G's-Spot

The Rantings of a Day Sleeper

I worked last night and didn't get to bed until almost 11am this morning which put me up right at 23 hours.  Gene told me he'd be out running errands all afternoon so I could have a quiet house.  Imagine the dead sleep I came out of at 2:30pm when the door bell rang twice, each time multiple times.  I laid there for a second trying to wrap my head around that strange noise that had just infiltrated my dreams.  Then I heard a strong long knock.  And another. And another. And another. At that point I jumped out of bed, threw clothes upon my naked body, which is harder than one would think when you're functioning on about two brain cells and both of those were still trying to nap but with that much knocking I immediately assumed something was wrong with a neighbor or something. It had to be someone who really needed to talk to me.  Now.  Another long hard knock sounded. I literally ran down the hall and skidded around the corner into the living room to see two bicycles in my driveway and in the front door window the shoulder of a white shirt and the black strap of a backpack of an LDS missionary turned away from the door.

Now, don't get me wrong here. I love the LDS missionaries and get a big hoot out of those boys. I also love the LDS church and when I go to church that's the door I choose to walk into on Sunday. I have nothing but respect for the LDS church and every wonderful thing it/they are and do.

But don't screw with my sleep, man.  That's just not cool.

They didn't see me so I pivoted and came back to the office.  I've sat here listening three more times to the loudest knocking that I've ever heard in my life.  One of those boys must have knuckles made of granite.  I know it was rude of me to ignore them but I figured rudeness was the better choice between that and, say, opening the door and popping their little heads off like Pez dispensers.

But it's not just them. Sigh.  As soon as I climbed back into bed and changed the satellite from Sirius "Love Songs" to "Songs of the 70's", my favorite two sleeping channels, the phone rang. It was my state governor, Matt Blunt, inviting me to participate in I know not what because I picked up/hung up on his butt with a mental note to have Gene turn the answering machine volume down.  I could try it but I'd only end up somehow deprogramming the VCR or the garage door opener in the process.  I'm about as good with electronics as any ninety year old geezer.

After I mentally told the governor where he could shove the state, I crawled into bed once more and closed my eyes. The phone rang again.  It was the American Heart Association calling to ask me for money.  I left that one on the machine.  I figure I'm already going to hell for ignoring church missionaries and refusing to ask not what I could do for the state. I figured I didn't need to compound it with screaming at a charity phone volunteer.

Well hell.  I'm up now. Guess I should go check my garden pots and see what I lost in the near-frost the last two nights since I forgot to cover them up with a sheet....

It's Spring--Time to Play!

I have written much about my social life lately but I love that spring is here both in reality and in attitudes.  It seems like I, along with my friends, have been having a lot of fun lately, and to me, that keeps me plugging along in the rest of my life. Know what I mean?

Had a great time out with a couple from work.  I've known the wife for a few years now and we were right that when we got the "men folk" together they hit it off too so I'm looking forward to lots of summer dinners and poker nights.

Ahhh...something fun to live for.  :-)

Ashley's been a riot lately, planning little get togethers all over the place and at one of them we all definitely...um...let our hair down.

And then last weekend some friends and I who've known each other for over 20 years got together to hang out together and we went to the inaugural concert at the new Chaifetz Center at St. Louis University.  Aside from the driving rain coming in sideways that we had to walk five blocks through, the concert was a blast.

Hey, life is filled with work and obligations but what keeps me humming is fun times with people I love.  I live for that shit!

Quote for the Day:

There are only two ways to live your life. One as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

Albert Einstein

I'm on Va-Ca-Tion

Okay, not really but it sounded good.  I'm going to St. Louis for the weekend to see some old friends. We're leaving early this morning and come back late tomorrow night.  I'm really looking forward to this.  We're a group of gals that have known each other and been getting together just to yack and play and eat, drink, and be merry since I was in my early 20's, so nearly a quarter of a century.  It's nice to have friends you hold on to that long and who still make you happy in your heart just thinking about spending time with them.

Bad Code

I couldn't talk about this one for a while.  Several work days ago we started the shift with a code that really got to me.  Most of the time I'm okay with codes. Most codes I go to (on adult floors) are very elderly people who've had long lives, are usually in multi-organ failure, and it's their time. You can feel that it's their time so, emotionally, AS A STRANGER I'm okay with a code ending badly.

But this one was a little too close to home.  My husband has already had one heart attack but was fortunate enough to have gotten away with needing only a stent.  He eats what I tell him to eat and he exercises three days a week, but he can't or won't stop smoking. It's not that he hasn't tried and I know it's a difficult thing but his numbers are all still high because of the smoking and it's the one last risk he has (a huge one!) that he can control. He can't control genetics but he could stop smoking.

So anyway, sometimes he gets a little glib and says something like "If I have another 'incident' the cardiologist will fix it."

Well maybe.  Or maybe the thoracic surgeon will fix it.

Or maybe he'll be like the patient we coded who was getting "fixed" when he crumped on the table and we never could get him back and, believe me, it wasn't from not trying.  We threw EVERYTHING at him.  It wasn't a straight ACLS code where "We'll do this but not this or this because that's not really called for."  We did everything by the book and then did everything else too.  Okay, that was really the nurses pushing meds and shocks.  Meanwhile we did compressions, and tubed and bagged, for 45 minutes with never a glimmer of getting him back.

It could have been Gene and that scared the shit out of me.

Afterwards, I ran smack dab into the family and I had the strongest urge to hug the wife and say "I swear to God we did everything we could" but of course I didn't. Instead I made it to a ward kitchen before I started crying. Luckily for me, one of my favorite nurses was getting herself a glass of iced tea and she hid out with me for about 20 minutes until I could go back to my BiPaps. 

The job goes on.

Albuterol, Albuterol, Oh How They All Love Thee

Chris and I decided tonight that our "bright idea" for the year would be to cut to the chase and just start nebbing albuterol through the air ducts over the entire hospital. Wouldn't that be grand? Think of the community benefit.  Why, every patient would be cured of every wheeze, rhonchi, pneumonia, fever, fluid overload, and cancer. What a wonderful fountain of youth and health it would be if we could but shower everyone who enters the hospital with a mist of albuterol wafting from the air ducts. 

Because we certainly all know that albuterol cures every ill.  Right?

We're thinking about making Carrianne a t-shirt that says "I wouldn't have broken my foot if only I had used my inhaler before I took that run."

And like a present from the sky, I got a call in the wee hours from an RN saying that she had a patient who'd just started wheezing, that "no" the patient didn't have any kind of respiratory regimin but she did currently have a fever.  So I rushed right up and gave her an albuterol via neb treatment.  Yeah, right.  Not gonna happen.

What I did do was go examine the patient and listen to those wheezes along with her complaints of not being able to take her wedding ring off since last night and about how her name band had become so tight overnight that it was cutting into her skin.  Hmmmm...I don't know. Let me think really really hard about this one.

I went to the computer and pulled up her records. No respiratory history.  No surprise there.  Then I clicked the magic tab "I and O".  Again, no surprise, holding on to every drop being running into her.  I called the nurse over, someone I really like by the way so I really wasn't trying to embarrass her. I showed her the report and said "Are these numbers correct, because if they are, I bet you a Wild Cherry Pepsi this has nothing to do with reactive airways."  She said "Oh" when she saw what I was pointing out. She and the charge nurse went in and assessed the patient. I cheerily said "Call me if you need me" and went back to setting up home meds.

Hey, I wish albuterol could cure fluid overload but it simply can't.  I could have dipped that lady in albuterol and she still would have been wheezing. What impressed me, though, was that once they saw what I saw, they got it and they didn't say that one sentence that makes every RT's skin crawl like nails on a chalkboard:  "Yes, I agree this is fluid.  So you're going to give them a treatment, right?" I respected that they didn't say that at all but immediately started working on the actual problem.

Garden Time!

It's not much yet, but it's a start. Will be working on it more over the next two weeks.  So far I have tomatoes, marigolds, lavendar, rosemary, thyme, parsley, lemon basil, nasturtiums, and a geranium, all of the flowers so far are edible too so everything will be fun to play with in the kitchen.

Just got through my weekend work stretch. As always, enjoyed working with my friends and getting to catch up. Sunday night was a slow night, the first one since last summer so we were all punch drunk, too loud (yeah, I know, I was the instigator), and giggly silly.  Well, all but Jones but he was stressed out with his first weekend as team leader--where he did a fantastic job!  Of course we all know he's a natural leader.  Brian is so light-hearted now it's even more fun to be around him.  Kendall took a poll by show of hands of "How many people love the new and improved divorced Brian better?"  to which all hands shot up.  Not that we were trying to insult him, it's just nice to see Brian not living on the edge of the stressed-out abyss all the time. Chris was off for the weekend :-( so it wasn't the entire clan but close.  It was nice to have a night where we weren't all running ragged and behind every minute of the night.  I think everyone needs one of those kinds of work days once in a while just to keep morale up so you can remember that they're not all terrible and you don't get to where you dread going to work every night.

Off to buy plants...

I admit, I am Perverse

Maybe fickle is a better word.  Or maybe yet, justified?  Not sure.  So the nurse who's been giving us hell? Apparently she's no longer pissed at us.  Last night I went in, happened to be on her ward, was talking to another nurse when she walked up all big grins practically yelling "Hey ya, Glenna! Great to see ya!"  I said hello AFTER I finished my conversation with the first nurse but all I could think was "Wow.  This is the definition of two-faced"  and "how interesting that AFTER she spent a couple of months being snotty to every RT who walked onto her ward, complained to the supervisor several times, bad mouthed us to every nurse on that floor....suddenly she's not mad anymore, for whatever reason, so I'm supposed to be all jacked to see her?" 

That's what I mean by "perverse".  I really do try to work things out and give people the benefit of the doubt so all along during this whole drama that SHE created, I've kept my cool, been friendly and nice, yada yada. But now that she's decided to like us again, I can't stand being around her.  It feels so fake. 

Not that I was rude or anything at all. I just didn't return the greetings with as much ardor. I was nice. I was polite. I was friendly.  But I wasn't as joyful with her as I used to be.  I've lost so much respect for her after all of her constant jibes, complaints, and negativity that it will never be the same for me.

Oh well. Such is life.

You know, it sort of illustrates something in the bigger scheme of my life.  I'm far from perfect but many times I get caught up in the roles of Peacemaker, Situation Fixer, and Glenna'll-Do-It.  I get a little tired of it.  Like in that situation.  How come it's okay for her to express herself in all that negativity and complaining and being rude and yet it would be "rude" of me to say "kiss my ass" which is, quite frankly, what I was thinking at the time?

So many times in life I feel like I have to do "the right thing" while everyone around me just does whatever the hell they want to and that's just fuckin' fabulous.

Or maybe I"m tired and bitter in this moment.

G

Las Vegas Ricin Case Update

The man who laid in the hospital sick from what they presume was poisoning from his own Ricin was formally charged as soon as he was released from the hospital with a count of having a biological toxin and two weapons offences.

He says he never intended to hurt anyone.

Well, yeah. I sit around with a biological toxin all time with no intentions of doing anything with it, don't you? It will be interesting to see what comes out about this.

Quote for the Day

Immature love says: I love you because I need you.

Mature love says: I need you because I love you.

************   Erich Fromm  (1900-1980, American Psychologist)