Yikes

Mighty suspicious. I don’t think I’ve had a temperature this high since I started tracking. Just sayin’

…or maybe I’m getting sick?

Well maybe I am?

We finally had decided over the summer to try to not try. Of course that is terribly hard to not notice now. We were going to, at my urging, wait to officially try next summer. As in try/try. Really just out of convenience because if I got knocked up in oh, say June, then I’d have a baby somewhere around March? Then I’d have 12 weeks off work, followed exactly by Hubbin’s 3 months summer vacation. Presto 6 months free childcare! w00t! Ahhem. However after the summer we’ve both had a little difficulty adjusting back to “trying not to” after throwing caution to the wind all summer. We had one episode that occurred squarely on what I believe was ohhhh probably just the most dangerous day of the whole month. The little built in ovulation predictor on my iphone thinks the most dangerous day was the 29th, but I think with that drastic dip it was probably the 28th… whoops. (PS who really gets a temperature of 96.6… talk about cold blooded!)

At first I was like little freaked about it because Gah! Plans! The plans! But I don’t know… My opinion is starting to turn around a bit. Last night we went to dinner at my parents with Hubbin’s mom too, so our whole immediate family to have dinner and look at my parents pictures from their trip to France. Now my mother in law has been hard up for babies for years. To the point that before he met me she told her old lady friends she didn’t even care if he had an illegitimate baby as long as he came up with some grandbabies. Now we were looking through the France photos and my dad took like 6 pictures of someone else kid on the ferry in Paris! A little kid playing pattycake with her dad, my parents just thought she was so cute. LOL! Hubbin leans over to me and goes “I think maybe they’re ready for grandkids now too”

Then three days ago my mother in law called Hubbin to say that her doctor wants to set up a meeting with him because they’ve now diagnosed her with early onset Alzheimer’s.

So… no time like the present either way I guess? Thoughts?

 

Nothing Left to Give

So there were 10 patients when I got there and we quickly filled the whole way up with patients in the waiting room. I had a busy day because I had a chest pain patient (elderly black male, dialysis pt) who got admitted. Then an 60-some yr old woman cancer patient that had to get a picc line(which shouldn’t have been but was a huge ordeal) and was admitted. Then an 80yr old uterine cancer patient who was bleeding heavily (mostly becuase her doctor had WAY over done it with the blood thinners- her clotting lab was supposed to be below 2.5 and hers was 9) I swear all my patients got admitted. Then we had all sorts of stuff like an acute appendicitis that went to the OR. There was a cardiac arrest in the hospital. I had this other guy who had a lengthy medical history and was there with his mother and sister who would not let this 52 yr old adult male answer anything! For himself! They had to be Italian or something the way they were smothering him. He had prosthetic eyes and when I was trying to ask him questions His sister was going on and on about his eye condition in 1985 and I said as nice as possible “but he doesn’t have eyes anymore so I think it’s probably irrelevant to his current complaint of LEFT HIP PAIN!”. We were jammed full the WHOLE day with two of the slower doctors and the patients just kept coming. the second side was still open when I left! let me tell you that when “Princess” -real name!- checked in with abdominal pain and “menstrating”I had ZERO patience.

Shedding assistance

What you don’t think reptiles make facial expressions? Well let me help you with this one. It’s “Pissed Off”:

In my absence…

Today is my first day off since Thursday. I just worked three 12s in a row. I did have a lovely weekend at work complete with a little free time, and a little drama and a few scattered emergencies. I came downstairs to make my breakfast this morning and was greeted by this staggering image:

Now, we’ve sort of divided up the chores around here and the kitchen is technically my chore. HOWEVER. Hubbin is 35 so I’m pretty sure he is capable of throwing out his garbage.

Wiping up cooking spills on the floor

and stove before they harden.

And perhaps rinsing out the dishes wouldn’t be too much to ask…

even though I’m sure loading them into the empty dishwasher is.

Just as a comparison,

the kitchen got a through cleaning

before I went back to work for a stretch

including a stove scrub and mopping.

I sent him a text at work today that said “I’m cleaning the kitchen. In all seriousness I need you to be a little bit better about the kitchen when I’m gone for a few days”

Iko Iko

I was recently offered the opportunity at work to switch from rotating days and nights (7a and 7p shifts, both 12 hours) to rotating days and evenings (11a-11p) instead. I debated for a good while about it because A: I really like the people that work nights and B: Nights (in general) aren’t as busy as days or evenings so that leaves free time for fun conversations, homework, or crochet projects. I ended up taking the offer and switching to evenings because working days and nights I felt like my whole life revolved around when I was sleeping.

I will also miss nights because of some of the bizarre shit and fantastic stories that happen when the world is sleeping.

For instance I was working the other night and about 3 or 4am (4am seems to be a general witching hour I think) a 27year old boy signed in with “palpitations and shortness of breath” He was a thin boy, well groomed and gave off a distinct vibe of gay. Not that that’s important I’m just trying to give you a visual and so you can hear what he sounds like with this ensuing conversation. So one of the other nurses went out to get him and I went to help her get things started. He was sitting in the waiting room in a wheelchair and there were two girls with him.

We brought him back alone and started following our chest pain protocols which among other things involves starting an IV. I was starting his IV while the other nurse was asking him all the triage questions. He said he was feeling very anxious and thinks he might be having an anxiety attack. I was at his bedside opening all my IV equipment and had the tourniquet tied around his arm getting ready to start when he says “Wait wait! Can we talk about something else while you do this?! I’m afraid of needles!” The other nurse says “Sure, what do you want to talk about” and he says “Quick does anybody know the words to Iko Iko?” and the other nurse says “Maybe if you start singing we’ll remember the words” So he’s laying there in the bed, tourniquet tied arm straight out to his side and his eyes clamped down tight and he starts singing in this weak tight voice “your grandma and my grandma were sitting by the fire…” I turned to look at the other nurse and we both started laughing so hard. It was just the funniest scene I’ve ever encountered. Of all the songs to randomly bust out with for a 27 year old but this random 1950s/60s song… and he was so serious about singing it and so scared that we couldn’t help but laugh. (not to worry, he joined in too)

While we were getting him settled another older (creepy) guy signed in and the third nurse brought him back and while she was asking him about his medications he was changing into a gown and came over to “take a look” at the list of medications she had in the computer already for him and proceeded to invade her personal space and bump up against her while wearing only his underwear.

Meanwhile, one of our 27year old’s female companions signed in with “possible abscess” so I brought her back to a room and she was telling me about this abscess she had on her back and how she knew someone who had an abscess and it had to be drained and treated with antibiotics… so I say “well let me see”. She takes off her shirt and shows me this spot on her back that she has covered with one of those small circle band-aids. So I’m thinking “welllll, maybe it’s worse underneath” so I peel it off and reveal underneath a very unimpressive ZIT. No honestly. A zit. I had no idea what to write on my triage assessment sheet because is “zit” really a medical term… no, but that’s what it was “pustule” was way too dramatic sounding for what it actually was. The doctors sheet later was even better. She drew a little black spot on the diagram of the back and drew and arrow with the words “single pimple”. It is part of our standard procedure during triage to ask patient’s about substance use, people tend to be surprisingly honest and it’s hard to impress on you how little the nurses actually care what you’re using at home unless you come in unresponsive. I don’t care if you smoke marijuana every weekend, I don’t care if you experimented with cocaine back in the day… and if you tell me you quit heroin three months ago I’m certainly not going to believe you. Anyway so I’m asking her (with her zit) if she’s ever used any substances, and I always suggest “like marijuana, cocaine, or heroin” just so there’s no confusion. She said “noooo” very slowly (but come on, you were clearly up to something tonight) and then closed her eyes, did a whole body cringe and blurts out real fast “okay, I’ve tried cocaine once!” lol. I told her that was fine and then promptly went into the nurses station and reenacted her response for everyone’s amusement.

We had not had any patients for hours and all of a sudden we had three total nutcases. Someone said “Is there a full moon tonight?” I said “I think what happened was the cloud of whatever these people were smoking has parted and the full moon started shining down on them”

62

It’s 62 out right now! Feels amazing considering we just had flurries less than a week ago. I spent 1.5 hours walking around the lake and enjoying the air. I think I need to spend more time outdoors. Just in general. Shame I’m coming to this conclusion in late October :-/

Time for Bed!

So my day started off with me leaving the house at 6am and getting on the highway at 620 as per usual. However last night around 3am some assholes were driving on the highway out of the city shooting at each other the two cars ran into this and that and the one shattered all over the place (everyone survived-perhaps unfortunately for the human race) and attempted murder charges have already been filed. Regardless. It being a crime scene and all the outbound highway was still completely shut down at 6am and the inbound lanes were creeping along at 1mph because everyone needs to spend appropriate time gawking you know. So that was 50minutes of my life spent in traffic that I’ll never get back…

The day really didn’t improve much, I was charge nurse today and one of the old nurses was being a huuuge pain in my ass because she’s so lazy and slow. Usually when she’s in charge she doesn’t take any patients because “she’s in charge” well I don’t know what her excuse was today, because it was like pulling teeth trying to get her to pick up patients today.

I had a patient that went to the OR because she was having a miscarriage, which looked fairly complete to me in the cup but clearly was not because she continued bleeding profusely — all over my pant leg. Awesome. I managed to get some out at work with a bleach wipe, but we’ll see how the washer does…

Then I came home to find Hubbin in A Mood because the mac apparently ate all photos from 2009. Bye trip to France. Ta ta Hubbin’s three weeks in Germany. The mac pulled a stunt similar to this once before and the photos were somehow recovered by one of the geniuses at the mac store, so I’m not abandoning all hope yet — however I will be buying a new external hard drive for my PC to back up all future photos– (recall my PC recently melted it’s motherboard and got it’s hard drive reformatted three times in attempts to restore balance) — I did have an external harddrive but it was hijacked to support the mac ie: the perfect family home computer. That just ate 2009

My Sunday Brain Explosion

I’ve been officially accepted into the gradschool program beginning in January. Provided I pass all my fall classes of course I spent the day at Panera rotting my brain on Pharmacology. I’m not joking. I’ve been here since 9am and then had to take a break when I typed the following sentence in my notes:

Antiadrenergics inhibit release of adrenergic agonists or/by antagonizing adrenergic receptors

…and then my brain exploded all over the walls of Panera. Seriously. School blows. But you know, great news being accepted to the masters program, now I can have a blast doing this for two more years…

I’m currently taking a break and reading about various baby products online. Because I am OBSESSED. My ovaries are hormonally in full baby drive and are screaming “make use of us now!” I’m trying to be rational and wait until schools over… but I don’t want to.

We decided this past summer to just “not pay attention” or in other words, not really try persay but not try not to either. Of course I was paying attention because I think once you become aware of the FAM of birth control you can’t ever not be aware. I used to inwardly cringe when people talked about “charting” for birthcontrol, because everyone knows that doesn’t work… au contraire. I started in March 2008? No babies here. If that’s something your into do check out the iphone app for women’s calendar it really and truely is awesome, it does pretty much everything I would want it to and I’ve since completely abandoned paper.

Anyway, to satisfy (or tease) my whole baby drive I spend my spare time secretly reading about different brands of car seats, slings, strollers, and cloth diapers… I’m pretty sure I could fill out pretty much a whole baby registry right now if pressed. I’m thinking come next summer we may actively start trying… it just seems so far off! I won’t be done with school then, but by the time we would have a baby I’d be more than half done and that seems fair enough…

Infested

Now that we have a gaggle of cute little gecko at our house I’ve noticed an unforeseen side effect. You see these little guys eat an occasional cricket, but their main subsistence is some nectarish baby food. Like peach. Peach is a favorite. Well over the past few days I’ve noticed that we’ve become infested. Yes, infested. With fruit flies. Now harmless, true, but oh so irritating. I was sitting on the couch crocheting last night while watching Dexter and you catch yourself moving your head back thinking “What is this in front of my face”. And right now while I’m typing one just flew in between me and the monitor. I called Hubbin into the bathroom this morning to point that there were three sitting on the mirror and a fourth flying around my head. Hubbin admitted he had thought it was his wine glass he had “forgotten” to take down to the kitchen. I said “well I guess it could be, but I suspect it’s probably these little plates of fruit baby food we have scattered all over the house. I’m not sure if there is anything we can even do about this… it’s not like we can starve the geckos.

I do remember a few years ago we had a tiiiiny little Anole that my mother had found on her porch and it was only big enough to eat fruit flies and we had to go to the petstore and BUY the little bastards. I remember saying to Hubbin “who would have thought you would ever TRY to attract fruit flies?!” We set out a few grape halves in the little things tank and no fruit flies ever showed so we finally had to go buy some for him to eat. Now our house has TONS.

The bathroom photo shows two fruit flies on the mirror.