Denizens of Disney

A Helpful Field Guide to the Inhabitants of the Magic Kingdom

Dedicated to Libby, and to the poor souls standing in line for The Jungle Cruise on a 90 degree day in June

(Author’s Note:  the study of Magic Kingdom denizens has been a long and arduous process, encompassing hundreds of woman-hours, and thousands of dollars worth of tickets and Mickey Mouse ice cream bars.  I present this guide to help you, the reader, identify and more fully appreciate these creatures.  Please be advised that they are wild, and in their natural habitats.  Please exercise caution when dealing with them, both for your safety, and for theirs.) 

The Newlyweds.  Identified by their unique Mickey Mouse ears: the female’s is white, with a veil; the male’s is black, with a top hat.  Also wear new, shiny wedding bands and glazed looks.  If you’re not careful, you will knock them over; they don’t pay attention to their surroundings, only to each other (and have only rarely seen the light of day on this honeymoon).

The Foreign Tour Groups.  These seem to be a rarer species these days, for unknown reasons.  Beautiful creatures in matching orange t-shirts, led by a frustrated woman holding a flag and yelling to try to get their attention.  Usually harmless, but can occasionally clog major intersections.

The Stroller Commandos.  These creatures use a stroller as a weapon to advance themselves through the crowd, much like a battering ram.  They have apparently forgotten that they have a kid in there.

The People Who Rush the Gate of the Attraction and Nearly Cause a Stampede, Even Though the Show Repeats Every Eight Minutes.  Self-explanatory.

The Button People.  It’s their birthday, their anniversary, their family reunion, their first visit.  They are given a button by the cast members to advertise the reason for their celebration. You are obligated to offer them congratulations.

The Self-Appointed Entertainers. Small sub-population of teens and young adults, often drunk, who have decided that the park would be even more fun if they provided additional “entertainment.”  They scream like banshees in the Haunted Mansion, and love to enact dramatic sequences with the costumed characters that inhabit the park.  They find their actions hilarious; everyone else finds them annoying. ((hi mommy, I know your describing me here so…thank you for remembering :]))

The Photographers.  Will stop in the dead center of Main Street, causing a traffic jam behind them, so they can get the perfect shot of Cinderella’s Castle, or, more often, of their loved on in front of the Cinderella’s Castle.  Become extremely annoyed if you accidentally get in their shot.

The New Parents.  Will wait in the afternoon sun for 90 minutes so they can bring their child on Dumbo the Flying Elephant- a ride that takes approximately three minutes.

The First Timers:  Appear lost- because they are.  They have yet to figure out that the Magic Kingdom is arranged in a circle.

The Thrill Seekers.  Will spend the entire day running from Space Mountain to Thunder Mountain to Splash Mountain.  Love to tell everyone: 1. how many times they rode the ride 2. how much they screamed 3. how sick their friends got and 4. how SOAKED they got on Splash Mountain (OMG!).

The Parents Who Should Be Tied Up and Made To Ride “It’s A Small World” 100 Times in a Row.  It’s 10:30 p.m.  Their four-year-old is hungry/cold/exhausted and sobbing in the stroller.  The parents, however, refuse to leave the park until closing time.

The Kid That You Wish You Had:  Parking your car in the Dopey lot is exciting.  Riding the tram from the parking lot is exciting.  Looping through the endless attraction lines is exciting. You don't have to spend money on them to make them happy.

The Disneyphiles.  Recognized by their Goofy hats, Mickey Mouse t -shirts, Tinker Bell handbags, and lanyard full of trading pins. Excellent source of Disney minutiae, like where the closest Hidden Mickey is, or where the best ladies room in the park is (Main Street, behind the Crystal Palace, near the Baby Care Center).

The Gazillionaires.  Stay in the suites at the Contemporary- for two straight weeks.  Buy the $500 Mickey sculptures in the Main Street Emporium as souvenirs for their hired help.  Usually have a nanny in tow.

The Sitters:  Always male.  Will find a convenient bench in the shade and wait for the rest of the family to finish watching the show/riding The Mad Tea Party/finish yet another trip into a gift shop.   Also can be spotted on the People Mover in Tomorrowland going round and round and round….

The Strategists.  Plan the trip like a military campaign, with a set itinerary, Fast Passes, designated meeting points- and actual restaurant reservations.  Refuse to be deterred from “The Plan”.

The Person Who Only Wants to Ride the Haunted Mansion, and is Content to Walk Around and Eat Mickey Mouse Ice Cream Bars the Rest of the Day:  That’s me. 

About the author:  Dr. Smith has been visiting the Magic Kingdom regularly since 1975.  She still remembers the names of all of the “E” ticket rides- and actually knows what an “E” ticket was.  She is considered an expert (in her own mind) in Magic Kingdom sociology.

Long Island, 2010. After the Gulf Oil Spill.

I am writing this post from the beach in Southampton, New York.  The Halsey Neck access point to the beach in Southampton, New York, to be exact.  It’s a serene kind of beach:  it seems populated with thinkers and walkers and readers rather than body boarders and beer swillers and barbequers.  It’s not like the Florida beaches that I grew up with; it’s a more contemplative type of beach. A beach to simply look, and feel, and smell, and to think of nothing and everything, all at once. 

My kind of beach.

I’m sitting on the sand looking out in the water, and I am trying to imagine the salt water covered in thick, shiny, greasy masses of slime.  And I am especially thinking of another beach like this, far to the south, along the Gulf Coast. It’s another contemplative beach like this, where I used to sit and think of everything and nothing- like I am doing now; where I sat as a quasi-intellectual college student writing bad poetry.  Not much has changed- except I’m now a 41 year old quasi-intellectual adult writing bad blog posts along with the bad poetry.

Allen and I visited that beach a few weeks ago, down there in the Florida Panhandle, before all of this happened. It may have been a farewell visit; I suspect that it never will look like the way that it did in April.  What will all of that pristine sand and the clear green water look like covered in oil?  Will that fine white sand blow for miles down the empty beach and pile up in drifts?  Will there still be sand dollars buried in the sand?  I doubt that the sand will blow, or the sand dollars will stay alive, when the oil comes.

In April, the weather can be quite unsettled in the Deep South.  We headed down to our campground on the beach just as a line of severe weather was headed down the same direction.  We arrived in the late evening, and it looked like the worst weather had passed us by.  We were safe, in our campsite hidden behind the dunes.  There was nothing to worry about.

I woke up in the middle of the night.  The sky was flashing; I could see it even with my eyes closed.  Flash…flash……flash…flash. flash…FLASH…..flash flash flash…. The sky glowed greenish.  It was dead still.

 I have seen storms like that before in my life- the storms where the lightening comes so fast that the thunder can’t catch up, and the sky glows from all of the electricity.  They suck all of the air surrounding them inside- inhaling the atmosphere- so that you seem to be a in vacuum before the storm arrives. They are a living creature.

That storm lay off the coast, stalking us, and waiting to strike.  I lay there, feeling frightened and helpless. Our little cocoon of a camper suddenly felt thin and fragile. All we could do was wait….

That storm now seems to portend what was to follow.  We were fortunate that night:  the monster slunk back out to the open ocean and away from us.  This new monster- this oil from the broken well in the Gulf- I don’t think this one will retreat.  This one will not be content to sit offshore, menacing. This one is coming.

Like that night in the camper, I feel helpless today,  in the face of this oil spill, the dimensions of which I simply cannot get my mind around.   

Right now, the only thing that I can do is to ride my bicycle down to the shore in Southampton. I chose to not turn the ignition key in the car. 

Maybe this disaster will effect a change in the nation’s psyche.  Maybe we will consider consuming less fossil fuel.   Maybe some of those people who drove their luxury SUV’s down to the beach access at Halsey Neck Beach will leave them home, and ride their bikes instead – they can park them next to mine, in the nearly empty bike rack.  Maybe we could make our roads safer, so that the other type of “traffic”- pedestrian, bicycle- could travel without fear alongside the cars and trucks.

Maybe we won’t be able to kill this monster- but maybe we can stop a new one from being created.

St. George Island, Florida, and the rest of the Gulf Coast:  you are in my thoughts and in my prayers. 

Snakes Alive (2010 edition)

There’s (sort of) a new addition to our menagerie- the one that includes three cats, two dogs, I’ve just forgotten how many chickens, two fish, and one freshwater snail…

I’ve named our new addition Bob. I had decided, after numerous interactions, that he deserved a name. So Bob it was. And, now that he has a name, I feel somewhat protective toward him- which, for me, is rather unusual.

Bob is a snake. A really big snake.

(Above: one of Bob's cousins, from the UGA snake website)

Bob made his first appearance last summer, shortly after the rattlesnake incident. Having just recovered from that ordeal, I was sitting on the patio in the evening, and watched something slither toward the
grape arbor. It was dark brown, dingy, and fat. Water moccasins are dark brown, dingy and fat. But, after the rattlesnake incident and the resulting trauma that it caused, I was in denial. “That is NOT a water moccasin… that is NOT a water moccasin…” And then it slithered under the grape arbor and out of sight. My denial mechanism asserted that I hadn’t really seen a snake at all, much less a water moccasin. And so the incident was forgotten.
______________________________________________

“Be careful when you go in the garden… there’s a giant cottonmouth in the garden! Eek!”

That was the text message that I received two weeks ago from Jenni. I had been in that garden the day before, on my hands and knees, pulling weeds. While a cottonmouth was stalking me, apparently.

The possibility of a large water moccasin roaming the yard was not amusing, so I headed over to Lowe’s to buy a bag of snake repellent (yes, they actually make the stuff). The problem was, what if I put down snake repellent, and he was trapped inside of the yard, rather than outside?

Of course, Jenni also said that it may be a non-venomous water snake, as they look very similar. However, I prepared for the worst- that I had a cottonmouth in my yard- and hoped for the best- that it was really just a water snake.

I got the opportunity to make the distinction, up close, feeding the chickens that evening. I went out to the carport to bring the chickens a scoop of chicken feed- and there he was. Hiding under a table. He hadn’t spotted me, thank goodness.

With my usual calm and thoughtful demeanor when confronted with a reptile, I jumped up on a bench and screamed for Allen. I also began swearing. Loudly. In Spanish (in times of great stress, Spanish seem to be the best language in which to swear, in my opinion).

Allen came out. He got too close to the snake for my comfort, as per usual. So I started swearing at him in Spanish.

We stood there- me on top of the weight bench, and Allen by the table- trying to figure out what we were dealing with.

Dusky color? One vote for cottonmouth.
Thick body? Not so sure. The vote could go either way.
Big triangular head? Definitely not. One vote for water snake
Slit-like eyes? Hard to tell. Wasn’t planning on getting a closer look.

General opinion was leaning toward ‘water snake.’

“Let’s catch it” Allen suggested.

“Are you nuts?” I said. “You don’t know that it’s not a water moccasin! You just think that it’s not a water moccasin! You have a hypothesis that it’s not a water moccasin! You have not proven that it’s not a water moccasin!”

I headed for the back porch and waited for Allen to get bit and die, since he refused to listen to me.

“Come here!” He finally said. “I have him pinned with a broom.”

The snake was trapped underneath the whisk of the broom. He was curled up, and casually sampling the atmosphere with his tongue. He looked pretty placid.

“He doesn’t look particularly dangerous,” I said. I crept a little closer to him to get a better look. If he were a water moccasin, I doubt that he would be this docile; he probably would have tried to swallow the broom by now.  
I snuck even closer, and got a couple of pictures of him on the camera phone to post to Facebook, of course, so our herpetologist friends (believe it or not, we have more than one) could identify it for us.

“Do you want me to let it go?” Allen asked. “I can dump him in a bucket and take him away somewhere.”

“Nah- let him go.”

We let him go, just like we did with the rattlesnake. As icky as I find them, they are magnificent creatures, in their own way. And he’d clear the yard of vermin- a nice perk.

Allen took off the broom. Bob hauled ass.

I watched very carefully where I walked the rest of the night.

Bob has decided that he has nothing to fear from us, so has decided to carry on his business with us around. Last week, he was in the lawn, sunning himself and happily slithering around the yard.

Bob may still scare the crap out of me, but I am learning to peacefully coexist with him. Out on the carport last night, the dogs and I heard a rustling sound from between some boxes. Out slid Bob, trying to gain some traction on the concrete and get over to another set of boxes. “Oh, thank Goodness!” I thought.” It’s not a rat; it’s only Bob.” He must have been hunting frogs and rats, which seem to love the comfy carport.

Of course, the kids have raises a disturbing possibility- what if Bob is really Bobbie? What I Bobbie in hunting food for her babies (do they even do that?) What if there are about to be ten more Bobs in the yard? I am not sure I’ll be able to peacefully coexist with… Eleven Bobs???

“Aye! Mi Madre!”

Dispatches from the Scamp #1: Allen, Janna and Libby Go to the Movies

The Scamp has spent a lot of time at Ft. Wilderness Resort and Campground at the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida.  We race quite a bit at Disney, and we use it as our home base; we also like to celebrate any and all birthdays there.  Most of the time, we don’t even bother going to the Theme Parks—we just hang out down by Bay Lake and watch the fireworks and the Water Parade, eat like pigs at the Trail’s End Buffet, and spend hours in the Meadows Swimming Hole, sliding down the water slide and making like lobsters in the hot tub.

I think that the absolute best thing to do at Ft. Wilderness is to attend the nightly Campfire Sing-a-long and Movie in the outdoor movie theater at the Meadows Recreation Area.  You spend the first half hour singing corny songs and roasting marshmallows with Chip and Dale in the open-air theater.  When the fire dies down, they put on the Disney movie for the evening.  In the pre- “now available on DVD for a short time before it is returned to the vault” days, I got to see Cinderella  in that theater for the first time; watching Cinderella turn into a princess on the screen, on a cool summer night when I was a kid, was magic.

I still love the experience as a grown-up, and drag the family there every chance that I get—although we scared the pants off ourselves when we watched Meet the Robinsons out there- that scene in the future with all of the Bowler Hats and the world in shambles- very creepy watching outside in the dark.

I went with Allen and Libby to the movie when we stayed there last month.  Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the featured presentation.  I hadn’t seen the film in years, so I was excited.

It had been raining on and off that evening so, by the time we arrived, very few people were left in the amphitheater. Both Allen and Libby enjoy creating a running commentary to any movie they attend; I usually try vainly to ‘shush’ them.  That night watching Snow White, they were both in rare form.  Even though I’m usually the designated movie shusher, I joined in—there was no one close enough to hear us, so I only felt slightly guilty talking through a movie.  If you were within earshot, this is what you would have heard:

(Libby):  Ok, so what’s the deal?  The Seven Dwarfs look all cute and cartoony, but Snow White?  She just looks… bizarre….

(Allen):  Ok, now remind me:  what’s with the old lady with the apple?

(Me):  She’s the evil stepmother/queen and she hates Snow White’s guts because she’s way prettier. You know: ‘Mirror, mirror/on the wall/ who’s the fairest/of them all?’

(Allen): I get it.  She’s pretty scary all huge like that.

(Libby): Right?  I’m 14, and she scares the crap out of me!

(Libby, Me and Allen):  No!  Snow White, don’t do it!

(Me):  Don’t you know that you’re not supposed to talk to strangers? Geez, how stupid do you get?  Snow White:  sorry.  You deserve what you’re about to get.

(Me):  They kept a dead girl in a glass coffin because she was ‘too pretty to bury?’

(Allen and Libby): GROSS!

(Me): And, really, pathologically, that’s not really gonna work out to well, because….

(Libby): Mother! Really??  Allen, this is the exact reason she’s not allowed to watch medical shows with us anymore.

(Allen):  The LIPS?! He kissed the dead girl on the LIPS?!  Ewww!!!!!

(Me): Awwww…. They’re off to live Happily Ever After in the Castle….

(Libby):  Is that the Castle at Walt Disney World?

(Me):  No, that’s Cinderella’s Castle.  I think Snow White’s Castle is at Disneyland.

(Libby):  I thought that was Sleeping Beauty’s Castle?

(Me):  Isn’t that in France?

(Libby):  Sleeping Beauty isn’t French….

(Allen):  Oh no!  There’s a big red shiny apple back in the camper!  Don’t anyone touch it!!!

(Me):  I’m gonna have nightmares about that witch.  Do you know how scary she is when she’s huge like that…?

(Ok:  it’s not Mystery Science Theater 3000, but we thought  we were funny…)

Scamp Season

It is Scamp Season once again. The beginning of the oppressive South Georgia summer season sends us scampering (pun intended) toward cooler, balmier locales: down to the Gulf Coast, up to New England, or, maybe this year, even up into the Canadian wilderness.

The Scamp is our 13 foot, fiberglass eggshell camper. It houses a dinette that converts to a bed, a couch which converts to bunk beds, a sink, some cabinets, and a two burner stove. It has an icebox which doesn’t always keep things cold enough, and an air conditioner that sometimes keeps things too cold.

We sometimes complain about the meager living space, the lack of privacy, and the tendency to bust your head on the door if you don’t duck; but, if you suggest to any of us the possibility of moving to a more spacious trailer, we protest loudly. We adore our Scamp.

While on the Gulf Coast this weekend, we bought a Jolly Roger flag for the Scamp: 3’ x 5’ black and white skull and crossbones. It flew high atop the Scamp, popping in the wind at our beachside campsite.

This is the latest and greatest decoration to adorn the Scamp. It also boasts three different strings of lights (flamingoes with palm trees, stars, and white twinkling ones), a Mickey Mouse garden gnome, and a pair of pink plastic lawn flamingoes. The effect is pretty cheesy, but we like it that way. The Scamp attracts attention wherever it goes, regardless. Strangers stop by, asking if they can have the Grand Tour of the place. “Stick your head in the door,” we say.

It’s our little play house, our little tree fort. We hide out in it away from the rest of the world, decorate it in whatever suits our fancy, and then use it as home base for our adventures. One week it’s a beach house on the shore of a white, sandy beach; then, it’s a cabin in the woods, surrounded by tall pine trees. Quite often, it is our hideaway in The Happiest Place on Earth, in the Old West Fantasyland of Ft. Wilderness at Walt Disney World. Spending the weekend there is probably the best bargain, and the most fun, in the entire resort.

We’ll be on the move again this summer. The work week will end, and we’ll have the Scamp ready to roll to… wherever. We have it down to a science: we pull into a campsite, and down go the supports, up go the awning and the lights and the Mickey gnome and the lawn flamingoes and the pirate flag and the chairs and the lanterns and the barbeque grill and the picnic table. We’re back in our clubhouse, ready for adventure.

We’ll send you postcards from the road. Stay tuned.

If You Play Your Cards Right....

I decided not to do the flower thing this year. Flowers wilt eventually, and then you throw them away and they only live in your memory — unless you are my grandmother, and you take a picture of them, and then they live on for all eternity in a photo album, along with the pictures of you opening every single present at your wedding shower, and every birthday cake you ever had.


So, I’m here on the Internet to give you your Mother’s Day present—where everything, good or bad, exists here in perpetuity, like Grandma’s pictures ( I suggest that you don’t look too hard at my Facebook albums, because I think you’d probably rather not see what I was up to my senior year in high school). Nothing is private here on the Internet, which is fine; for Mother’s Day 2010 I am writing your present, and I will happy to share this post with the with everyone.

Welcome to my blog. The name’s a little weird, I know, and I have been thinking about changing it—I ate a lot more Chinese food when I started it, but, now that my figure getting a bit too… “womanly”, I’ve backed way off. Have a look around if you want—I don’t think that I’ve skewered our family too badly here (yet).

But enough introduction. On to your Mother’s Day present.

If You Play Your Cards Right….

“If you play your cards right….” Now that I am grown up, and have been to Las Vegas, I understand the meaning of this term: it means, when you play blackjack “if you stand on, like, a fifteen, or sixteen, you have a pretty good chance of beating the house, because they have to draw to at least seventeen and, because of this fact, they have a pretty good chance of busting.” Or something like that.

When I was a kid, “if you play your cards right….” had a completely different meaning. “If you play your cards right” meant “we are on our way to somewhere awesome unless World War III breaks out in the back seat and I can’t take this car ride anymore.” But, either Armageddon did not occur, or you were very tolerant of our sibling squabbles, because you never did turn the car around.

We were adventurers, you, me, Kate and Bill.

We loved our road trips. We took short jaunts to neighboring New Haven to The Yale Peabody Museum. We looked way up at the Brontosaurus skeleton in the Hall of Dinosaurs, years before it became an Apatosaurus skeleton. We climbed the huge stone stairs. I remember that the museum smelled as ancient as it looked. I love that smell (When Ben and Libby visited last year, they weren’t as impressed. “It smells weird in here,” they said. “But it’s the Peabody smell--don’t you get it?” I answered. You know what I mean. They didn’t get it).

Then there was the epic trip to New Orleans one summer, the one when we turned onto Bourbon Street, which was not the only slightly naughty tourist attraction that it became years later, and you realized that we may not have landed in a very “appropriate” part of town. Didn’t you try to cover my brother’s eyes when the strippers started swinging out of the windows on the second floor of the clubs?

But the best road trip of all was to The Magic Kingdom, in Walt Disney World. We would get up before dawn to make the drive to the park, so that we could be there when the gate opened. Over breakfast at the Crystal Palace Restaurant, on Main Street U.S.A., we pulled out the park map and planned our day like a military campaign. We marked the guidebook up with checks to mark our “must see” rides, and plotted our route through the park. We rationed the “E” tickets to make sure that we had enough to ride The Jungle Cruise; we reconnoitered possible parade-watching positions, and predetermined which horse we were going to ride on Cinderella’s Golden Carousel (mine will always be the circus pony with the red, white and blue headdress) . We stayed until the very last possible second when the park closed, and then you drove us home, in the middle of the night, down the deserted Florida Turnpike. I’m sure that you were exhausted, but you didn’t have the luxury of sharing the driving with any other adult back then.

I’ve come to realize a couple of things after all of these years:

We really didn’t have a lot of money. Our epic vacations were financed with a shoestring budget. We rationed those “E” tickets because extra “E” tickets cost a bundle, and we didn’t head to a hotel at night after leaving Disney because it was expensive. I never considered that thought when I was a kid: how difficult it must have been to find the money for even a single day at Walt Disney World. But, trust me, when I look at my credit card bill at the end of a trip down there, I am even more appreciative of what you had to do to get us there.

And, even more, you not only single handedly financed our epic adventures—you planned and executed them by yourself. Driving home in the dark after 18 hours at The Magic Kingdom couldn’t have been much fun by yourself—but you did it. And trying to keep your kids safe in a pretty rough part of the French Quarter, or after accidentally taking a wrong turn in New York City—that couldn’t have been much fun either. But you did it.

Nowadays, no matter what happens in the back seat, I don’t turn the car around, either. I don’t want to miss a thing. Sometimes, I think I get more excited than the kids about the adventures that are down the road.

As when I was a kid, my own family has its epic adventures: up to Long Island Sound, down to the Gulf of Mexico. We ride inner tubes, kayaks, surfboards, paddleboards and mountain bikes—always looking for somewhere to go, somewhere new to explore.

We still take those trips to the Magic Kingdom, and it’s the same as it always has been with us: the map, the plan. Ben likes to be in charge of the map now. Ben likes to be in charge of the map everywhere, actually. And, even though I have a partner to share the driving, and even though we can afford to sleep at a Disney hotel now, and even though we don’t have to worry about rationing “E” tickets anymore, those trips with the four of us- to Walt Disney World and beyond- will always be some of my favorite memories; memories made all the better by understanding what you did to make it all possible.

I know that “I’ve played my cards right….” For sure.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I love you.

A Dispatch From Behind the Microscope

Hi-


I am not hunched over a murder victim at the moment, the glare from the overhead lamp revealing some important clue about the perpetrator. Yes, I am a pathologist; no, that is not how my day goes. I suppose that solving murders all day would be cool, but I also like what I do here at the hospital. I thought that I’d share my day with you so far:

8:00 a.m. Arrive at work. Talk with my associate about what’s been going on in his absence; the interesting cases, and a little hospital gossip.

8:30 a.m. An oncologist (cancer doctor) calls, and is interested in knowing about one of his patients, a person who has a colon cancer that has recurred after treatment. The surgeons just took out a portion of the colon with the new tumor; the oncologist wants to know if the tumor has spread to the lymph nodes and the tissue around the colon. I tell him that I will call him back once the pathology slides are ready for me to read, so that I can look under the microscope at the lymph nodes and the tissue and give him that answer. He’ll have to decide what to do next: whether he’ll give chemotherapy and, if so, what kind and how much.

8:40 a.m. A fax comes through with a report on special studies done on a woman’s breast cancer. The test helps determine what type of treatment the woman is going to receive, and also can help tell how aggressive the tumor will behave. I dictate a report to send to the doctors, and give them this additional information

9:00 a.m. Time to get ready to present cases at Tumor Board. I have taken pictures through the microscope of some interesting cancers; I put these pictures and additional information into a Power Point presentation for the noon conference. I also head to the textbooks to find out some additional information about the cancers that I am going to present at the conference; I like to teach the audience some stuff, occasionally.

9:45 a.m. I get to look at the first microscope slides for the day. The first case is one that we are especially interested: a gentleman with a large mass in the middle of his chest. He’s having a lot of trouble breathing, so it’s very important that we find out what’s wrong with him so that we can treat him appropriately. The surgeon removed one of his lymph nodes for us to look at. He definitely has some kind of cancer, and, from looking at the slides, it looks like he may have a very aggressive lung cancer. We are waiting for a couple more outside studies to be done to be sure, but we are pretty sure that we can tell the doctors what it is for sure today.

10:00 a.m. Making up clues for a scavenger hunt here in the lab. It’s a fun way to take a break.

10:30 a.m. A surgeon sends some tissue samples from the operating room. He needs a frozen section, which is a special procedure where we freeze the tissue, cut it, stain it, and put it on a microscope slide quickly so we can put the slide under the microscope and give him a diagnosis. This sample is a lymph node from under the arm of a woman with breast cancer. He needs to know if the tumor has spread to the lymph node; if it has, he will need to take out all of the lymph nodes in her axilla, both to find out how far the cancer has spread, and to take out as much tumor as possible. If the tumor hasn’t spread to the lymph node, he won’t have to take out all of the nodes (do an axillary dissection); this is a very good thing, because oftentimes women who have an axillary dissection have problems with swelling in the same arm after the surgery, which is very uncomfortable (lymphedema).

11:00 a.m. It’s time to look at more slides (tissue samples) under the microscope. Essentially, the pathologist is supposed to look at every piece of tissue that’s removed from a person when they have surgery. For the most part, that’s true. So I look at skin biopsies, and make sure that skin cancers have been completely removed; I look at gallbladders that were taken out because they had gallstones and caused a lot of pain in the patient; I look at pieces of fallopian tubes from women who had their tubes tied (it’s important to make sure that the doctor cut all the way through the tube, so that the woman can’t get pregnant again, which is exactly what she wants). I look at the slides, then dictate a pathology report that I will sign later.

12:00 p.m. It’s time for Tumor Board. Technically Tumor Board is called a “Multidisciplinary Cancer Conference.” In English, the primary care physicians, surgeons, radiologists, oncologists and pathologists all get together to discuss their patients with cancer. We hear their histories, look at their x-rays, and I show the pictures of their tumors, that I took from the microscope. Then all of the doctors put their heads together and decide what the best treatment for the patient is (this is all confidential, by the way; we don’t use the patient’s names). Things can get a little heated in there, by the way, when all of the doctors don’t agree on the best course of treatment.

1:00 p.m. Tumor Board is over. Whew! I’m a little nervous about public speaking, so I am always happy when I am finished. I take a break and eat pizza with the lab employees. It’s National Medical Laboratory Professional Week, so we’re celebrating and having a party. Since pathologists are lab professionals, too, I get to party too!

1:15 p.m. And on we go. We talk to a few more doctors about their patient’s pathology reports; I call a doctor for more information on his patient, which will help me make a diagnosis on his biopsy; we talk to a surgeon, whose patient is in the examination room, waiting to hear if her breast tumor is benign or malignant (it’s most likely malignant, but we have to do some additional studies to confirm that; it’s not always a matter of looking at a slide and diagnosing a cancer— oftentimes, there are a lot of grey areas between benign and malignant, and even after all of the tests, you may not be able to tell—but, of course, try to tell that to a malpractice lawyer).

2:15 p.m. And our report is back on the very sick guy with the respiratory problems: it is indeed a very aggressive lung tumor. Fortunately, chemotherapy and radiation can shrink the tumor quickly, so he may be feeling better soon. Unfortunately, the long term prognosis is not so good.

2:30 p.m. My fourth Diet Coke of the day.

2:35 p.m. Looking at a particularly hideous tumor under the microscope: a malignant blood vessel tumor. The surgeon couldn’t get the whole thing out. He took a large piece of skin and fat, but there is still tumor at the edge. It looks like he may have to go back and get more; luckily, he was very careful to mark the skin, so I can tell him exactly where he has to go back and take more tissue. Surgeons rock.

2:55 p.m. I am signing reports now, on the computer. We used to have to manually sign the typed reports, not so long ago, but now that we have electronic medical records it’s a lot better. These reports will all go onto the patients’ medical charts, and copies will be sent to their doctors.

3:00 p.m. A little down time. It’s not my turn to gross today: that’s when you look at all of the tissue that comes out of the operating room, with your eyeballs, not your microscope. You can tell a lot just by looking with your eyes, and feeling the tissue. Breast cancer will look like a crab and feels very hard when you touch it, for example. After we look, and touch, and measure, and describe the tissue in a report, we take little pieces of it that our techs will make into slides that we will look at the next day. I will take a little piece of the hard area that feels like a breast cancer; I will take a little piece of tissue from the edge of the specimen to make sure that the tumor has all been taken out. Not everything that we examine is cancer; we look at tonsils from little kids, and appendixes; we look at tissue when a woman has a miscarriage, and try to find out why her pregnancy failed.

3:30 p.m. The slides from the colon cancer are here, the one the oncologist and I discussed this morning. Her tumor has gone through the whole colon; the cancer has spread to most of the lymph nodes around the tumor. The oncologist has to figure out what to do now.

4:00 p.m. Things start winding down for the day, in my office, anyways. I finish signing my reports, check my email, check my snail mail, check my inbox, and check my list of pending cases, to see what I’m going to need to do tomorrow.

5:00 p.m. Outta here. I wear a pager, and carry the phone at all times in case a doctor has a question, or a surgeon needs us in the OR, or there is an autopsy that may need to be done. So it’s never really done here- I am still pretty much tethered to the hospital. We take turns taking call, though, so each of us can have a break, or go out of town- as per our contract, we have to be within 20 minutes of the hospital if we are needed.

I will post, eventually, on the thing that makes us pathologists notorious: The Autopsy. I think it’s not quite what most people envision, and maybe I can dispel some myths.