New chronicles!

Dear reader,

there are new adventures awaiting your reading: the blog munichgoeschicago will contain experiences from another rotation, internal medicine this time, in the windy city.

See you there.

Gotta love night shifts

Hey there Trillian, greetings out to Manhattan!

It's now 5am and I am sitting next to two residents at the desk of the higher beds in ED1, the attending standing on the other side at the counter of the desk. They are discussing bike models and bike trails. We have a total of three patients on our side, two of which will be discharged soon, one going up to the floor. Unfortunately, patients usually start pouring in around 6am, otherwise we would have a 0 patient signout. I did do some suturing today, one of them on a breast. I had never done that before. With the quality of the tissue there, I wished I had been able to do some subcutaneous sutures. Because it was very hard to avoid wrinkling of the skin with there being quite some tension on the tissue yet the surface being soft. She had apparently been stabbed with a screwdriver, just like her mother and another patient actually brought in as a trauma alert.

As Trillian already said, we are preparing to go to a Broadway musical, the Lion King, later today, at 2pm if possible. In less than two hours, our shifts will be over and we will have to attend conference. I did not read more than three or four pages of this week's Rosen's chapters. Oh well. Today we should also be having our exit interviews. I'm looking forward to talking to Dr. G. about our nine-week rotation. I also regret very much having to leave now, right after getting very comfortable with pretty much every resident and attending here. The atmosphere around here is great. We have been having a lot of fun earlier when the attending on this side, Dr. T., made my forearm and abs twitch with a TENS unit. If any of you guys are reading this, thank you for the great time. I'll miss you guys.

Before we leave though, it seems like we'll be putting together a semi-decent two-day farewell party. On Thursday and Friday, which is - oops - tomorrow and the day after tomorrow - all residents and attendings are invited to our place in Manhattan and it seems like a lot of the 78 people on the guest list will actually attend. Yay! Which reminds me - I need to staple all the 60 copies of the quiz I had copied in the EM office. Talk to you later, readers!

(Btw.: Still no new patients on this side - docs still talking about bikes. Hehe.)

Ridealong

I cannot keep building up blog material in my head to be written down just because I still have two Vegas days waiting in the line.

That's why I'm going to start "backwards" right now, beginning with last night, which was our scheduled ambulance ridealong. Despite Mayor Bloomberg's warning, we used the amply-filled A and D trains from Port Authority Bus Terminal at 6pm last night to come to the hospital at 7pm, when we were to start our ridealongs. After some confusion about where to go (Dr. G and Dr. A, the EMS-expert attending, were both on shift luckily) we met paramedics outside. We learned there are 3 BLS (basic life support) and 1 paramedic cars that belong to the hospital roaming the streets outside. The paramedics had a laptop, wireless internet, a movie on DVD and they were going to get pizza. Skriehma and I played rock-paper-scissors for going with them first and naturally, as always, I lost. I waited for the first BLS crew to come to the hospital, which consisted of two big African-American gentlemen who did welcome me very nicely. Yet, they weren't my EMTs for long, we started right around their shift change. Another black guy, originally from Nigeria, grown up in Manchester, England replaced one of the EMTs. Before the second one was relieved, we got a call for assistance from another ambulance. The patient, a 43 y/o F (non-obese!), had apparently slipped and fallen down a couple of stairs. We helped the other unit put a collar on her and place her on a spine-board. Only two of us ended up carrying the lady, since I was going backwards I got some nice co-piloting from one of "my" EMTs, one hand in my back constantly warning me of every little step and/or danger on the way. Not sure whether he was more concerned I'd drop the patient or fall myself. I do think the latter though.

After that, this other EMT was relieved as well by a guy who had immigrated from Peru at age 10. He apparently had a migraine headache in the beginning but after that turned out rather talkative and nice. Our next call was a stand-by for FDNY (fire department) who were responding to a transforming station that had exploded. Since no one got hurt (you know I'd never ever ask for that to happen, right?), the experience was limited to looking at five big fire-trucks and one police car on that road all giving an amazingly intense light-show until we left after about 30 minutes when there was no more fire and they were just waiting for the company to shut the power off.

Next call was a "broken arm" on the fourth floor of an apartment building. 16 y/o M s/p (status post) trying to put his fist through the wall. More interesting than the patient himself was the apartment and the "family" in there. The place mom, dad and about five teenage kids lived in was not much more than a few poorly-lit empty rooms that hadn't had a paint job in decades, one shelf and a table with fold-up chairs, a ripped couch and an exercise bench. The inside doors had big holes in them, looking like people have been punching through them regularly. A familiar sweet-sour aroma of urine was in the air, rather big bugs were running around the place while grossly obese mom was sitting at the table, never moving an inch. Dad had opened the door but after that didn't concern himself much with us and wandered around the apartment. The "patient" was sitting on the couch, his 18-y/o brother on the exercise bench. The 16-y/o claimed he couldn't move the fingers of his right hand and he at least pretended to be extremely sensitive to touch from the wrist on. The pulse was fine and there was no swelling we could discern. We put an ice pack on it and splinted the arm. Mom, sitting on the strained chair, legs spread apart, belly sogging between them, could not offer any more reply to the question why her son punched the wall than "he was mad". She also did not know what medication he was on, only knew he had "some mental problems". The older son got the discharge papers of his brother, he had recently been released from the psych ward. He was on olanzapine. We did ask her about allergies but the answer "I don't know" really didn't surprise any of us anymore. We brought the boy to the ED, accompanied by his 18-y/o brother, his mom obviously couldn't be bothered with that. The EMT from Peru later said the majority of people around there spent their time sitting and "hanging out" on the streets waiting for "something to happen", not knowing more of the world than the corner of 187th and 3rd or wherever else they happen to be growing up. They call an ambulance for something like this "broken arm" because they don't have a car, no money for a cab and since they have Medicaid the state pays for the ambulance ride.

A bit later it was 2am, the time when skriehma and I were to switch rides. The two teams met and we made the switch. Naturally, the paramedics had to tell me "dude, (edit)skriehma(edit) just decompressed a GSW to the chest". I went through the first phase of grief: denial, and replied "you are f'ing with me". "No, seriously dude, it was awesome". We stopped by the hospital and they said that the patient was still in the trauma bay. And lo and behold there was a patient with a GSW lying on the stretcher. I ripped the record from the hands of the resident and read in disbelief - GSW to the shoulder. Shoulder! Not chest! Hahah! The paramedic just shrugged and we went back to the rig. I still didn't believe him but the thought that skriehma may actually have been doing another needle thoracostomy while I was putting ice on fist-through-wall-guy. We then drove to a Starbuck's to get coffee for a nurse that obviously had to be cute. And you know what happened? Radio chimed in, calling ambulance 18E to a "pedestrian struck". Skriehma got a movie ("Alexander"), pizza (obvious from the trashcan), a possible needle thoracostomy (they even claimed he asked to put in a chest tube) and now he'd get a MVA (motor vehicle accident) on MY ambulance just ten minutes after I got off? The paramedic in the front started laughing hysterically while I was using my seat in the back as a punching bag. He did have some mercy and told me upon another request from me that the GSW never happened, the only job they had apparently turned out to be a panic attack. And the pedestrian struck was a short time later clarified over the radio to be an intox case, in other words a drunk. I spent the rest of the night watching half of Alexander myself and sleeping for the last hour in the back of the ambulance.

All in all, the ambulance ridealong was rather disappointing. It was also pretty much the only time it was actually raining while we were outside. The whole time. We did pick a Friday night in the Bronx - yet according to the EMTs people don't go out and shoot and stab each other when it rains. Rats.

Let me also use this opportunity to talk about the past two days before I further continue the novel on Vegas.

Sooooo .. as Trillian already told you, we were out on Wednesday night. Dr. F., a. k. a. Chris Tucker, invited us to watch the Yankees game with the residents during conference in the morning. I did what any good American would do - say "oh sure, that'd be nice" and not even consider going. After all, we'd be working 14 hours before we got off making us awake x16h + another 2 to get home. What's more, I had slept very little that evening. But it turned out that most residents from that shift, two attendings and even a nurse would come and chief resident Dr. S., a. k. a. the cute resident, would "give us off" at regular sign-out 7pm instead of our 9pm. That actually consisted of her going to the attending coming in on our side and telling him "We're taking the Germans out to drink and watch the game", his reply being "yeah, whatever". They were right in saying it was probably the first and last time we'd go out together and it did allow for skriehma and me to shave 2 hours off our crazy Wednesday late shift. So I agreed to go, being quite tired and really not caring much about baseball.

What ensued was a wild 80mph-ride on the freeway up the Bronx until we arrived in a sports bar with TVs all around the place. Attending Dr. S. arrived about an hour after us, an extremely sociable and enthusiastic indian guy who immediately said "this night is on me", even though the Yankees later went on to lose the game. The evening was OK, after sitting around not much interested in smalltalk for the first hour, after the third beer and when the game started I started enjoying myself a bit more. I did start calling our place, at least the number we seemed to remember, every 45 minutes starting 9:30pm, since neither of us had any of the girls' cell phone numbers with us (nope, not on my PDA either). We then got a ride from one of the residents kind enough to take us (skriehma, Dr. F/Chris Tucker and myself) to the subway, which obviously at this time of night had to be a local train making every single stop from the north Bronx down. Chris Tucker actually offered to accompany us from Central Station to Times Square since he assumed we'd be scared in NYC in the dark. When we claimed we'd be fine he at least wanted us to call someone, anyone, in the morning to tell them we're allright. It was very touching. We met him in the residents' lounge on the next day, when we started our shifts.

And that shift started wildly. Even before I was officially on I was helping to pry a crazy woman off an IV-cart, we had to force every single finger off that thing, stuff flying off of it wildly in the process. We were about eight people, residents, attendings, security and me throwing her face down on the stretcher, while she was trying to writhe, scratch, spit and bite her way out of our grips. While one of the residents tried to secure her face, we put soft restraints on her limbs, put an IV into her, relieved her of her agitation and flipped her on her back to tie the restraints to the bed. Before we were quite done with that, another patient that I also didn't know since I was just about to start my shift jumped out of bed. She was a well-built black girl, 22 y/o as I later found out, wearing nothing but a bra that only held one of her breasts while she wildly charged the security guard posted at the only exit out of ED1. She took several big swings at the poor guy and actually hit him a couple of times in the head while he desperately tried to fend her off. At that time I felt very sorry for him since it was his damn job to stand in the way of the crazy savage woman who fought an unfair fight, since he had to be afraid of her scratching, biting and kicking while she didn't. Then I realized I was the one closest to the wrestling couple and he would probably like some help. I really didn't know what to do between all the fists, elbows, nails and teeth flying about until more of the staff converged on the brawl and pinned the second madwoman down. She was dealt with in the same manner as her colleague, I later read she was apparently having a reaction to the THC in her system just like the girl several weeks ago that I was supposed to do my first LP on that ended up biting Chris Tucker.

And then I don't know what happened .. was it the attending not moving the meat? Or just one of those days? My side of ED1 was overrun. All areas were filled with two or three patients, as many as would fit, and patients were piling up double-file in the hallways, it was hard to squeeze through. All this happened in the last 1.5 hours before sign-out, so we signed out 25 patients and 6 to be seen, the following shift was not amused.

We are also supposed to sign out our patients to the medstudents coming after us, if any, and that day there was one. I had actually been sharing my shift with another student, so the newcomer was going to be getting five patients. While those girls were still signing out, I strolled over to skriehma's side to chat with him and his new student when she made me aware that three people sitting on a patient's bed on this side were trying to attract my attention. They waved me over and a girl about my age asked me whether I remembered her sister who apparently had been my patient two weeks before. I asked for the last name and it did sound familiar but there was no way I could remember her case and/or face. Anyway, the sister said she had been looking "all over the hospital" for me during the past week (strange, since I have been working in the same place during all that time) and she wanted to get my number or give me hers now. Since I didn't remember what she looked like I chose to play it safe and said that I was going back to Germany the following week and that it just wouldn't work out. Heheh.

Allright, now I'm up for 25 hours minus one of sleep, so I won't write more on Vegas day 2 right now. But it does feel good to have gotten at least some stuff of the past days off my chest.

Good night everyone

Work in progress

Hey people, this is the first set of pictures from the first day and a draft of the evolving documentation of three days of Vegas. I have been and will be working on it every free second I get because I'm trying not to forget too much before I get a chance to write it down.

Vegas, Baby!

I'm sitting in the plane several thousand feet above the Midwest, I presume, cannot get myself to concentrate on this week's Rosen's chapter and skriehma was kind enough to hand me his notebook to get started on documenting this weekend.

I guess I should start from the beginning, resisting the urge to write the first thing that comes to mind.
Since Trillian was already at the Las Vegas airport at the time, Phèdre, skriehma and I set off for JFK at 5am on Saturday morning. The flight was scheduled at 8am, since MTA was moving us rather slowly that morning though, we decided not to take the bus as planned but use the 5$ airtrain instead. It brought us to Terminal 7 quite comfortably, where we used America West's Quick check-in to find many seats on the plane already taken - curiously with the exit row seats predominantly empty. Naturally we jumped at the chance of getting ample legroom.Before we were allowed to remain seated in these beautiful seats the flight attendant put us to the test by requiring an actual verbal response to the question whether we can read and understand English. I was very tempted to rat out skriehma at this point but then decided that I would need his notebook again, so I gave him a nudge and prompted him to say "yes, m'am".

After the lengthy flight all over Northern America,which we have almost completed the second one of right now, we were greeted by a bunch of slot machines at the gate. Then we met Trillian, who had spent a whole 12 hours overnight at the Las Vegas airport, reportedly not having slept a lot.

The nice ladies at the tourist information desk told me that a shuttle bus to the hotel would be $5 per person and a cab was the cheaper alternative if we were four people. So we took a cab, after waiting for it in a long line that moved quickly thankfully, due to the constant influx of one cab after another picking up people. Unfortunately, as we later learned, many of the Las Vegas cab drivers have never heard of our little hotel about half a mile off the strip and neither had our driver. He took us on a nice tour of the city before "finding out" that our place was actually very close to the airport. The taxameter showed something around $29, much more than the shuttle, but hindsight's 20/20.

Just FYI, this was the point where I had to switch off the notebook, since we were approaching JFK. So now I'm writing from Manhattan again.

When we finally arrived in our hotel we were rather tired, especially Trillian who apparently slept less than two hours at the airport. Naturally, we nevertheless took the hotel's complimentary shuttle to the strip right after we deposited our luggage in our room, that we were allowed to check into early (didn't seem at all like they were very busy though).After being a bit surprised by the fact that there was no free food on the plane our first target on the strip was - you guessed it - food. Even though McD appeared an obvious choice for quick food you wouldn't spend a long time searching the menu with, it didn't seem right to go to Vegas just to have the "one-taste-around-the-world". So Trillian invited us to an awesome lunch at the Harley Davidson Café.
We had loads of delicious food, my sirloin steak being especially tasty (they do claim to have the "best barbecue in Las Vegas", which out of the one place I tried, they certainly had).One regret: the girls, especially Trillian, were not wearing too many layers of clothing, which was good out in the desert sun, but can be fatal inside with Americans and their pathologically maniacal air-conditioning. So we had to take breaks in between to go outside and warm up. There were some nice vehicles in front of the café.Still, the food was awesome.

Out the door of the Café we started poking our heads into the souvenir shops one by one, skriehma and myself looking for proper poker chips and t-shirts predominantly, while the girls were more interested in shoes and other "pretty things".Skriehma and I after some negotiations ended up with 500 chips and two silver suitcases to put them into.All set to institute Texas Hold'em tables in Germany.

After slowly making our way up the stripand getting separated we met at the Mandalay Bay's shuttle pick-up spot, the other place besides the Bellagio, where our hotel's shuttle would go. We were actually kindly brought back to our hotel by a shuttle driver from another nearby hotel who didn't have any other customers to transport anyway. Back in the hotel we went to a nearby gas station to stock up on supplies (90% liquids, since walking on the Strip at noon requires some serious hydration) while Trillian was stocking up on a few hours of sleep.

After sunset, we took the shuttle again to the Bellagio and ambulated up and down.
First stop was Treasure Island, whose sirens would have given us and several hundred other spectators a free show if it hadn't been for those "strong winds" they were talking about. Be that as it may, we kept walking on the strip


and went into about every other casino on the way. We wasted some money on some slot machines and I even bought some casino chips, $5 each,which was the minimum bet at the roulette table. So I bet it all on red and they took my chips.

Verbal response
Sarah waiting
Cab drove us around town $28 on it
very tired
went on strip, Trillian invited to awesome lunch Harley Davidson Caf�
souvenir shopping, poker chips for skriehma and me, t-shirts
Trillian slept few hours, then went to strip again, gambled a bit
back home
after breakfast back to strip
tickets for today
food court
shooting range closed
ST Hilton
Chippendales
Flirt Lounge at the Rio
Shooting range


We did try our luck with several slot machines as well, but they turned out to be very dollar-hungry as well.The second I actually was in the plus for the first time I hit the "cash out"-button overjoyedbut naturally, I put the money right back into the machine and it kept it.

All this losing money did not destroy the mood too much so we kept walking through the humongous and beautiful interiors of these money palaces.This picture was taken at night, inside the "Venetian".If you have not been to Vegas before, there is no way I can make you understand how huge these hotels are and how much money they spend on their themes and luxurious, spaceous interiors.These few pictures cannot even come close to giving you an idea of the huge labyrinths the interiors of these hotels are. And I gave up shooting pictures of all of them since I could never ever capture a semi-significant fraction of it all anyway.

I do have to say though, that despite the obvious, shiny, ridiculously luxurious exterior of it all, the places all were casinos at heart. Hundreds, if not thousands (!) of slot machines standing in rows on the clean carpeted floors, dozens of roulette, blackjack, poker tables, wheels of fortune and whatever other games they played. We frequently had trouble finding a way out of the endless huge casino halls of just one of the huge hotels. And this was kind of disappointing actually. No matter how huge, beautiful and charming the exteriors and "themes" of the casinos, it always came down to the same layout and business at heart - gambling.

You could also bet on sports.
Eventually rather late at night we took a cab home and slept to see another day on the strip.

While we always knew we wanted to go to "Vegas", we actually didn't have any specific spots to visit picked out. Shooting a gun had been a plan for New York, yet shooting ranges seemed closer to reach in Vegas than they had been in NYC. So that was actually our target we set out for on Sunday morning, a shooting range rather close to the strip. After that, skriehma and I wanted to pay the Hilton and its Star Trek Experience a visit. Sorry, couldn't resist. In order to cut taxi costs, we took the hotel's complimentary shuttle to the Bellagio and strolled up the strip again during daytime.On our way north we stumbled across a shopping mall that contained a place called Tix4Tonight, where we then decided to make up our minds on where to go that night. The girls actually got tickets for a show, if you read Trillian's post you know which one, skriehma and I found that we could get half-price admission to Star Trek there so we grabbed it.We then hit the mall's food court (paradise!) and after a tasty mealwent outside to take a cab to the shooting range.

Bright as we are we didn't pay enough attention to the flyer we had to realize it's closed on Sundays.

Luckily the cab was still there since the place seemed like the middle of nowhere and we asked the driver to bring us right to there:, dropping off the ladies at the strip on the way.

DISCLAIMER: If loving Star Trek makes me a nerd - so be it. Then I love to be a nerd! I felt like 12 again and I had a huge grin on my face all of Sunday afternoon, especially when the admission people told us we could go see the experiences as often as we wanted. Wooo-hooo!

Star Trek: The Experience is next to one of the Hilton's casino rooms.

Beautiful!A bird of prey! Poorly illuminated, unfortunately.Look, it's Zefram Cochrane's clothes!This made up for the shooting range being closed.A photon torpedo! True love!Her majesty.

Now on the two main attractions of the experience, any type of photography was naturally prohibited. Which was a real bummer. So I guess I'll have to type a thousand words for every picture I would have taken. Too bad. Here it goes.

The first "ride" we took was called "The Klingon Encounter". They told us that we'd go on a simulated shuttle ride and people dressed up in blue "21st century" clothes led us into a rather small square room where we were to line up in four files. The wall ahead had four doors so that made sense. They made us watch a little video on how we weren't allowed to ride if we were pregnant and the likes, then we were supposed to board. Suddenly all the lights went out, the room became pitch black. Several shots from a flashlight ahead blinded us, then a strong wind came seemingly from all sides simultaneously. When the room was lit again it wasn't small and square anymore. I was looking down, so the first thing I saw was the familiar "light circles in a big circle" look of the floor in the transporter chamber. When I looked up I saw we were in a Next-Generation transporter room! Sure enough, at the console was a woman in Starfleet uniform, a lieutenant judging from the pips on her collar, who explained to us that we had been abducted into the twenty-fourth century. Awesome!

The two seemingly confused "twenty-first-century-tour-guides" were led to the side of the transporter room to be "briefed separately", while an ensign took us outside the door of the transporter room and onto the hallway of an Enterprise deck!
If I hadn't suspected I would look horrendously stupid I would have jumped in circles for joy. The ensign led us to a door that opened to reveal the Enterprise's bridge. THE BRIDGE! At that point my facial muscles cramped and my grin probably became very scary. I was on the bridge of the Enterprise! I was so overwhelmed I didn't even realize at first that there wasn't supposed to be a transporter room on deck 1 of the Enterprise, which is where the bridge was. We were told to stand on the back of the bridge, behind the tactical station. There were three officers in here, the one at the helm welcoming us and explaining that the first officer was in the cargo bay and he would brief us on what was going on. The first officer? Commander Riker? Number One? Woo-hoo! And sure enough, the viewscreen changed from stars at warp speed to the very familiar face of Jonathan Frakes, excuse me, William T. Riker, standing in the shuttle bay, several Starfleet officers seeming busy in there around him. I needed to refrain from yelling a loud "Sir!" at him. He apologized for the surprising events and explained to us that we had been abducted from the 21st century by an alien race called "The Klingons". Uh-huh, keep going! He then elaborated that one of our group was actually an ancestor of a person that was very important to the 24th century, a certain Jean-Luc Picard. Get out of here! I could be Picard's great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather? I knew it! So cool! So why aren't we on a Klingon ship now then? Oh, you guys intercepted us. Very good! So now what, Commander? Ah yes, we were to take the turbolift down to the shuttlebay in order to take a shuttle back through the rift into our own time. Awww, what a bummer. Can't I stay? Naturally, there was a catch. Riker ordered the lieutenant at the helm to show us the three Klingon Birds of Prey on the Enterprise's tail. Uh-oh. Better get going then. We entered the turbolift, and after the doors closed and it started moving, I felt a bit annoyed. For one because I had to leave the bridge of the Enterprise :'( and also because the turbolift moved to the side initially. It shouldn't be able to do that coming from the bridge, since as I said before the bridge is on deck one at the top of the saucer section, there's not much moving sidewards up there. Be that as it may, naturally, the Klingons got several good shots off at us at right that time so we were in for a rough ride in the turbolift and it freely fell down dozens of decks before the bridge could restore power and brake our fall. When the doors opened we were in a large hallway, illuminated in the familiar light of a red alert. The officer who had ridden the turbolift with us led us into the shuttle bay, where we got final instructions from Lt. Commander Geordi LaForge over a viewscreen. He'd be flying our shuttle remotely and accompany us with another shuttle to make sure we find our way. The shuttle apparently was a side-loader, since we boarded it through a huge hatch on its left side. Once inside, we strapped ourselves in and enjoyed the ride. The shuttle bay doors in front of us were blown out (naturally they couldn't just open them for some technical reason) and next we knew was we were engaged in combat with several Birds of Prey together with the Enterprise. There was a planet nearby that contained a large machinery that apparently could open a rift in the space-time-continuum. Allright! So after a short jump to warp speed we flew down to that planet, followed by a pair of evil Klingon warships, combined our firepower to blow up that piece of machinery which naturally opened the rift in space-time, passed through it and immediately saw the familiar skyline of Las Vegas that we were flying over. Just as we started looking for the Hilton to set our shuttle down on, our shuttle rocked from disruptor fire. The Klingons had followed us back! Oh dear. We made a run for it and dove down to the strip, Klingon fire barely missing us and blowing up a car on the street. The voice of the Klingon commander Korath thundered over our intercom as he had caught both our shuttles in his tractor beam. As we were drawn closer to the Klingon warship he spoke "perhaps, humans, today is a good day to die". Seconds later we heard Riker's voice over the intercom "if you say so, Korath" and the Bird of Prey burst into flames, the Enterprise had followed us as well! We then set down/crashed into the Las Vegas Hilton and lights went off again. When the shuttle hatch opened again, we were in a very 21st-century room that looked like one of the maintenance areas of the hotel and one of the employees was surprised to find us there. He led us to elevators that we were to wait in front of, there happened to be a TV mounted on the wall above. It showed Las Vegas news, which was interrupted by a "this just in" - several UFOs and a strange series of explosions were witnessed today over downtown Las Vegas. They switched over to the closest Air Force base where a seemingly distressed officer was hounded by a press mob for answers. On his flight into the base he shouted out the UFOs were weather balloons and the explosions solar flares. We entered the elevator smiling. It brought us down to the Promenade, with the retail shop and Quark's Bar.Naturally, with Ferengi around, my money didn't stay in my pocket for long.Still better than starting mating rituals with this lady, who luckily was not interested in my flirting attempts.