Month: November 2014

Home. Hassles.

Jeremy’s home.  Good food is back in the house.

Edda’s wheelchair is broken.  The left brake doesn’t work which means it can’t go on the bus.  In order to get this brake fixed, we are entering the dark hole of health insurance reimbursement.  There is a single weirdly shaped plastic washer that is missing from the mechanism.  If it existed and was available at Home Depot, it’d cost 35 cents.  But since it’s a custom washer, I’m sure it’s $30 + $450 for the visit/repair.  I think it might take us more than six weeks to get it fixed.  I was wondering if we’d have to drive and pick up Edda from school everyday for six weeks.  Luckily, I had forgotten we’d given Edda’s school her old stroller to use, so they sent us back her old little one (the one we got when she was 3!) and she squishes into that one to go back and forth on the bus now which is better than nothing.

Clinical. Done.

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Here’s a photo of my white nurse shoe on my way to the last day of my med/surg clinical.  This is what I saw over the ten weeks I spent in the hospital:

  • A dead body
  • A heart attack
  • A stent placed in a beating heart
  • Inmates (shackled to the bed) seeking drugs
  • Regular folks seeking drugs
  • A stroke with hemiparalysis
  • A GI bleed
  • Irregular heart beats
  • People with end stage kidney disease who don’t get dialysis for months because they don’t have insurance (that’s like not peeing for months).
  • Alcoholics detoxing
  • Poop.  So much poop. The indignities we all will face as we get older.  Nothing like having someone help you poop.  That someone who is helping you is me.  And someday it will be me needing help pooping.  Don’t think it won’t happen to you.  Stool softeners are your friend.
  • Bariatric patient – took 6 of us to move him.
  • Kindness and unkindness
  • I got to stick tubes in every orifice.  Oh, kind of not fun.  I hope that I get better at that.
I loved most of all my clinical instructor, Alex (amazing and brilliant, I’d bypass the doctor and just have her treat my congestive heart failure) and our little group of nursing students.  One of the many things I love about nursing is the diversity of my coworkers.  Look at this (youngest to oldest):
  • N, female, late 20s, BS Biology, Pakistani, phembotomist
  • D, male, late 20s, BS Information Technology, African-American
  • A, female, late 20s, BS Public Health, African-American 
  • V, female, late 30s, personal trainer, Ukrainian, mom 
  • M, male, late 30s, ex-military – can drive an aircraft carrier, Caucasian, dad
  • S, female, early 50s, middle school math teacher, Jewish, mom
How cool is that?  Totally cool.  And we were tight.  So tight.  That doesn’t often happen in randomly assigned groups.
At lunch, on the last day, Alex spent some time sorting us into the specialties that she thought we were best suited for.  She thought carefully and I felt like it was the sorting hat in Harry Potter. People got placed into ICU, ER, shock trauma, and psych.  When she got to me – she thought for a moment and said: pediatrics – and not only pediatrics, but a subspecialty within peds.  Hmmm.  Not what I had been thinking, but it’s what so many people have been telling me for years.  I’ll have to do my peds rotation at Children’s to see if they are right.

A Duracell :)

Yeah, I would like to pat on my own back for doing all these
things in 10 consecutive days.
1.      
Friday:
after working 6 hours, drove to airport to catch transcontinental flight across
the USA (one connection, east first, then all the way from east to west).
2.      
Saturday
& Sunday: to Home Depot twice to pick up 20 bags (50 lbs each) of wet
mulch (rained several days already and still raining); put away all wooden
boards on all walkways around the house and replaced them with mulch; cleaning
up (by stacking them together) all construction debris of a master bedroom
addition ( ~13 ft x 35 ft in size, engineered & sub-contracting by Rena) for
earth work, foundation with drainage, radon gas mitigation system (DIY), framing
( vault ceiling, windows, closet, egress windows & door, door for crawl
space underneath), siding , roofing with vent holes and electric meter
relocation and its box addition; Installed door locks; planted a shrub on sale;
buried ~14 feet of exposed new telephone wires (old one severed by electricians
by accident, new old couldn’t buried due to debris all over) 6 inches deep; restored
7 feet long fence as well as 3 feet gate attached to it.
3.      
Monday:
Took transcontinental flight across the USA again with one connection.
4.      
Tuesday:  Worked 11 hours.
5.      
Wednesday:  Worked 11 hours.
6.      
Thursday:  Worked 11 hours.
7.      
Friday:  After working 6 hours, drove 10 hours (~ 550
miles) with pit stops only.
8.      
Saturday:  did grocery shopping; vacuumed the house; did
laundry; replaced all batteries (~20 for fire alarms, AC, remotes, garage door,
clocks, etc.) inside the house; cleared the overgrown weeds, shrubs & trees
around the house; removed all dwelling & food storage of mice under the car
hood (on top of the battery was a nicely built home – very colorful and
artistic & should be saved as a whole and input it into a glass enclosure as a house decoration, inside the air intake, on the engine
block, etc.); charged the dead car battery; inflated all tires to 30 psi; to
Jiffy Lube for oil change on the car driven.
9.      
Sunday:  had breakfast with Jeremy, Doris, Vincent & Edda; drove another 10 hours (~ 550 miles) with pit
stops only.
10.  
Monday:
back to regular schedules.

But, at my age (even look healthy), without waking up next morning
is also possible J  

Ortho.

Where are we again, exactly?  Oh yeah, we are at the ortho’s office again.  Guess who broke her arm again?  That’s right.  My mom.  This is the story of her left arm:

30 years ago, sliced open her finger to the bone on a garbage disposal.
20 years ago, broke her wrist running away from a dog
this spring, broke her elbow rushing to dinner
last week, broke her shoulder gardening

Let’s not think about where this is leading.  I told her perhaps she should just get it over with and cut off that poor arm.

It’s fine, mom is fine.  No surgery.  No cast.  4-6 weeks of PT to prevent it from freezing up.  Should be good to go.  Good as new.  We are very lucky.

Loves, this is important.

Folks, read: THIS

Possible treatment for Edda.  Not a cure, but a promising treatment.  It’s also being studied for Fragile-X and traumatic brain injuries.  It’s an already approved drug primarily used to treat long term growth failure in children (IGF-1: insulin-like-growth-factor).  Rumors from Facebook indicate that the families who participated are excited about the results that they saw (improvements in hand use and attention span), but they aren’t allowed to talk about it.  Exciting!  And the study was done on older girls, not little, little ones who are prior regression.

Then maybe Edda can get a point or two on inane forms like this that I still have to fill out:

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Yesterday.

Dad was in town in the am to get the house ready for Mom who came back into town Sunday afternoon.  Jeremy was kind enough to send Dad on his way with a whole roasted chicken.

Sunday evening we went to Eric and Colleen’s for Sunday night dinner.  Attendance was down from the usual census, but there was great food and good snobby wine.  

Soccer.

We went to the celebration dinner of Vince’s soccer team on Saturday night.  Jeremy and Edda checked out the BMW i3 electric car we parked next to.

Getting Vince to play any organized sport thing is quite difficult – he just doesn’t really like doing it.  We’ve tried soccer, basketball, swimming, ping pong, gymastics.  All the things. The only way I got him to play this season was because three of his very good friends were already on the team.  They were completely defeated this season and Vince whined a bit before every practice/game, but I think he secretly liked it.

Edda and Jeremy thinking about pizza.