Author: Doris

I was at the hospital all day yesterday with the tiniest of babies and I came home at 6pm.  The kids had been fed dinner, Vince was gone.  I helped Keyla clean up all the dishes and chatted with her about babies and families and high school reunions. I was tired, I’d been up late the night before reminiscing with Jeremy and something about clinical wipes me out. I think it’s because I’m in a new section of the hospital each week, I meet new people and then, all day, I feel like I’m in their way and I can’t even be a smidge helpful because don’t even know where the water dispensers/alcohol wipes/diaper creams are.  About 7:30pm, I shuttle Edda upstairs into my room and sit down at my work desk to login to see how a few things went for the day and I find the above package at my work station.  Confused, I looked at it a bit more carefully.  A full minute passes before I realize that my little brother has given me a phone!  He gives me expensive gifts on ordinary days.  You know, I don’t care much about possessions, they don’t occupy very much of my thoughts, I don’t ever really covet any particular thing.  But these surprises warm my heart, that my brother thinks of things that I consider so luxurious and frivolous and gets them for me.  He knows in a million years, I would never, never buy these things for myself.  He’s also spending his weekend in Portland helping the parents set up a new Mac workstation and prepping them to get their smartphones over Thanksgiving.  My mom is learning to text.  A nice guy, my brother.

Dog walking in the moonlight.

I can no longer tell what day of the week it is.  The kids have off random days for holidays I don’t celebrate.  Jeremy is traveling tomorrow morning and through the weekend.  I work my job all days of the week and do schoolwork most days of the week too.

As we head into this weekend, here’s what we have on tap:  Jeremy – traveling to Cambridge, giving a talk on Saturday, coming back late Sat night.  Doris – working in the NICU tomorrow & putting in a couple of hours regular work and closing out the end of the fiscal year by 9/30.  High school reunion on Saturday night!  Vince – he’s going camping Friday night into Sunday with the scouts, he needs to bring his bike.  Edda – new childcare provider coming over on Saturday to work some hours, hopefully it will be a regular thing. We have guests for the weekend too (we warned them we’d be a little scarce), which means Edda’s sleeping in our room.  And we are hosting Sunday night dinner at the house.  I was getting a little nervous about the whole weekend, it’s a little busy.  And my ambitous, Type-A clinical group has been texting like crazy all day for a project that is due 10/9!  

Then at 4:30 pm today, our dryer broke.  We have a backup dryer (everyone needs one of those) and it turns out that it’s broken too.  We are unable to do laundry.

Maybe I should just switch to indoor line drying.  I’m not going to be able to get to the dryer until Tuesday at the earliest.  Sigh.

The kids had the day off of school because of Yom Kippur.  I took them to get their flu shots.  lThe pope is also in town today.  Everyone was told to work from home.  Jeremy did have to go downtown, but he reported that all the trains were empty and DC was quiet.

I think I am the recipient of a food donation.

I spend some time filling out forms for Edda.  I do not go around thinking that I’m extra-super-competent or anything, but for form filling-out, I think I’m smarter than the average bear.  But these Medicaid / waiver / funding forms are not helpful.  Who is the vendor?  Who is the provider?  What are the eligibility dates? Can I ask for reimbursement or only future payment?  I’m befuddled.

Anyways, I went to a meeting to learn about how to fill out a form (which should be self-explanatory).  The meeting was from 3-6 on a Monday (who, besides a person with an extremely flexible job, can go to a Monday meeting from 3-6?)  I met with an unhelpful person, who, when I asked what I should put down as the “vendor” or “provider” looked at me and said, well, you tell me! Lady, if I knew what to put down, I would not have shuffled my schedule around to come to this meeting.

They were starting to clear the chairs, there weren’t many people left. I finally met with a more helpful person who guided me (like a 2nd grader) to fill out three lines on the form and I was pleased and thanked her profusely.   Even though I got help with the form, I’m still not betting on it going through the first time.  As I’m thanking her, she asks with a bright smile, would you please fill out a form to get a food basket?  I said slowly – uh, sure!  So I filled out a form and I gave it back to her and then I was about to duck out of the meeting.  But then she tracked me down and said, wait!  your food basket!  I said that I really didn’t need the food basket.  She insisted.  She said that it would really be helpful for her if I took the food basket.  So I took it.  Inside: peanut butter, jelly, tuna, Cheerios, rice and some can of beans.  And this is how I ended up being a food donation recipient.

Farmer’s markets and hikes in the woods.

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We got into Bard after midnight on Friday night because we left DC at 6:30pm.  Why did we leave so late?  Because I had clinical all day on Friday.  It was a fabulous day at the hospital.  I scrubbed into the operating room for two c-sections.  Not only interesting because I’ve never scrubbed into an OR before, but also because a c-section is the only surgery I’ve had myself.  So now I can count myself: twice on the table, twice at the table’s end.

All I can say is that I needed to sit down for a few minutes after the first one.  Not because I was on the verge of fainting, but because it was amazing, crazy, interesting, bloody, and then after all that – you miraculously had another person in the room!  I did not know how much tugging, pulling and yanking happens in a surgical suite.  I did not know how much fluid just flew around the operating table.  I did not know the surgeon stuck his/her whole hand/wrist inside a person’s insides.  The surgery staff was very nice to me, I got to put in Foleys for both surgeries (my first sterile procedure), and I got to see a bunch of anatomy – appendix, large intestine, small intestine, ovary, fallopian tube. Yipes!  It’s all there, just like in the book.

Today I had a classmate tell me she wanted to be a surgeon.  I was momentarily confused because how do you become a surgeon from a nurse?  But it makes sense, because this is a BS degree, this is the bachelor’s degree she’d use to get into medical school.  So useful to have a nursing degree and 2 years hospital experience and then head to med school!  I told her that I had to live vicariously through her – I think now I’m too old to be a surgeon.   She laughed and said that that wasn’t true.  But it’s true.  I’m too old.  Just like I’m too old to become a gymnast or really learn another language.  It will have to wait for another lifetime.  After watching the c-sections, I think perhaps surgeons should start training when they are 4 years old, like a truly exceptional violin player, the hand skills are probably best imprinted in a person’s muscles/tendons and brain/reflexes even before they can spell episiostomy.

We spent two nights away from the kids this weekend.  We don’t do this very often.  We have a lot of childcare during the week, but on weekends, we are more reluctant to call on our childcare providers to take care of Edda.  It’s a tangle of issues and emotions.  On the weekends, Jeremy likes to cook and I like to nap – it’s very economical to stay in the house.  We take turns doing our own things on the weekends, which is fine.  But someone is always home because Edda is always home.  Vince is often out, doing his own thing, sending texts every few hours updating us on his location (I should just install a homing device on his phone and be done with the texting) or else he’s in his room doing teenage boy things that, well, are best left for mothers to not know.  We end up working a lot on the weekends.

Anyways, we made it a little mini-goal – a part of our marriage performance-improvement-plan – to get out of the house more together.  So for our first trip, we made it to Jeremy’s parent’s house in the Hudson Valley.  The weekend was anchored on Emy’s work performance near Bard, an art installation having to do with sound.

Emy and company performed a John Cage piece which involved “playing” leaves, rocks, sticks, pods and a cactus in a prescribed, yet (I think) somehow random manner for about 45 minutes.   The plants were played near the microphones and then the sounds were heard through radios scattered along the path and woods nearby.  I found out a few years ago that I have something called ASMR where I feel a little tingly thing-y in the back of my skull when I hear quiet, repetivitive sounds.  Actually, I’ve always known I’ve had this sensation ever since I was a child, but I didn’t know anyone else had it and I didn’t know it was called AMSR.  Now ASMR is a “thing” – lots of videos on youtube – I spend time listening to it to calm down when I’m anxious or to relax enough to sleep.   So a live performance of quiet, repetitive sounds was completly engrossing and relaxing for me.  That is was a beautiful day in the woods also a big bonus.

There were also other sound installations, like this one, full of old tape decks playing modulated sounds on AM frequency.

We had a nice lunch there as well.  I had a speck sandwich.  What is speck?  I think it’s a fancy word for ham.

I’ve spent a lot of time at the DMV this week for naught.  We are in a bit of a bind and want to get Keyla a driver’s license soon.  We were able to make an appointment for the road-test seven weeks out, but it’s a little long for us to wait.  We tried our luck to walk-in on Tues. – getting there at 8am, which I thought was early enough for an 8:30 am opening time.  We were 5th in line, but it turns out we were in the completely wrong line.  By the time we found the right line, we were 25th.  They took about 5 people on Tuesday morning.

We tried again today, this time Jeremy dropping Keyla off at first light – about 6:45 am.  She was 6th in line and wanted to stay to see if she would get lucky.  I came at 8:15 am and at 8:30 am, the DMV guy came out and said, no walk-ins today, they are all booked with appointments.  I asked the person first in line what time they came, 3am!  3am, people.  Keyla said the 2nd person in line came at 5 am.

We might be waiting until the late October appointment.

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On Wed, I had my fake patient postpartum assessment exam.  I looked on the syllabus and I freaked out because I thought I had to really do a real postpartum exam (without underwear) on a real person/fake patient.  But the person was wearing Spanx underwear.  So it was a fake postpartum exam.  I don’t have a problem doing an exam on a real patient, it’s what they are there for, they are expecting it.  But doing one on an actor is just weird.  Weird.

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Kristina is helping us out with the Austim Waiver.  After 8 years on the waiting list, Edda is now on this waiver which provides us with Medicaid as a secondary insurance and lots of services which we are learning how to access.  I already have lots of stories about Medicaid.  The most recent one is this:  our pediatrician (who does take Medicaid, a rarity around here) will take private insurance for the flu shot, but not Medicaid.  Hmmmm….