Year: 2014

Dinner.

Mom has been coming here for dinner the past few days.  She’s trapped in her house because she really can not drive with her bum shoulder.  I’m glad that when I’m as old as my mother and have the same broken shoulder, there will be a car that exists that drives itself (with me in it).

A few days ago, Jeremy bought an amount of kimchi that was larger than the volume of his head.  I do not like kimchi, but Jeremy and Vince are big fans.  I wonder how long it will take them to finish off the whole bucket.

Vince also loves my mom’s shrimp and last night we found out why.  It’s because she puts an entire bottle of ketchup into the dish.

Cold.

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I know compared to some parts of the country, there is nothing to complain about, but it’s crazy cold here.  Crazy.  Here’s Jeremy dressed up for his morning bike ride to the Metro.  He left and had to come back because he forgot his phone.

This is what fall is suppose to look like:

Tea parties on the back porch.  Bring fall BACK!

Odds / ends.

Look how big Edda is getting!  So toothy in this photo.  Also dressed somewhat like a hipster farmer.  Taken just before heading up for a shower.  Maxi is barking her head off in the background because she’s afraid of the big camera with the telephoto lens.  So any photo that you see on this blog in our living room/kitchen/dining room, just imaging loud, insane barking as part of the soundtrack.

Every week I try to fold the clean laundry before Maxi finds the pile and settles down.  I usually fail.  But I try ALL THE TIME.  This is one of my habits that Jeremy finds *slightly* annoying.  What’s that? Pulling out an undershirt from the clean pile with ten thousand little black hairs on it is annoying? I am otherwise perfect.  Ha ha!

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.