Life is definitely different when you are rotating through a pediatrics service.

So I was listening to “kid a” on the way home from work today, and I thought about how the opening measures sort of resemble the music a demented child’s mobile would sound like, or perhaps an evil ice cream truck.

The first thing came to mind was to use the song as a soundtrack for a scene where a baby is delivered after a really hard and long labor. Maybe the mother has even died. And the baby isn’t doing too well either. The neonatalogists are doing their routine things quickly, trying to hurry up so that they can get the baby to the NICU. (The sensation of hurrying is carried by the bass rhythm of the song.) The baby isn’t moving all that well, and is starting to turn blue. The neonatalogists have to intervene at a frenetic pace. Perhaps they are <p>bagging the baby</p> , or maybe even intubating. IVs are started, medicines are injected, electrodes are placed for monitoring. (There is an interlude in the song that sounds like hospital monitors beeping.) The baby is stabilized, the heart is still beating and the baby is still warm, but is not breathing on his/her own. They rush the baby to the NICU. Eventually they decide to call a code and the crash cart is pulled out. And at the end of it all, the baby starts breathing, and cries.

How melodramatic and somewhat depressing, huh?

The other thing I thought about is that the song might describe how an obstetrician or neonatalogist might feel during a delivery in the case when he/she is low on sleep, and have perhaps accidentally (or perhaps purposefully) ingested a psychotropic substance, and is trying to do a delivery.

Makes you have great confidence in health care professionals, huh?