Bigger or Better: Life outside of Texas

Typical social interaction comes with essentially rhetorical questions. We, in fact, expect an answer to "How are you doing?" or "How has your week been?", but I think the main purpose of these questions is to let us start a conversation to get to our real question or topic of discussion. However, the answer to these questions IS my topic of discussion. How I'm doing is tied heavily to how my week has been. It's not exactly been emotional, because that sounds too lachrymose, but it has certainly been emotion-ful. I woke Sunday morning in my parents' basement (no, they didn't kidnap me) with the carpet flooded. That emotion is called stress. Possible panic. It meant that on Monday, when I attended one of my best friend's wedding, I hadn't showered in two days because we had to turn our water off. Fortunately someone invented wet wipes and perfume a while ago. The wedding itself was sheer happiness. Imagine the true friendship where thei...

One of my best friends is getting married. Fairly soon, actually. I had to hurry and buy her a gift. Then I was looking for pictures to set to this song, and I realized I had a lot of pictures of Sharon. After I made the video, it occurred to me that it might look as if she had died. She is not dead. I am not "letting her go" to heaven, but rather letting her go to Marriage. Just needed to clear that up.

You might be thinking, what on earth is she talking about? Her post title is sooo mysterious... Well, good. That's my intent. If you're not thinking it, too late, because I'm about to elucidate. And that rhymed. Unintentionally. So flashback two years ago: I got ACLS certified for the first time. I blogged about it. Well, it became time to re-certify. And thus time to re-blog. Except it's bigger, and definitely better. I had heard re-certification is tougher than the initial one, because the instructors expect you to know the stuff already. So I had been reviewing, memorizing, and assessing my readiness for several weeks, and stayed up late the night before  [and I'll be honest. By "late" I mean 10:30 or 11pm. For me, after working two 12-hour shifts, that is as much as I can handle.] making sure I knew those algorithms for ventricular tachycardia, asystole, bradycardia, and a bunch of other most-likely-Latin-based words. So at 8:15 in the m...

My friends have been asking me lately how work is going. It is very hard to explain concisely and still give them a sense of what I am doing. Work is work. It's hard. It's tiring. It's frustrating at times. But sometimes it's awesome. Several weeks ago, I randomly got assigned to the opposite side of my unit. In the morning report, I found out that one of my patients was DNR, but only in her 40s. I also learned that her companion would sleep every night by her side. In fact, when I peeped into the room at the beginning of my shift, he was sleeping in the chair, reaching out and holding her hand. The next time I went in there and both of them were awake, he told me that they needed a notary and a priest, because they had decided to get married in two days. That began a frantic wedding planning on the part of the staff, contacting facilities to host the reception, chaplaincy for the religious ceremony, respiratory for breathing support, physical therapy for assisting t...