Author: Doris

The queen-sized bed we bought a week or so ago was for Edda.  We’d been sleeping with her in a twin sized bed for 10 years.  She’s 85 pounds now and takes up a lot of space.  You always ended up with a crick in your neck or your arm would fall asleep.  Now sleeping with Edda, the grown-up gets his/her very own spot!

Jeremy made a PB and J sandwich for his long bike ride this morning.  He managed not to hurt himself (on either the bike ride or making the sandwich) and for that, I’m thankful.

Vince and Edda watching TV.  Edda’s cheeks are all red from her hand mouthing now, a sure sign that winter is coming and the air is dry.

Jeremy made hand-pressed hamburgers with tater tots for dinner tonight.  I always think the hand-pressed burgers have too much meat in the patty, so I asked Jeremy to slice my patty along the horizontal axis and I eat only half the burger.  Guess who got the 2nd half?  Why these two well behaved doggies of course.

Good morning Rockville!  I see so many sunrises these days.  It means that I go to bed really, really early.  I’m learning stuff like what to do for: heart attacks, hypotension, asthma attacks, COPD, heart failure, hemolytic blood reactions, hypoglycemia, kidney failure, AIDS, and spinal cord injuries.  I’m dutifully memorizing all the signs and symptoms of all the most commonly seen issues, all the drugs (generic and trade names), all the side effects and the antidotes of the drugs.  I’m able to rattle off all the normal lab values and what happens when the lab values go out of whack.  It’s really interesting, but I consider this stuff almost secondary to the other important thing that I’m learning which is to touch people and do a full hands-on head-to-toe assessment: take their pulses and listen to their heart/lungs/belly and then really listen to what they are saying.  This is harder than you think it would be.

Date night = Whole Foods + Old Navy.  One of my favorite places to have dinner is Whole Foods.  I like their salad/hot food bar because it seems like everything is possible.  Want to have Chinese food with collard greens?  Or do you want to have quinoa with strawberry cake?  Yummy.  No one else seems to like this idea.  But Jeremy indulged me tonight and took me there.

Then we headed to Montgomery Mall where I tried on many, many leather jackets on behalf of Edda.  We are trying to pull together an Amelia Earhart costume for Edda for Halloween.  I could not find any leather jackets at my favorite price point (eight dollars), but I did find a flowing white scarf for her to wear.

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I love beets.

What’s going on here?  Ummm.  Midterms are over for me.  Halfway done with the term.  Jeremy lost the cookie competition at work.  Heartbreaking.  Vince got his bike stolen at school and spent two hours (during class time ?!?) looking over security camera footage to see if he could find the thief.  No thief found, but the bike was found in the middle of the field on school grounds.  Edda went to Strathmore to see a concert yesterday.  We are eating a lot of vegetables.  Things are well.

Boys had a sleepover Friday night which segued into an 8 am soccer game.  Go Strikers!  (They lost.)

Donald flew to Portland this weekend to hang out with mom and to get a cup of coffee.

I went running on the C&O and it was beautiful.

Vince made me a BLT for lunch!

Jeremy is in a cookie bake-off at his work this week.  He wants to WIN.

Both the kids had the day off on Friday and it was Edda’s regularly scheduled OT appointment with Deb.  Deb hasn’t seen Vince in years!  Deb has been Edda’s therapist since she was three years old.

In first or second grade, Vince was having a lot of trouble with his handwriting.  Deb took him on for a few months to teach him how to hold a pencil and write the letters correctly.  It was not an easy thing for Vince.

Date night = IKEA.  Jeremy is trying to convince me that this desk is going to totally change the workflow in the house.  A modern organizational miracle.

We misestimated that a queen sized bed would fit into the minivan.  Had to tie it to the roof.

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Would it be remiss of me to not talk about Ebola?  This has been a crazy week to be a bedside nurse (in training) in a hospital.  I’m not immune to having my blood pressure and heart rate rise when I watch 15 minutes of CNN.  Yes, I have friends who work in ERs, I have friends who are nurses at NIH, and I have friends who have kids that needed to be in the ER this week surrounded by feverish people.  Yes, I have put on PPE equipment to protect me from C-diff and MRSA beacuse every third patient have these hospital aquired infections.  Yes, I’ve seen Contagion.  Please just go out and get your flu shot, OK?  They are at every Safeway, CVS and Walgreens.  There are flu clinics at school and work sites. Don’t follow the red herring.