I recently made these cookies again and they were so good, I wanted to remind you about them and challenge you to give them a try. They sound pretty weird but they are, really, some of the best cookies I have ever made. And they are not at all hard to make.

Here is a picture of our son, Philip, and our grandson, Hunter, showing off a plate of them they made for Fathers’ Day.

The other night, we had a serious trauma patient come in. She was eighteen-years-old and crashed her car off the freeway into a ditch. She was unconscious and severely injured. The whole team moved together to try to save her. I helped an emergency medicine resident pass a breathing tube as the surgeons put in IVs, gave her blood and stabilized her for CT scan and the ICU. I read in the paper two days later that she had passed away. This is what the floor looked like in the trauma room after she left:

“Housekeeping to the Trauma Room” is a pretty common page heard overhead.

I came across a rectangular sheet of relatively rigid plastic. It was just the right size to form the bottom of a bag so I used it, just as it was to reinforce the bottom of this bag. I sewed it in between two layers of black straps so the bottom is not only rectangular, which is unusual for my bags, but is also stiffer so it stands up straight.

Also, this is the first bag I have sewn since the county changed recently to black and orange rather than yellow-green straps. Since I can only use what they bring me, I now have lots of black to inspire me.

When a rape is reported somewhere in our county, police investigate and, if they think a forensic rape exam is indicated, the patient is brought to our emergency department for that exam. The victim is not seen by our emergency physician unless some issue comes up that the specially trained Sexual Assault Response Team (SART) nurse is not able to deal with.

Recently, while the SART nurse was doing the exam, the patient said that being raped had made her suicidal and, when she got back home, she was going to kill herself.

This information was passed to me and I went to talk with her. She was emotionally upset, as you can imagine. She admitted to saying she was going to kill herself but she had just said it because she was upset, not because she was going to follow through on the threat. She just wanted to go home.

This put me in a tough position. By law, if I think patients are suicidal, I have to place them on a psychiatric hold and get them to our psychiatric emergency room for help. If I don’t do so, I have broken the law. This also offers a challenging moral dilemma. If I sent such a person home and she did kill herself, I would certainly be at fault and would feel terrible about it.

We see people all the time who come in on a hold with clear documentation of suicidal behavior who totally deny it once they get to the emergency department. They either change their minds or they lie because they just don’t want to be on a hold. Was this patient like them or was she really just upset and misunderstood by the SART nurse? I had to decide whether to believe that she had just said something that she didn’t mean and let her go home or put her on a hold and send her to emergency psychiatry.

After talking to her for quite a while, I told her I was obliged, under law, to send her to psychiatry to get her help that would not be available if she just went home. When I told her that, she pleaded and begged to be allowed to go home. When that didn’t work, she went ballistic and started hollering and screaming that she was just going to leave.

When she went off, the staff called security. Soon, three big guys in blue uniforms were standing at the door of her room, which only made her more hysterical.

You can imagine how bad I felt. First, she is raped, which is horrible. Now, instead of the calm, understanding environment we try to provide victims of rape, we are threatening to tie her down to a gurney with leather restraints. It made me feel really bad, though I recognized I made the right decision, given the circumstances presented.

Fortunately, she quieted down and went peacefully off to talk with the psychiatrist. When she got there, she was calm and cooperative. She told the psychiatrist she felt safe and was glad she was there. She acknowledged she really needed help.

Susan took trauma straps with her to a chimpanzee reserve in Gabon. She shared these pictures of baby chimps swinging on the straps. What a great use of these straps that otherwise would have ended up in the trash!

My mother-in-law recently had surgery. She lives in a town called Paradise. When we unpacked, I saw the bags we used to get our stuff up there and lined them up on the washer and dryer. What a bag family we have become.

I was just looking back at my last few posts. They are pretty sad. I decided to share this with you as it lifts my heart a bit.

This is a letter that was mailed to our department from a patient. I think it speaks for itself:

To the Emergency Room Staff of The Medical Center

My name is John Smith. I was a patient at your hospital the night of July 4^th, 2008. I am writing this letter to apologize for my verbal and physical abuse to the members of the staff working that night. I have to admit that I do not remember much of what happened that night due to being extremely intoxicated. I am told that I made threats to kill and that I was spitting on staff members. I cannot capture with words how sorry I am for saying those hurtful things and spitting on people that were only trying to help me. I am extremely embarrassed about my behavior and will be paying for it for a long time to come. You guys have a hard enough job as it is and the last thing you need is some drunk kid making that job even harder. I obviously was having a problem with my drinking and it turned me into a person that I never want to be. I have a long road to recovery ahead of me. I understand that forgiveness might be out of the question for some of you, but I hope that in time you can find it in your heart to forgive me. I would never knowingly want to hurt anyone that is trying to help me and feel a great amount of shame for acting as I did. I just want to say sorry and thank you, thank you for helping somebody who needed it whether they knew it or not.

Recipe By: recipe4living.com

Ingredients:

2 cups flour
1 cup cocoa
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 cups butter, softened
2 cups sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 teaspoon anise extract
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups semi sweet chocolate chips
1 1/2 cups chopped walnuts (optional)

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Mix together flour, cocoa, cinnamon, baking soda and salt. Set aside.

3. In a separate mixing bowl, beat butter and sugar until fluffy. Add eggs, anise and vanilla. Beat well.

4. Gradually add flour mixture, beating well.

5. Stir in morsels and walnuts.

6. Drop by rounded teaspoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheets. Bake 8-10 minutes. Do not over bake. Cool on cookie sheets 5 minutes. Remove to wire rack. Cool completely.

If you look at all the great cookies recipes I have shared on this blog, you might get the idea I am an expert and alway make perfect cookies. Not so. Thursday, I had a cookie catastrophe. I took the recipe for Chewy Oatmeal Cherry Toffee Chocolate Chip Crisps. I made them exactly by the recipe except that I substituted three cups of cooked quinoa (left over from cookies from two weeks ago) for the oats. The original cookies needed to be flattened a bit before cooking. These spread out and ran together, almost forming a sheet cake. Even when I let them cook long enough that they were dark brown, they were still soft. When I scraped them off of the parchment with a spatula, they came off like putty or clay. I put them in a big Tupperware in the refrigerator where they formed one, big, amorphous blob. There they sit, teasing me with the challenge of coming up with something to do with it. I quickly made up a batch of Tad’s Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies to take to the hospital.

Lesson learned: you can’t just substitute quinoa for oats.

Here is the bag I made for my mother for Mother’s Day. The blue straps are an unusual color and I used every inch of that type of strap I had to make the bag. In fact, I used short handles because I didn’t have enough of the blue to make two long handles.