Month: June 2021

I went to the dentist yesterday and they found a cavity! I haven’t had a cavity in decades. Ugh. They also said my teeth are decalcifying. I was a bit alarmed and I asked if the rest of the bones in my body are decalcifying too – the (young, beautiful, fully calcified) dentist shrugged her shoulders. Crap, crap, crap. I’ve seen a number of 50 ish – early 60 ish female patients who are incredibly active & fit and were out on their bikes or running and took a tumble and smashed their hips or arms or whatever and needed the bones pinned and then the operative report says that their bones are really weak and brittle. So yeah, I’m concerned about decalcification.

I also went to get a massage. My friend trained to be a masseuse and I had been going regularly pre pandemic, and now I’m starting up again as now we are both vaccinated and we both feel OK spending an hour in the same, small, unventilated room together (still masked! I think she was more nervous than I, so I went with the masking.). She gave me this beautiful bouquet from her garden.

My parents, on the other hand, are OK without surgical masks, but now insist on bug masks. lol. Just kidding. My parents refuse to get an Amazon prime account, so we order stuff for them often (and they get some strange things, but whatever!) so I wanted to see this bug helmet I got them a few days ago. (They pay us back.)

Vince took his last final on Thursday, spent the day Friday packing and moving everything into storage. He got a Honda Odyssey zipcar (which he said was his dream car when he was about 4 years old, so just to let you know, dreams do come true (we have a Toyota Sienna, (which we had to get because of the lowering seat for Edda, the Odyssey didn’t have that option) so he’s been close but no cigar)) and made two trips to the rented storage unit. I tried to tell him, more smaller boxes are better than fewer bigger boxes, but, like lots of things that mothers try to tell their children to try to spare them anguish and learning hard lessons one generation later, this was ignored at the time of purchasing the boxes and then later acknowledged.

As fittingly appropriate, the last meal out was In ‘n Out. See you home soon!

And holy mother of g*d shit! Germany changed the status of the US to low risk and all of a sudden, after being pessimistic about Jeremy’s european vacation and settling into the idea that he wasn’t leaving, now Jeremy is leaving for Germany on Friday. Which means – crap! I have to pack (meatless, nutless, kosher) lunches for my kids for camp by myself. I’ll have to ask Jeremy for help. Honestly, Jeremy needs the break, poor guy – he’s been in a funk which the root cause is a difficult one. I hope 10 days out of here with his parents and his bike and no work will help him out.

Jeremy went to a work party last night in Silver Spring. Still covid friendly and outdoors because the host has little kiddos who can’t be vaccinated yet and wanted everyone to be outside. It was raining, but Jeremy got to see his coworkers for a couple of hours for the first time in a long, long time.

I helped Alice take a mouse of her washer this morning. You know when someone calls instead of the usual texting, your heart drops and you think something really, really terrible has happened? She called, my heart dropped and then when I realized it was a mouse my heart rebounded from the pit of pits, I grabbed a box of gloves and a plastic bag and plucked that mouse out of the dryer (she took the photo! not me!). I’ve seen gangrenous or trench feet, rooted around poop filled deep wounds, scrotums the size of softballs – a mouse is nothing.

Can I be slightly disappointed that my gyn is offering Botox? I like my gyn person, I just want everything to work well. I don’t need anything to look good. I realize this is not what everyone thinks, kudos to you for wanting to spend money/time keeping everything smooth and pale.

Jeremy tried to get his first professional haircut since the beginning of the pandemic. The google said they open at 8am. In reality, no.

I was at the hospital yesterday, it has been *months* since I’ve worked a real weekday shift. I think since September, I’ve alternated Sundays and Mondays. Sundays tend to be quiet, a waiting day and Mondays tend to tie up those loose ends and send patients on their merry way or you get the surgery patients at 4pm and take care of them for only a few hours, but they are basically asleep waiting to fully awaken from anesthesia. But a Wed shift, you have people who are post op day 1 or post op day 2 or in the middle of a long, complicated diagnostic workup and the hospital is fully staffed, so no waiting for IR or CT scan or anything. So the orders change constantly and people are in/out of rooms and asking for all sorts of things. Yesterday, I went hunting for missing driver’s licenses left in the ER more than 12 hours ago, JP drain bulbs, ten thousand cups of ice and snacks.

My friend Thu mailed (!) me some of the mangos from her parents’ property in Florida. Her father nurtured these trees for a long time and he passed away a few years ago and she, in his honor, plucks them by hand from the trees and distributes them far and wide. And as she mailed me too much for me to eat by myself, I redistribute to friends, family and neighbors and tell the story of Thu and her father’s love for these particular mangos. Edda’s bus driver said – they were so delicious! I can tell, they aren’t like the ones from the grocery store. And, of course, they are more delicious than any other mango because they are filled with love and connection from the earth through the farmer and from one loving hand to another.

I have been thinking a lot about how I want to spend my time. When I was younger, I wanted things to be I exactly just so. I tried to wrench things into alignment. Now I’m more open to being curious. Like, let me try this fun thing and see what happens. And then I can delight more when things just fall into spaces that just fit. Or when it gets stuck or frustrating, I can ease it back out, give it a little pat on the head and then try something else. Or I can sit with it unmoored and floating around and undefined. Gah! This is so vague. What the hell? This is not about a particular anything. It’s just that I keep learning so much! Whenever I think I’ve learned enough, things surprise me and I unfold and learn more. Everyday, I think I don’t have enough time to figure it all out, and I don’t. But if it all ended tomorrow, I would feel lucky that I got to learn what I did learn. It was so hard during the pandemic, so full of fear and grief. I am still full of grief, but with summer and vaccines, at least I can soothe myself with the love of other people.

Vince is going to be home on Saturday! It’s finals week – his finals are the 8th, 9th and 10th. The final he’s most worried about is the physics one on the 10th, so if you could send out into the universe any good vibes for Vince on that day, it would be much appreciated. Because all these exams are virtual, lots of his classmates are already leaving campus, moving back home or to their summer destinations. So there have been good-byes and good lucks said. I’m so impressed with Vince and this tough pandemic and freshman year. He did have some bumps in the road, but he made good friends, kept his friendships at home, figured out how to do college classes and made me laugh all the time. I think he and his fellow students must be the most Covid tested people on the face of the earth, it was once a week for a few months and now it’s twice a week with no exemption, yet, for being vaccinated. So I think he’s done at least 50 tests. That’s 50 more than any of us. And every single one was negative. Thank goodness.

Eliana was here on Sunday to mind Edda for a few hours.

She’s training to be a phlebotomist. So I had her practice a few times on me. The left AC is harder on me because you can’t see it, but the right AC, she got no problem on the first try.

I also got to see Megan and her new apartment and hang out with the kitty cats. <3.

Jeremy’s bike race was near Lake Placid on Friday afternoon. He’s calling it a success – I guess there were two metrics he was looking out for, his heart rate and his power and he handily met the heart rate goal. Of course, he would have wanted to meet both, but they seem to decouple in the race so he picked HR to focus on.

He had stayed with Emy starting on Thursday night, they drove to Lake Placid on Friday and then stayed in a hotel on Friday night after the race and on Saturday had a low-key hiking/biking adventure, the two of them.

I’m looking forward to taking care of Emy’s cat Ivy, who is a boy and also diabetic. I haven’t taken care or lived with a cat for a long time. I lobbied to take care of Ivy by citing my extensive blood sugar and insulin coverage experience I have, you know, on humans. Ivy, from all reports, is a friendly loving cat, but is acknowledged to have resting bitch face in photos. Oh, doesn’t he look super pissed at me?

I spent some time with Soojung and I picked up the air filter I had dropped off when she first went back to work as a teacher in early March. It was a lovely time, I had Edda with me which was an extra bonus because Edda needs some outtings.

Jeremy has a big bike race in NY this weekend. He’s ridden an average of 2 hours a day for the last month (well over 1,000 miles), carefully tweaked his workouts, and dropped to race weight. I’m both super impressed and kind of a little taken aback by his obvious obsession and efforts. Fingers crossed the weather is good and the stars align for a good race! xoxoxo! Go Jeremy!

He spent the weekend weighing bike parts on our kitchen scale.

We celebrated George’s birthday on Sunday with Domino’s pizza and donuts. A fun night had by all.

I attached the dishwasher to the garden hose and rigged up some electrical adapter to be able to run the dishwasher in our garage. We got our familiar error code. I promised myself that I’d make one good effort to fix this thing (which broke in Sept 2020) before I call it a day (or a half year) and spend $800 on a new dishwasher. I pray to the appliance gods, sometimes I can fix for $25 dollars and an afternoon of time.

Jeremy made me this beautiful sandwich for my shift yesterday.

A rare shift selfie. It was a quiet shift – so quiet that we emptied and sent home half the unit and had to send a nurse home too! Not me unfortunately, I kept my full load of patients.

Here’s Edda rocking her stander and watching TV.