Month: April 2019

And they are off to China.  Lucky kids. ha ha.  Twenty eight kids from the high school and one big bus to the airport.  They just took off from Dulles headed to Beijing.  My parents are already in China ready to intercept them en route at my mother’s high school.  I’m not sure how well that is going to turn out, but what the heck?

I laughed so much about the little cultural mismatches.  The leader of the trip is a Chinese mom of a RM alum – she runs an after school enrichment program and has done many, many exchange trips between China and the US.  She is already in China texting the whole group — it’s cold!  you all must pack jackets!  It’s like lows of 50s highs of 80s.  No American HS kid is going to wear a jacket as you see all the US kids walking around in 30 degree weather with only a hoodie.  The Chinese mom/leader was also answering questions during Q&A sessions – such as – are our kids going to have any free time to explore on their own? (hoping that they will have the time). And the leader is like – absolutely not, no way, they are going to be supervised at all the time and there will be a fence around them that will encircle them.

Photos from the plane:

Vince re: Edda:

One of the things that I love about my job is that most of my co-workers are immigrants.  A bunch of the senior nurses are half a generation older than me, their kids are in college or grad school.  I can hear the pride in their voices as they tell me – she got an internship at Microsoft or she’s going to be an ob/gyn or anesthesiologist.   Often these nurses not only work the regular 3 shifts a week, but pick up 2-3 shifts at another hospital.  No one wants their kid to be a nurse, lol.  But my favorite story is this: 

I have a coworker with three kids, each kid going to an impressive big name college.  The baby of the family decided to go to Swarthmore.  She leans in and asks – have you heard of that college before?  And I say, yes, I have!  Very impressive.  Then she goes on and says, then she majored in English and met this boy who majored in political science and Spanish and then they went to NYC to work for something called Teach for America.  And she shook her head.  He’s a nice boy, but he will never have any money.  They will never have any money.  Did I nod?  Maybe I nodded.  And then she said and then she decided to go to Hopkins and become a nurse!  Can you believe it?  She’s now a nurse at an ICU in NYC and she tells me all the time how hard it is to be a nurse.  My daughter didn’t really understand it before.  And I laughed. 

A few days ago, I asked how her kids were doing and if her daughter was still doing OK in NYC at the ICU.  And then she showed me texts from her daughter holding up up signs protesting outside her hospital for safe staffing levels and texting – “I was born for this!”  And there you go, NYC nurses.  Good for you.

The taxes are mostly done.  Somehow I have a snafu and can’t e-file, so I have to mail them out.  But they are done and we owe, but I knew we would owe so that isn’t a surprise.  It occurred to me the other day that in a year, if Jeremy and I both died together, we could give our whole estate (estate sounds weird – as if we owned a castle.  I mean, my home is my castle, but I mean a castle with hounds and horses) to Vince.  Of course, the whole thing is complicated with Edda and her care, but putting that aside, I mentioned it to Vince.  He was first like – if you guys died, who would I live with?  I said – well, if it happened next year, you would live on his own because you’d be your own person.  Then he said (eyes widening a bit), oh yeah, I’d be my own adult.  Then he said wow, I’d live in the house?  It’d be pretty big for just me.  I said that he could probably rent or sell the house and then live in an apartment/dorm near college.  But then we talked about how that might be a bit much to handle as a college junior, especially if Edda needed care coordination.  Even though it would be a lot to handle as a 20 year old, I think Vince could do it.  It wouldn’t be the best thing ever (as we’d be dead), but I think he has a good head on his shoulders.  Edda is a whole ‘nuther story. 

Vince’s play was great and a nice Friday night outing.  I don’t think I’ve ever sat through a performed Shakespeare play, it was pretty funny.  They always do a great job.  Edda was home with Nat, Dara, Ning and Brian.  I ordered in Chinese food for them and they had a nice Friday night together.  At the play, it’s always nice to catch up with other parents.  Now all the conversations are about college.  I spoke with a parent who is on his fourth out of sixth kid off to college.  I told him he must be a pro at this, but he said each kid was so different that it kind of didn’t matter that he’d gone through it before.  There are whispers of kids not getting in anywhere, there are kids who got in everywhere.  I just want Vince to get into somewhere that he’s excited to go to.  MCPS offers a free SAT to all students, Vince is going to take it tomorrow.  I feel like I can offer him only so much advice (same thing I feel about vaping and drugs – I have no idea), the landscape of college admissions has changed so much in 30 years.  Thirty years ago, I didn’t even contemplate not getting into Berkeley or Michigan and now those schools are very difficult to get into. 

******

I still have so much work to do before spring break.  Taxes are still not done.  I still have two more shifts at the hospital.   First world problems. 

Vince’s drama club is putting on Midsummer’s Night Dream tomorrow night.  I thought I needed to brush up on the plot a little before I went to the play, the language is going to be hard enough for me to follow, so I wanted to know at least the names and the general plot.  I struggled with The Real Inspector Hound, it would have been better if I had gone through the cliff notes first.  Youtube is awesome.  I wish youtube was around when I was taking differential equations.

******

I’ve been rethinking my role in the opioid addiction crisis.  I have a small, but I think, semi-critical role.  Every surgical patient I discharge is given a prescription for opioids.  Sometimes it’s oxy, sometimes it’s percocet and sometimes it’s vicodin. I don’t decide whether they get the prescription, I only get to tell them about the prescriptions that they get.  I actually hate handing over the printed prescription, especially for people who might have had a couple of narcotic doses right after surgery, but for the last day or day and a half, they’ve been doing great on Tylenol or Motrin or even nothing.  A patient who has been on no pain meds for 18 hours is still sent home with an opioid prescription.  For the first few months I was on the job, I told them – this is a narcotic.  Take it only when you need to.  Then the second few months, I told them – this is a narcotic.  Take it only when you need to.  It is habit forming.  Just this week, after reading about the Sackler family, I changed my wording to say – this is a narcotic.  Take it only when you need to.  You probably don’t need to given that I’ve only given you Motrin for the last 12 hours.  This is an addictive substance. 

I regularly have patients who are addicts.  I regularly have patients who refuse all narcotics even after major surgery and they are clearly in pain.  For the majority of patients, the narcotics work well for pain control in acute situation and they have no trouble transitioning to non-narcotic pain relief.  But I have had a few patients who have not had narcotics before and under my care discover that they like the narcotics and begin asking for them more frequently than I think they need.  I follow the dr. orders whether it’s every 3, 4 or 6 hours.  But when a patient becomes aware of that dosing schedule and starts calling 15 minutes before the next dose or they might not call, but they kind of ask hopefully for the next dose, I have a sinking feeling about those patients. Those are the ones that I think about when I fall asleep at night. 

I took Percocet for my c-sections.  For Vince, I refused it for a long time not because I thought I’d get addicted, but because I thought it would get into my milk for Vince, but I did finally take a dose which did allow me to rest and regain strength.  For Edda, I think I took it right after the surgery for a day without convincing.  Edda took oxy? or vicodin? for 10 days following her spinal fusion.  Of course, I wasn’t worried about her becoming addicted to it because she’s unable to get it herself, it was more important to me that she was comfortable because I think she did not understand what was happening to her. 

Edda’s stairlift is fixed.

I often have misgivings that I am doing such a female dominated field like nursing (they really should change the title of the position to medical associate or something – they did it for stewardess), but I took great pleasure in showing up at Home Depot yesterday smelling like sewage and asking the salesperson – hey do you have a 2″ sewage ejection pump check valve?  And Jeremy did cook for 100 the other day, so gender roles are all upside down here.  But sometimes not really.

The plumber did call today kind of apologetically saying my voicemail didn’t pop up until this morning.  He sounded like he would have come over yesterday if he had gotten the message.  He didn’t know what the white crap was either.

The taxes are still not done.

Argh.

I could not let a broken sewage ejection pump lie.  I did call the plumber this morning and left a message on his voice mail and then tried to take a nap, letting the broken pump just stay broken.  But my nap was constantly interrupted by thoughts like – 1) it’s Sunday, the plumber is not going to call you (he didn’t), 2) you probably can do it yourself in like 45 minutes (it took 4 hours) and 3) even if you start and fail, the plumber is on his way already anyways, so what is there to lose? and 4) OMG, I’m totally going to be knee deep in shit for a long time and I only like to be knee deep in shit when I’m at the hospital and not during my own nap time.

So I watched a few youtube videos and felt trained enough and I went in.  I started with this:

A sewage ejection pump is exactly what it sounds like, it takes dirty water from the toilets and sink from below ground (the basement) and collects it in this bucket in the ground and when it fills to a certain level, it pumps it up to the ground level sewage.  It had stopped working – everything backed up,  the basement was slightly flooded.  Initially Brian thought the toilet was backed up, but the pump is located outside their apartment in the common area of the basement and he didn’t notice that the whole sewage system was backed up. 

I will spare you photos of my work – I started myself by lifting the cover off the pump bucket and using our wet vac to suction out the sewage in the bucket to try and reach the pump.  After about 30 minutes of this on my own, Brian (bless his heart) pitched in and helped me suck and dump bucket after bucket of sewage out into the backyard.  Finally, we got to the pump – it seemed like the pump and the bucket were all coated with a deep layer (like 6″) of white debris.  We couldn’t decide if it was hard water deposits or grease buildup or toilet paper build up.  Anyways, we scraped the debris from the sides of the bucket and the pump itself.  It’s a small space, it’s really smelly and we needed to contort to get the pump in and out and to scrape out all the debris.  As we were working, Brian and I traded stories of our dirty jobs.  I started with stage 4 pressure ulcers that needed dressing changes, he countered with back of the house restaurant clean-up work. 

Brian and Jeremy convinced me that we could rescue the pump which turns out, really wasn’t broken, just covered with crappy crap and couldn’t pump with all the crappy crap in the bucket and as soon as we rinsed it off and cleaned out the bucket, it seems to be working fine.  Brian and I reinstalled the now-clean sewage ejection pump into the now-clean sewage ejection pump bucket and tested it out.  I told Brian after we finished (well it’s not really finished, I still need to order a few parts online) that if we weren’t friends before, we were certainly friends now.  Jeremy, who spent the afternoon working on his bike and consulted in on our work, every once in a while would take a whiff of me and tell me that I smelled bad.  It was no joke.  I smelled bad.

I have never, ever wanted to take a shower so badly.  And I took a nice long one right before we went to Sunday night dinner where we celebrated Sarah’s birthday with Lauren’s cake!  I rarely ask for an alcoholic drink, but I really wanted one tonight and happily took up Colleen’s offer for a tequila sunrise.  Yum!

And then we came home to a broken stairlift.  Argh.  I’ll have to get new batteries tomorrow.