Pardee Hospital - Total Hip Replacement

Today was another first. Not too long ago I was dressed up "head-to-toe" in Tyvek so I could go down inside of an active mine. Today, I dawned the scrubs. I was inside of the operating room while they performed a total hip replacement. It was incredibly interesting. The doctor was very passionate about his work and took time to explain almost everything that he did (and was doing) to me. I can only put up this one photo right now. Maybe at some point down the road I can put up more. 

edit: I had to take the photos down and destroy them all. The patient changed her mind about the photography and we have to destroy all the photos.

Heavy Ice on Trees Causes Havoc

A couple of posts back I talked about the differences in weather and some of the new crazy weather that I am being exposed to in North Carolina. Something new again: heavy ice on trees.

A couple of days ago it was about 31 degrees and raining quite heavily. This caused all the trees to collect a lot of ice. So much ice that tons and tons of trees snapped off branches and tons snapped in half.

We went for a drive to check out the damage and were turned back because there were so many trees and telephone poles blocking the roads. Here are a couple of photos where you can see the weight of the ice and another where you can see the tops of the trees missing. They looked like they had all had a haircut.

If you look at the trees on the right you can see they are all missing their tops.

This really shows the weight of the ice.

An up-close to show the thickness of the ice.