Author: Doris

I spent all weekend in a Wilderness First Aid class – a requirement for me to be an “adult” on the Scout Sea Base spring break trip next year. Jeremy & Vince went together a few years ago and next year Vince and I will go. It’ll be Vince’s first trip where he is going as an adult with adult responsibilities. Vince was WFA certified (with Jeremy) for Philmont so he didn’t have to go to this training again. So we went over things like: cardiac arrest, drowning, pneumothorax, hemorrhaging, fractures, carries, poisonous snakes, ticks, lightning strikes, hypothermia, heat stroke, burns, etc. After I take a class like this, I’m nervous about being responsible for other people’s children. I’m actually extra nervous because now I’m some sort of medical professional. I mean, I am a medical professional, but I almost never, ever take care of emergent situations. I’ve never called a code – I’ve come running to other people’s codes, but never my own. And I have a lot of knowledgeable coworkers and generally endless supplies/medication. I’m actually the most worried about being on a plane and then someone is having a heart attack and I’m the only medical professional on board. Jeremy’s like – you can’t not help. You have to help. And, of course, I’ll help. But I’m not going to like it.

We played victim sometimes: Doris with a head wound:

Jeremy is on his way to Seattle right now. Gone for a week for a business trip. I really have to hand it to him, he’s clicking through the college applications with Vince. Not that it doesn’t have hiccups and/or tension and/or terrible days, but it’s going. Rutgers went in this weekend. UC essays have a first draft. UBC essays are started. Since I was gone most of the weekend, I just got small updates from Jeremy. Vince was struggling with a separate essay from Rutgers which asked that if you had any difficulties or struggles that you wanted to tell the admission committee about – a few colleges have this question on their application. Vince said, Ok this is the spot that I should write about Edda, right? (This is why Vince didn’t hand in Rutgers earlier in the week, he was thinking about this question.) Jeremy was counseling Vince to leave it blank. He said to me – in semi-confidence (Vince does read this blog) – if you have a life of privilege, you should own it, you shouldn’t make up struggles that are not there. Rett Syndrome is Edda’s struggle, not Vince’s. To Vince he said – Did having Edda as your sister, in any way, prevent you from performing at your best in high school? Of course, it impacts us everyday as a family and had molded us into the people that we are, but think hard about what you think is a struggle. Vince got very angry at UC’s essay about – tell us your best talent? or what are you good at? Jeremy said there was door slamming and various drafts, but by the end of the day there was something. Writing is very difficult for Vince, he’s not a natural at it. Jeremy says the essays are not clever, flashy or writerly. He says they are in his voice as ernest, sincere and matter-of-fact which, as Jeremy says, is really who he is.

Edda went to a Friendsgiving party today with Jeremy and Eliana hosted by one of Edda’s classmates. Eliana worked this afternoon to cover Jeremy’s departure for the airport (4pm) and my arrival back at home from the Wilderness First Aid training (7pm).

Jeremy took his bike to Seattle with him. After his accident in Chicago a few weeks ago, he still hasn’t gone for a ride outside. He’s done all indoor training and the occasional bike to the Metro station 1.5 miles away from the house. I’m a little nervous that his first outdoor bike ride will be so far away from me. He was actually not going to bring his bike, but then he started calling around all the hotels making sure they had stationary bikes in their gyms and then the ones with the bikes were already fully booked, so then he’s just like – what the heck, I’ll just bring my bike.

Vince and I shook each other’s hands and promised that we would try to make it through the week without being mad at each other.

I’m trying to figure out how to low-key hang out with people more. Actually, I’m trying to figure out how to low-key hang out with Alice and Sofi more. We are next door neighbors. In the summer, we’d see each other puttering around outside and be able to chat that way, but now it’s cold and dark and it’s not good outside chatting weather. So we started puzzling. It turns out Kitachi likes puzzles too. This was last Thursday night and it’s like a party (without music, alcohol, weed or flirting). I want to buy a superfancy puzzle from this company called Liberty Puzzles, but they are $100 each and that’s like a whole lost calculator, so instead I got a $10 one from Amazon. I think from now on, I’ll try find them at thrift stores. Actually, I just have to see if the puzzling sticks. If you ask me, I vastly prefer 15-20 min every-other-day interactions vs 3 hour every 4 month interactions. It’s almost impossible to have the 15 min every-other-day interactions as a grown up with people who aren’t your coworkers or your family.

I went shopping at the Safeway that I now refer to as the Brett Kavanaugh Safeway. This is not my usual Safeway, I was out running on the C&O trail and the BK Safeway is on the way home. Jeremy was working from home today watching the impeachment hearings while reading the NYTimes live commentary. I have no interest in watching, it all makes me feel ill and unhappy, so, like so many other things in my life, I try not to think about it too much.

I made fancy ramen for dinner. It was just the three of us tonight.

There were 2 half days at school this week and Edda’s aftercare, which used to provide camp until 4 pm on those days, has decided not to have aftercare on half days, so Jeremy picked her up on one day and I picked her up the other day. Edda and I hung around together Tuesday afternoon. I mainly quilted, she mainly napped.

Vince went to school today as emo/goth person to advertise for the play this weekend – Addams Family the Musical, remember? Two more shows, Friday and Sat night. Get your tickets now! He is holding the third $100 calculator that I’ve purchased for him. He lost the other two. I made him repeat after me: if I lose this calculator, I will have to replace it myself with my own money. And then Vince said – or I’ll ask Gong Gong for it for Christmas. omg. Vince was trying to tell me how awesome this calculator was, but I’m ok boomering him and saying when I was in high school, we used slide rules and abacuses. You don’t need no fancy calculator to learn calculus. But it does derivatives!, he insisted. Whatever. lol. And then Jeremy looked up our fondest calculators on the internet and we reminisced over them.

Edda, who has been eating infuriatingly slowly for the past few weeks, seems to have reverted back to her old self eating wise.

I made my fancy cake tonight. It doesn’t look fancy, but it is fancy because I had to grind almonds and use whole cloves and everything.

I’m doing a good job releasing my anxieties about Vince’s college stuff. I do every once in a while, for a few moments, start to get wound up like – what if he gets in nowhere? what if he gets in one place and doesn’t want to go to that place? what happens if he gets in one place and I don’t want him to go to that place? what are we doing paying a gajillion dollars for a non-ivy-league school? what crazy person would do that? he’s not ready to go because he is constantly losing $100 calculators! And then I walk back from the ledge and reframe the whole thing and then try to immediately forget about it. Another application went in today (U. Wash Seattle) with almost no fuss. Rutgers is almost ready to go. And my Senior House email list continues reminding me that what I think I want really isn’t what I want. This is from a contemporary of mine who was the same year as I was at MIT. I was not her pal, but I admired her from afar when I lived at Senior House for many reasons and then I admired her even more when she came back and became a prof at MIT and then I was heartbroken for her when I heard she didn’t get tenure. She wrote on the email distribution:

Watching the closing of SH was terrible, but unfortunately not very surprising. As faculty I got to see the other side of how students are viewed, and it was incredibly frustrating and disappointing. At grades meetings students were often written off as "not being able to cut it" and zero consideration was given to students who had major life issues going on, or were suffering from depression, or just struggling with being at MIT because they were the first in their family to go to college. Other faculty told me not to have UROPs because they were "charity cases" and not to waste my time being nice to undergrads. Faculty who do make the effort to be good educators are written off as second class citizens. There are so many MIT students who need help, but they are overwhelmingly expected to not show any weakness and just suck it up. I struggled with this because it goes against the mission of the institution, which is to educate students. As for harassment at Senior Haus, I did not witness very much, but as a faculty I saw that it was rampant--not just sexual harassment but bullying, manipulation, exploitation...it is deeply ingrained in the culture of MIT and it was exhausting just trying to survive. So, I am all the more grateful for having been part of the unique environment at SH, which, sadly, the administration really does not understand. I have a list of about 15 reasons as to why I don't donate to MIT, but closing SH tops the list (even above not getting tenure). Still can't believe that the administration would choose to alienate decades of alumni instead of trying to actually solve a problem.

It really is a shame that baking as a hobby is deleterious to one’s waistline. It’s so nice to spend an afternoon baking, but then when you are done, you have an enormous delicious cake with no choice but to eat it. I have a slight plan to bake right before I have a shift at the hospital, so I can bring it to the break room and then share it among my many coworkers, but I have to be coordinated for that. And then maybe it’s terrible to offer up extra sweets for anyone, esp since 75% of our patients are diabetic. It’s a bad day when you have to cover four patients with insulin for three meals each. As an excuse, there are actually fewer donuts at work than I thought there would be and I don’t work that often.

I like to spend some mental energy during my shifts trying to come up with the “star patient interaction” of the day. Usually something amusing or interesting somebody says. I had a patient who had just gotten out of surgery. A little woozy, but not too bad. Got up to walk to the bathroom to pee. Was ordering dinner, chatting with their spouse etc. I asked, so from 0 to 10 what’s your pain right now? They looked at me and said when I’m sitting here and not moving, it’s like a 10. But then when I shift in the bed, it’s like way past a 10. I’m said, you know, the scale only goes up to a ten. And they looked at me and sighed and said, yeah, I know. Later, at dinner home with my family, I said I thought a 10 in pain meant that a T-Rex had ripped off your arm. And then Jeremy said, that doesn’t hurt for the first 30 seconds because you are in so much shock. And I agreed. But then I insisted that after the first 30 seconds it would be a 10. And then Jeremy said, well in about 3 minutes you would be dead because you’d be losing blood quickly and the T-rex, presumably, would still be after you so does it even matter that you were experiencing the worst pain imaginable for about 2 minutes? No one is going to rush on over with syringes full of fentanyl or dilaudid to help you out there.

Jeremy’s contribution to my hospital job was to buy a bunch of cheap chargers for my chargerless patients. You’d be surprised how often I get asked, do you have a charger I can borrow to charge my phone? It probably is 2nd only to, do you know when the doctor is coming by? I also get asked to validate parking, but not as often. Really nothing is sadder than a patient alone with a phone that’s out of juice who went to the ED in the morning and thought they’d be in and out, but instead, they were admitted and they had told no one where they were going. No one remembers anyone’s number anymore so they can’t even call their best friends. So Jeremy bought a bunch of cheap-o chargers for me to stash in my locker. Ones that hopefully will get returned to me, but OK if I don’t managed to get back.

Throwback to last week’s (two weeks?) Halloween where Jeremy and his colleagues dressed up as transit systems. (Last year’s Mario Kart was much better.) Jeremy went as the LA Expo line, can you tell? Only at UCS. I felt super lame on Halloween because I failed to procure a costume for Edda and just sent her to school in a regular outfit. It didn’t even occur to me to think of a costume. (<- this is a classic indicator of my not-able-to-have-funness.) Also, we sent Vince out to buy the Halloween candy for the annual 4 trick-or-treaters in order for the house to have some excuse to have some sugar, but he bought only non-chocolate candy. Both Jeremy and I were like – OMG we have 4 pounds of candy and none of it is chocolate. So no costumes and no good candy at the house.

Vince had a chance to be on local TV to do a spot on Scouting for Food. He did miss school for this, but I was like – I don’t think I can write a note saying he was sick because he was on TV.

Friday night, we went to opening night of Vince’s play the Addams Family – the Musical. We had dinner at World of Beer first which was amazing because I didn’t think they had happy hours on Friday, but apparently they do! So we ordered off the happy hour menu and had a very nice time.

The plays are always amazing, the kids do a good job. But it’s so long! 7-9:30pm. That it a long time for short attention span people like us.

I forgot what I did on Saturday. Oh I made a chicken dinner with capers and anchovies and Jeremy made fun of me for making “fancy” food. I told him, just wait, I’m making an almond cake with saffron on Sunday. Sunday, I went out to celebrate Lauren’s birthday by doing her favorite thing, Zengo classes. She wanted to do two in a row, so I showed up at 7:30 and spun around for a couple of hours and then had a mimosa and huevos rancheros for brunch. I only took profile pics of Lauren, I had a lot of fun.

I spent the afternoon making a chocolate cake to stay out of the way (I ditched the almond/saffron cake idea). It turned out well – both the cake and the staying out of the way. Jeremy worked with Vince on college apps. A struggle in many ways that are too complicated to explain on the blog. We are upbeat, supportive and trying to tell him there are many ways to be successful. But it’s stressful and tiring and hard. Here’s my half frosted cake.

For whatever reason, this week I’m feeling old. The “OK Boomer” line has lumped the GenX generation into it. At first, I was like – boomer! ok, that’s not me, those are my parents. But then the articles all say that – no Doris, you are for sure in it. And then you watch a 17 year old try to use a rotary phone on Ellen:

What else? Oh, I’m constantly using urban dictionary to look up changes to the English language: “pop a squat”, “post up”, “stan”. Stan is a portmanteau of the words stalker and fan meaning a person who follows the Jonas Brothers around to all their concerts and then stands in line screaming to get a selfie with them and that ends up being quote unquote “the best day of my life”. Also, I can’t read anything as soon as I wake up because my eyes don’t really work that well anymore. I feel out of touch. I feel like any advice I give Vince is going to be a dated mess and that I should just give him a wide berth. How am I to know what it’s like to be a 17 year old boy in 2019? I think I actually have no idea. This past week, Vince hasn’t been at home because it’s tech week for drama – he gets in at 10:30pm or so – way past our OK boomer bedtime. So there we are, Jeremy and I tucked in bed at 8:30 pm, each on our own phone reading the NYTimes and then looking at each other and then Jeremy asks – so you wanna watch some youtube together? We look up some labrador puppy videos. (too cute!) And then Jeremy sighs, is this what it’s going to be like from now on once Vince leaves the house? It’s so quiet. And we are so old. Edda is around, of course, but she’s very quiet. And she is a homebody. And she’s not leaving anytime soon, so you know, it’s going to be a permanent triad. Well plus Max. And the puppy that I’m getting.

Also, this week – on some weird email list mistake – I started getting emails from alumni from my old MIT dorm. Inadvertently, someone started an email chain regarding the president at MIT and how he’s been addressing harassment on campus and how that related to Senior House. Senior House was closed down by the administration a few years ago because of both the low 4-year graduation rate and the relatively high use of illegal drugs. Somehow the emails reached all the thousands of people who ever listed Senior House as their residence and it’s turned into a kind of remincience of sorts. Anyways, it was kind of touching to read how important Senior House was to a lot of people. It was important to me, just because it taught me that I was a little oddball or quirky or that I liked being around slightly oddball or quirky people even with my very square personality. But take a look at this photo with the skull logo & the motto “Sport Death” and yeah, if I was an administrator, I’d shut it down too. Are you really going to let a bunch of kids at some high pressure school go around with T-shirts that say “sport death?” mmmm, no. Many on the email list indicated they stopped sending money after Epstein or Khashoggi, or someone even said they stopped sending money when they revamped our alumni magazine from magazine which showed how technology related in a humanistic way to the world at large to a more business/flashy approach – like the most important 35 under 35 technologists (in 1998!). Even though I graduated on time and I never did any drugs, I wonder if any odd-ball dorms exist on any college campus anymore? Do people live in dorms anymore? (I also have a feeling that it’s considered feminist to join a sorority now. Never would I ever. But maybe I would now.) Is it all sanitized and corporate – like a Panera or Chick-fil-A or a Grand Hyatt? Maybe the thing I want for Vince doesn’t exist anymore (not that I want him to graduate late and do drugs), he probably knows better than I do what’s what.

Ack! Sorry, it’s been a while. I was losing it for a bit there, esp at the end of last week (enough for Jeremy to take a look at me and ask if I needed to go back on antidepressants and/or therapy), but I’ve mostly re-righted myself. I feel good and even and well rested. I needed to back off on all the things, working at the hospital, working at work, worrying about college for Vince (<- this is the big one). Vince and I were in a terrible cycle where I was nagging him too much and he was getting despondent and we were upset at each other.

Mid-last week, Vince got a few applications in (Pitt, UMinn, Calpoly SLO & Calpoly-Pomona) and it was so painful for me to get Vince to do these things that Jeremy unilaterally took over starting on Friday and basically forbade me from looking at any college websites. I actually do not want, at all, to be involved in Vince’s college application experience, I think he should do all of it, but he does need some help and guidance and if I’m helping, I can get obsessed and too invested. I want to be only his mother where I give hugs/support/snacks/youtube video breaks and not his educational consultant where I tell him how to spin his extracurricular activities and estimate the odds of him getting into various engineering programs. I’m very good at applying to college and much less good at being a patient mother, but the priorities are such that I need to lean into my unnatural tendencies. Jeremy spent the weekend (I know that already a week has passed) coaxing Vince to write essays and looking over applications for completion and he fell into bed on those days (Sat & Sun) exhausted. I happily spent the weekend shopping for pants (what are the Levi’s 501 version of pants for girls? I just want to buy one type of pants forever and ever. None of this changing fashion stuff.) and eating hamburgers (twice) and thinking about becoming a vegetarian (after this very last hamburger) and generally staying out of the house. I’m happy Jeremy took over as then he realized how much work goes into each application and then he was more sympathetic to why the heck I was going crazy. I’m mainly going crazy because Vince is not doing college in any way shape or form the way I would do college. He wants to hand things in on the last day. He’s not willing to slave over wording on essays. I freak out because OMG, what happens if the web site crashes on the last day and you can’t submit it and I would have written all my essays in the summer. But you know, I wouldn’t have done high school the way he did high school. I think he had way more fun than I did. Fun is worth something, right? I think I’m incapable of having fun.

I think over the past week, I’ve slid into the other side. It’s always a fine balance. Now I’m bored. What to do? Learn spanish? Read Middlemarch? Learn to rock climb? Ping pong? Cooking? My motivation is low. It’s dark early. I want to just snuggle in my bed. I need a dog that snuggles with me. Maxi is no good for that purpose. I subscribed to the NYTimes cooking app and cooked a dinner for the family this week. Today I bought semolina flour and cardamom pods for an almond cake this weekend. Now Jeremy is giving me the side-eye. He knows when I start venturing into cooking meals for the family, I’m not busy enough.

When Jeremy got his colonoscopy a few months ago, the CRNA – as he was putting Jeremy under – asked, hey – do you have any chest pain? shortness of breath? and proceeded to move the sticky pads on his chest to try to reposition the leads on the cardiac monitor. Jeremy said he felt great, never better. The CRNA said – huh. you have this ST-elevation in your trace which is usually indicative of a person having a heart attack. And then they shrugged and went ahead and put him under for the procedure (??!!). Anyways, the procedure went fine and it took him like 4 follow up appointments to figure out that the ST-elevation was an anomaly that day for whatever reason. Which brought the total number of appointments stemming from that colonoscopy to 7. 1. Regular appt for checkup to get the order for the colonoscopy. 2. Preop appt. with GI doc. 3. Actual colonoscopy. 4. Follow up appt with reg doc for ST-elevation. 5. Follow up appointment with cardiologist. 6. Treadmill stress test. 7. 2D Echo appointment. Jeremy was a little fed up with all this.

Jeremy failed to go to the doctor right after his tumble from his bicycle. And he seems mostly OK now, the cuts/scrapes/bruises are healed. But there is a persistent fluid bump on his hip that we keep poking at. It is about 5 inches x 5 inches. Not at all bruised, but for sure squishy and probably contains about 50-100 cc of fluid. He was patiently waiting for it to resorb back into his body, but it seemed to not be changing over time. Finally, last night, I typed into google – trauma hip fluid lump and found that he probably has Morel-Lavallée lesion. He spent the night reading about it. Maybe it’ll need to be drained or debrieded? or have a wound vac? He said – this one guy needed a vacuum for six days! Do I need to spend six days in bed? I said they have cute portable wound vacs. Then I said he probably won’t need a wound vac. And he groaned that he has to go to the doctor again. I said he probably should have gone to the doc right after the bike accident for his head.

I went to Bert’s 7th birthday party on Saturday. Vickey knows how to throw a party. Most of the action was happening outside with a bouncy house and laser tag, but I stayed inside with Edda eating too many snacks. I was helping myself to some more chicken nuggets when I overheard one 8 year old tell her pal – Bert’s parties are always the best parties. Jen (Vickey’s identical twin sister even though they did not share the same amniotic sac) and I laughed and told the little girl to go find Vickey and tell her that.

I had Edda with me. Gina (Vickey’s mom) fed a very happy Edda some pirate booty.

I legit had a nightmare last night about nursing. I never have nightmares. Is this a sign? I don’t think so. I almost always have a feeling of dread or resignation going into a shift (a patient asked me last shift if I enjoyed being a nurse and I did say yes – no hesitation), but I’m usually very happy at the end of a shift having completed it. I dreamt that I was 90 minutes into a shift and the night nurse had failed to give me report. I couldn’t find her for the life of me. Then I went to the charge nurse and asked for the assignment sheet because I wasn’t sure who exactly were my patients. Then she handed me a piece of a paper which was indecipherable and I didn’t know any of the other nurses on the unit. Then I cursed out the charge nurse (! This shocked me even in my dream.). Then there were about 50 middle schoolers crowding the hallway rushing here and there and I wasn’t sure if I was suppose to take care of them or not. On a side note, I got a raise! I’ve never worked so hard for money in my entire life. I’m very happy I never became a doctor because, holy hell, it would have killed me.