Bigger or Better: Life outside of Texas

Honestly, why the color pink was chosen for girls is beyond me. This is going to be a tricky post to write. I hope to neither embarrass nor offend anyone. When I go into my patients' rooms, I usually get two questions of the social nature: how old are you, and are you married. Usually I find this hilarious, because I'm thinking about what thoughts prompted such questions. This past week, two of my patients, both women, asked the marriage question. When I answered in the negative, they both said "Good for you." I was initially confused by that reaction, and then both elaborated, in essence saying that I was too talented to waste it taking care of someone else, or that I needed to develop my career. I'm wondering now if they realize how contradictory it is to tell their nurse that she shouldn't spend her time taking care of someone else. Um, that is my career. I chose it. And I do not feel like I am wasting my time taking care of my patients, or my frie...

I write these medicinal posts to remind myself that perception is the majority of my reality. If I can see something as funny, then it's clearly not overwhelming There's an approach to patient care that is all about treating the whole patient. Sometimes the 'whole patient' also means the family--because if the family is stressed, the odds are good that the patient will get stressed (and then the odds are really good that the nurse will get stressed). Rarely, the stress jumps straight from the family to the nurse, skipping the patient entirely. That happened today. My patient, a cancer survivor, was smiling and chatty. His mom was also chatty, but she'd leave some sentences hanging, or switch topics, or talk really fast. I really didn't know what she was talking about a lot of the time, but I listened in hopes that it would absorb some of her stress. It worked. I got stressed. Fleetingly, thankfully. Truthfully, I like when family is involved in the patient c...

Lately, for muscle engagement and social interaction, I've been playing ultimate frisbee. The first time I played, I noticed that nobody threw the frisbee to me the first game, but my team won, whereas in the second game that day, my teammates threw to me, but we lost. The guys chivalrously denied any sort of correlation there. Riiiight. So here I would like to show my red badge of courage from my efforts today. No, that is not a tan. That is dirt.  somehow the dirt got through my shoe and my sock on my right foot. I not only completed passes on both the throwing and receiving ends, but I also intercepted several passes, got in a tug-of-war, and somehow managed to trip one of the missionaries who was playing with us, causing him to lose his shoe AND miss the frisbee. Now he says "oh no, not again" whenever he sees me come up to guard him. Maybe because I'm a tripping hazard, but I'm hoping it's because I'm a serious threat to his game. As anoth...

I had this sudden urge to post my favorite poems, and then the lyrics from  "My Favorite Things"  courtesy of The Sound of Music popped in my head, and I've been wondering...am I unhappy right now? Why does the song only say to remember favorite things when you are feeling sad? Are we supposed to remember our least favorite things when we are happy? Back to the poems thought. I won't analyze them for you, because after my self-analysis above, any more analysis would make this post a veritable essay. The Quitter- Robert Service When you're lost in the Wild, and you're scared as a child, And Death looks you bang in the eye, And you're sore as a boil, it’s according to Hoyle To cock your revolver and . . . die. But the Code of a Man says: "Fight all you can," And self-dissolution is barred. In hunger and woe, oh, it’s easy to blow . . . It’s the hell-served-for-breakfast that’s hard. "You're sick of the game!" Well,...