I had a hard shift on Friday. I had to call my first STAT team ever. Every morning before I go to a shift, I pray to God (even though I don’t believe in God) please let my patients all be stable. They can be mean or weird or need to go to the bathroom every 5 minutes, but please let them be medically stable. God was paying attention to something else on Friday. My patient had had a pretty standard surgery, but they had had some issues in the night and seemed to be doing kind of ok when I took over their care, but by mid-morning, it was clear that there was some internal bleeding happening at an alarming rate. I had a new nurse orienting to the floor with me and I was like – this is going to be a very interesting first day for you. I called the charge nurse and told him I needed a STAT team, and they were there within a minute (a room crowded with people) and then I got flustered and anxious and gave report many times – but everyone else was calm and collected as if they did this all the time (and they do do this all the time) and within 30 minutes of calling the team, I had transferred the patient to the surgical ICU and then I was exhausted and sat down to eat a cookie that Jeremy packed for me for lunch and saw that R v W was overturned and thought that when it rains, it pours and that it was a terrible day. I had a 2nd trimester abortion in Texas in 2000 – a lifetime ago. At dinner, I said to Jeremy that our abortion clinic is closed now (it might have been closed a long time ago, I don’t know, Texas has been restricting abortion access for a long time) and he said that if it happened now, we’d have to fly to California which we would have done then – but lots of people can’t up and fly to California.
Saturday was a nice day, we had Edda-care in the morning, so I took Elka to the dog park and late morning, Edda and I met up with Grace. A graduating senior from the local high school who is working at Edda’s camp and lives on our street and is driving! So she’s going to be Edda’s transport to/from camp this summer.
Jeremy’s friend Dan drove to our house in the morning and the boys went on an extended bike ride during the day.
Early afternoon, I took Edda and Elka to dog training. Now they are expecting Edda-in-wheelchair to come, so they opened the garage door so we can wheel right in. Edda fell asleep. Elka does OK at training. I mean, she is trainable and is clever and is not the worst dog in the class and does all the exercises, but she spends the entire time looking sad at me. I try to tell her, training is fun! It’s fun, fun, fun! But she is really having none of it.
After dog training, the boys came back from bike riding and then we had an early dinner and talked a lot. It was a lot of fun. It was a good day on Saturday.
On Sunday, I ran for 10 miles on the treadmill. I’m still training for this marathon – mostly on the treadmill. I kind of prefer the treadmill training these days, it’s very convenient and predictable. The workouts are precise and I tend to not overextend. In the past, on the track or the road, Paul would write a workout and I’d often try to better the time. This is very fun, but also very exhausting over the weeks/months of training. You can get into a bad feedback loop where the workouts get too hard too fast. And then you are too tired to keep going and then you have to stop and take many naps all the time usually 3 weeks before a race when you are supposed to be peaking. With the treadmill, there is none of that – I just do exactly what is written and then I hope I can sustain a smooth buildup for months. Is ten miles on the treadmill boring? It’s a weird thing. Yes, of course it is boring, but it’s also freeing in a zen sort of way. You don’t have to concentrate on direction/pace or weather. You just kind of set it and let the time pass. After a while, it just passes and you are done with the run.
Then I went to Camp JCC open house. Isabella is Edda’s counselor again which is wonderful and she is going to help with aftercare this summer. I had this idea that I would just drop off Edda’s supplies and just say a quick hi from Edda, but I stayed almost the whole hour. Lots of people say hi to Edda, lots of people asking about Vince (he was so great last summer! is he back?), I got to see some other families. It was nice.
In the afternoon, I went to see Top Gun: Maverick with Megan and I had a great time. Megan was born the year Top Gun came out, so she prepped by watching the original the night before. It’s almost exactly like the original Top Gun, a very predictable, but very satisfying movie experience. Kind of like mac and cheese. Tom Cruise could still outfly all the best young pilots. Haha, lots of fun.