Report, cancel, batteries.

Here’s a link to an article in The Washington Post which talks about the report that Jeremy just put out. 

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I got new glasses via eyebuydirect.com.  These glasses are so nondescript that no one will even notice I’m wearing glasses.  The charge nurse unexpectedly called me early on Saturday morning to cancel me, which was a nice surprise because Saturday was Vince’s actual birthday.  Though he was asleep for most of the day, I got an extra day to spend with the family at home and think about my 17 years as a mother. 

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Vince, upon turning 17, has started to do laundry.  And label his chargers.  He’s growing up!

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Birthday, exercise, Nintendo switch.

This is Vince’s birthday week – 17!  what the hell?  I remember being up at 3am when he was a few weeks old trying to figure out how to breastfeed him – all the pregnancy/birth hormones readjusting hourly in my body and crying and feeling terrible and sleep deprived and thinking – omg, I’m not going to be able to do this.  But here we are, lucky to celebrate together. We kicked it off with a mid-week family dinner hosted by my parents.  Vince invited a couple of pals to Urban Hot Pot.  I’m not sure his friends had a good time, but my parents certainly did as evidenced by the 17 orders of fish balls my dad had and the plateful of crab carcasses by my mother’s bowl.  A little challenging for Edda – trying to keep her swinging arms away from all the pots of boiling broth.

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I’m trying to keep up my workout routine, at least on my off days.  For five years, Paul coached me in running and a bit of lifting – enough that I could run 7 miles at a good clip anytime and do couple of dips and a pull up.  I did a track workout and a long run every week, probably averaging just under 25 miles per week.  He’d email me the workouts in the beginning of the week, I’d email him what happened at the end of the week.  Even though I’d failed workouts all the time (Paul, I think, is often overly ambitious for me), I rarely missed a workout.  Every few years, I’d get a bit injured and have to pull back a few weeks or months at a time, but for the most part, it was a nice rhythm and felt good to work hard.  I had to give this up when I started working so much. I tried to keep some semblance of it up for a little while, but I’m quite tired a lot of the time.  I’m on my feet all day at the hospital – covering about 5 miles each shift and the shifts are kind of randomly scheduled, so it’s hard to get a good training rhythm going.  Sometimes I feel great the day after a shift and can run ambitiously, but other days, like today – I couldn’t really get going.  I’ve lost a bunch of my running capabilities because I’m running so much less these days, but I often still can get the feeling of a good workout even though I’m much, much slower.  Most often I get this feeling on a slight downhill stretch in the winter sun in mile 4 out of a 5 mile run or on a treadmill after a 30 min slow warm up.  One of my coworkers at the hospital is a serious lifter, so he’s been nudging me to work on my squats.  My goal is 135 which is this bar I’m leaning against and then the largest plate (45 lbs) – one on each side.  Just a scooch above my bodyweight as long as I lay off the cookies.  He’s like – nah – forget about 135, I think you can do 185.  Ha ha ha.  We’ll see what happens.  The fun is in the trying, right? 

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Vince and his birthday present.

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Favourite, diet, birthdays.

I’ve finished reading a whole book in the past week (which may prove that I can extend my attention span out longer than the length of a youtube video) as well as manage good progress on a quilt.  I take this as a positive sign – I’m carving out time for myself in various ways.  I even managed to watch a movie in the theater on Vickey’s suggestion – The Favourite.  I failed to read the reviews on this movie and I did pay a steep price for it, I can see how people can find this kind of movie deliciously funny, but people are just mean in the movie and they are mean the entire time.  I almost decided to walk out of the movie, but I forged on through.  I also wanted to walk out of A Star is Born except for the fact that I’m infatuated with Bradley Cooper, so maybe my movie barometer is out of whack because so many people loved A Star is Born and therefore, I can conclude that I’m an unfeeling b.  Ha ha.   Maybe I sat through The Favourite because I’m also infatuated with Emma Stone.  I was going to say I’m probably too old for either of them, but Bradley is 44, so that should be OK, though I’d have to overthrow the supermodel first and then there is the issue of my own husband. 

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I’m the heaviest I’ve ever been since I started seriously running in 2012.  Ooof.  I’m running less (which is OK), but mostly what is happening is that I’m longing for carbs and sweets and not doing too much to resist them.  Hmmm.  I’ll have to address that.  Otherwise my pants won’t fit for very long.  Why is everything so delicious?

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Including birthday cake?  We celebrated Eliana’s birthday a few days early this week 🙂

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We are putting together invites for Edda’s 15th birthday party later this month which always puts me in a melancholy mood.  Most of the time, I’m eternally grateful for Edda’s good health, even temperament and her clear happiness for her life.  I know that we have the financial and emotional stability to provide for Edda.  I try to not feel sorry for myself, I try not to feel sorry for Edda.  But sometimes this can be hard for me.  Once I feel sorry for myself, then I start to feel sorry for all my friends going through hard patches (even hard patches I have no idea about), all my patients (who clearly are going through a hard patch) and sorry for our country (extreme hard patch) and then finally sorry for the world.  Then I start to think OMG, all the beautiful places of this Earth that Vince’s kids won’t be able to see because we will have destroyed them because I’ve turned my heat up to 70F or had a hamburger at Five Guys.  This is not the most delightful route of thinking.   Argh!  Tomorrow is another day.  Hopefully, I’ll get the chance to try again.  Fingers crossed.

Snow, career day, spiderman.

Snow today!  Lucky for me (though not lucky for the kids – or at least Vince), there was no delay and everyone went off to school just fine.

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It was career day at RM and Jeremy volunteered to talk about his work life.  It was a half day at school, so he did his little speech seven times today.  He included everything including his stints as a cook at a French restaurant and fixing computers at a law firm both in Philly.  He mentioned that he was Vince’s dad so Vince had a lot of people come up to him saying – your dad spoke in chem class today!  That was fun for Vince.  Some people asked personal questions like why Edda went to Wootton and not RM.  Jeremy said that one of the messages he wanted to tell kids is that sometimes you take a job in a particular city, not because you always dreamed to be a semiconductor engineer, but because you have a girlfriend who lives in that city and someday you want to marry her.  Awww, what a sweetheart!  I’m not sure I would have married Jeremy if he had taken a job in another city.  Jeremy had to really talk me into a long distance relationship for a year between LA and San Jose.  Jeremy is very loyal.  I’m less so.  Jeremy also bumped into another dad at the career expo who was a grad student at Northwestern with Anne M*yes (my MIT senior thesis advisor).  The other dad works at NIST now where Anne did a lot of her measurements while I was her advisee.  He said his most cited papers are co-authored with Anne and he actually thought he didn’t deserve to be a co-author, but Anne graciously included him.  Ah, Anne!  I’m hoping to go to my 25th reunion this June, Vince will come too – I’m excited to go and run down the infinite corridor in the middle of the night (well, maybe at 8 pm).  I haven’t been back in so long.  It should be both fun and a bummer – Anne is dead, my dorm has been shuttered.

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We are working through Spiderman into the spiderverse about 15 minutes every night.  This is much better than flipping through youtube to find something we can all agree on.

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Update.

Sometime I have a few shifts in a row where I head home just buzzing and happy and excited.  Vickey reminds me that not every shift is like this and I know this, but sometimes you have to slog through the tough ones to get the ones that spin together in a way that is satisfying.  A good shift is when the work is steady, but challenging and you have friends working the rooms ahead of you and behind you to help you out when you need it.  When you have time to go on walks with all your surgical patients.  During the night before one of my shifts, a patient had filed a complaint with the management of the hospital – it was enough to go to the customer relations department which is past the authority of my director.  Anyways, I had grabbed the assignment sheet at 6:30 am and was just reading about my patients for the day and didn’t know anything about this high level complaint until 7 am when the morning huddle convened to do the shift change when I realized that they had assigned this particular patient to me.  Nursing-wise, this patient was a piece of cake. I was kind of flattered they trusted me enough to re-right this patient’s experience.  And I mostly did, I think.  It’s kind of fun for me to do this.  On the same shift, I also had a patient who was admitted into my care who was not stable enough to be on our unit.  So I had to manage a transfer to the ICU, but this is less fun for me.  I like my unit because even though everyone is sick, no one is really, really sick. And because no one is really, really sick, there is nothing in my medication dispenser that can really kill a person, which is what I like when I’m learning to be a nurse.  From Nurse Jackie – The only thing I want to do besides help people is not kill them.   On my unit, a patient’s vital signs need to be stable over the course of 4-8 hours.  So if a person needs vitals checked at least hourly, I can’t take care of them.  I don’t have the medications necessary to stabilize them (because our pyxis doesn’t have medications that can kill people, it also – as a corollary, doesn’t have medications that can really save you if you are really, really sick), I don’t have the expertise, I don’t have the monitoring capabilities.  So the transfer to ICU still takes a couple of hours, so I’m running around trying to take vitals every 30 minutes, calling the doctors both on our unit and in ICU to coordinate what care I can do for them.

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I’m starting to tell the doctors what I want for my patients.  They are starting to ask me what the patients need.

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I’m still tired.  I’m looking forward to working less.