Piffle

Long. So....?

2008-09-14T15:17:00.002-04:00

It's been just shy of four years that my fingers have been typing out this dreck. And I've enjoyed every bit and then some. Just shy of 4 years and over 350 posts.

From time to time, over the past years, I'd wondered how long I would write this. Somewhere less than 50 years, I figured.

I also wondered how I'd know when it was time to stop. Would I fade away or would I "just know".

Guess it's both. I'll fade away just knowing that I'm done.

My tale isn't told, thankfully. I may even, from time to time, come back and throw something up, purely for the joy of putting words to screen: The further tales of life as a medical resident and then a terrified attending physician. (Scariest night of my life? That first night on call as an attending.) More on the front lines of the garden wars. Even another wretched haiku or 10. The thug deer. The large grey goose who thinks she's a goat, who lives on the farm down the road. (The llama seems to have moved on, I haven't seen him shunning the pretty ponies for months.) Beaker the mailbox and his repeated pummelling by the snow plow of death.

But not now. Not for a while; a long, long while, most likely.

And that's not fair to anyone who still checks in here, from time to time, out of friendship.

I'll genuinely miss all of you, especially those of you (you know who you are, yes you do) who've become real friends over the years, many (though not all, sadly) whom I've had the sheer unmitigated delight to meet and squeeze tightly in real time and space. I love you all.

I'll likely be stopping in to see what's up in your lives from time to time, perhaps more often now, that I'm letting myself off the hook from the guilt of the dangling site.

So, one more big, sloppy hug and a slightly snuffly kiss from me to you.

At least for now.

So long.

Call of the Sirens (Part VIII)

2008-08-19T11:56:00.003-04:00

Our scene: A darkened patient room in a large urban teaching hospital. Not particularly nice but not grim, either. Think tan vinyl flooring and grey laminate counters, but cleanish. The time? Between 5 and 6 am. There is a human-shaped lump on the bed under the beige hospital bed spread, breathing rhythmically in a narcotic-induced sleep. A lone figure in pea-green scrubs and short medical student white coat, pockets bulging with assorted paraphernalia, stethoscope draped 'round the neck, silently creeps in, making no sound, holding her breath. In one fluid movement, she pops one end of the stethoscope into her ears and snakes the other end under the covers and onto the patient's upper abdomen (the 'epigastrium', for those who enjoy such jargon). Holding it there for a brief 3 seconds, she then withdraws from whence she comes, out the doorway, to join the other identically attired members of her surgical team, 6 in all, 2 with short med student coats, 4 with long housestaff coats (2 interns, 1 junior resident, 1 chief resident). In terse whisper, the interloper imparts the following, "No complaints. Dressing intact. Breath sounds clear. Cardiac--regular rate and rhythm, no murmurs. Bowel sounds present." One of the members of the team quickly scribbles her words into the patient's chart. Another scribbles some orders and puts it with the rest of the team's charts on the rolling chart rack. On to the next room, where the performance is repeated with little-to-no variation.

Thus are pre-rounds on the surgical team.

Heaven on a scalpel.

Rules:

Always round before the patient is awake and family members are present. Talking to patients and especially family, wastes time. The nurses can read your note and take care of all that touchy-feely bullshit.
Always have the lightest team member examine the patient, the better to creep in and out without waking anyone. (See above)
Placing the stethoscope in one place allows you to (theoretically) examine all 3 organ systems (lungs, heart, gut) without all that needless mucking about that internists are so fond of, placing their stethoscopes here and there around the torso.
All this stealth is vital for the team to have rounded on all the inpatients ahead of time in order to be in the operating room by 7 am sharp: gloved, gowned, scrubbed, surgical instruments in hand, attending pimping away. ("So. Dr Piffle. What is the order in which one encounters the vessels that supply the GI tract coming off the aorta, in descending order and is each anterior or posterior to their corresponding venous counterparts?" "Errrrrrrrrrrrrrr....")

Ah. The surgical rotation, where one learns the 4 cardinal universal rules of surgery:

Trust no one.
Eat when you can, sleep when you can, pee when you can.
The esophagus is not your friend.
Don't fuck with the pancreas.

Contrast these with the 4 rules of internal medicine, as told to me by a rather cool attending:

Medicine is not a science, it is an art based on science.
There are at least 2 ways to do everything.
Every patient is an n=1.
If you're not having fun, something's wrong.

Taking #4 up there: see, the thing about surgery, is that it is fucking fun and really simple. Not the surgeries themselves, but the approach to medicine. You are congratulated for the shortness of your notes and your ability to turf (transfer the care of) any patient who is not in need of surgery right now, to a non-surgical service. You don't have to waste time on all this differential diagnosis stuff. Who the hell cares why Mrs Jones is demented, all you care about is if Mrs Jones is a surgical candidate. If not, turf her.

Turf her good.

(An aside-- that's one thing that reallyreally bugs me about all these medical shows. See, there are strongly delineated lines between medicine and surgery, especially in a teaching hospital. Surgeons operate and do the post-operative (including the surgical intensive care unit) care. They do not have anything to do with medical issues. They don't manage the insulin. They do manage the pain meds. The patient with some sort of unknown fever, unless there's an obvious surgical source, would never be admitted to a surgical service. The patient would be admitted to medicine, perhaps with a surgical consult as to whether or not surgery might be indicated, but NEVER to a surgical team. Also? There are distinct surgical sub-specialities. Don't mix general surgery with orthopedics, ob/gyn, ENT, urology. They do not generally cross specialities. A general surgeon won't be operating on a deviated nasal septum. Nor will that surgeon be fixing a heart or doing neurosurgery. And vice versa. Pediatric surgeons generally don't operate on adults and vice versa. Got it? Rigidly defined roles. There are exceptions but they don't practice in large teaching hospitals.)

I also adored the surgeries, themselves. All that glamorous, sterile attire. The appropriate etiquette. How to scrub--start by cleaning under the fingernails with the enclosed nail pick, then lather up with the sponge side, then scrub 10 times each part of each finger, then the backs of the hands then the palms, rinse with the hands up, letting the water drip down the arms and not off the fingers. How to move through a sterile field. How to change positions with a colleague at the table-- the one closest to the head turns out of place, rotating back-to-back, and turning around again to face the table. How to stand--arms crossed, hands under armpits or hands held in front of the chest. Never below the waist. Below the waist is not part of the sterile field. Neither is the back nor above the shoulders. How to gown and glove oneself (although the surgical circulating nurses will often do the honors of assisting with the donning of gown and gloves) while maintaining sterility. One does NOT break the sterile field or one will find oneself in small pieces in several parking lot dumpsters.

How not to pee for hours and hours on end. Drinking fluids is to be carefully timed. It's OK to have some coffee up until, say 6 am, but not later, unless it's a short case. Some cases go 12-14 hours.

How to stand so as to try to diminish the pain in your legs, your back, your arms. How to ignore the hunger. The fatigue. How not to look weak. How to bond with your team.

That last one was key, I've no illusions. I adored surgery because of my team. The Chief Resident was an amazing woman who actually enjoyed teaching and let her students do lots. The Jr resident was a middle aged guy who had been a cardiothoracic surgeon in his Eastern European country before he immigrated and had to do all his training all over, again. So he was very happy to have the students do procedures. As he was so qualified, our team would sometimes have 2 suites going at once, with the Chief, an intern and a student in one room and the Jr resident with the other intern and student in the second room, the attending wandering about between the two and the lounge. What's not to love?

And so, why the hell didn't you become a surgeon, m'dear?

Ah. First, because I knew my personality, and while I loved it, I knew I didn't have the soul of a surgeon. I don't like crises. You can't get away from the crashing, life-and-death, what-the-hell-are-you-going-to-do-right-this-minute-Doctor-this-person-is-dying stuff, but it's so much more common in surgery. The tools I have as an internist are the drugs, the endotracheal tube and ventilator, the cardioversion paddles, the labs and scans and the consultants. Not quite in the same league as what the surgeon faces with someone who's bleeding out.

Also, most surgeons are assholes. It's true. I've known lots of wonderful surgeons, but most are not. I'm not fond of assholes.

And finally, Charles would have divorced me, I'm sure. The residency is brutal, lasting 7-10 years for general surgery, depending on the program. Call is usually every other night. The off call days run 14-16 hours. It's the speciality that brought us the phrase "The problem with only being on call every other night is that you miss 1/2 the good cases." That in itself was enough to bring me to my senses and to make me an internist, with my drugs and scans and long, involved differential diagnoses. And to care why the hell Mrs. Jones was demented, because there are a few rare things that can cause reversible dementia and the surgeons sure as hell weren't going to look for them.

After my glorious weeks as part of the general surgical team, I headed off to my surgical elective, anesthesiology. Good god, what a shitty speciality. All fiddly deadly drugs and monitoring. The gas passers live a life, as the saying goes, of endless boredom punctuated by bits of sheer terror. As students, we were paired up with an anesthesia resident (no interns; anesthesia residents generally do a medical internship) with an attending overseeing. One attending in particular, the Chief of Anesthesia, enjoyed the reputation of being a remarkable jerk and was, for some inexplicable reason, heavily into professional wrestling. As students, we had to call the surgical patients we were to anesthetize the next day, the evening before, and go through all the questions they'd already been asked by the residents. The same EXACT questions. Which I thought was beyond bogus, especially, as we all know, I really don't like talking on the phone, especially cold calling strangers for no reason but to bother them on the night before their surgeries.

So I made it a rule not to call them.

Which, as luck would have it, came back to bite me in the ass the last day of the rotation, the biter being the dreaded professional-wrestling-besotted jerk attending. He asked me something that I would have known, had I called the patient (nothing vital to their care, don't worry, just something beside the issue). I said that I didn't know. He asked "Why not", bushy eyebrows descended to an alarming level. I said, "Because I didn't call." Seeming to swell to the size of a large grizzly bear, he thundered, "Why the hell not?" "Because I'm worthless and weak," I said matter-of-factly, looking him in the eye. I was exhausted and, I suspect, not averse to goading him into killing me and relieving me of my misery.

And then he laughed. And laughed and laughed and left for his standing date to watch Portland Wrestling. And he passed me with an acceptable grade.

Always tell the truth, dearest darlings, no matter what. You're likely to be caught in a lie at some point, and who knows, you might provide comic relief to someone. Plus, the truth is always simpler. Like surgery.

So that's how things ended with Diana and surgery, except I still get to wield the scalpel and suture from time to time in the office, with small things. And I still feel a bit whistful as I don the sterile gloves and ask my nurse to pass me the #11 blade.

But I make it a point to always say "please" and "thank you", just so no one thinks I'm a jerk.

What I've Learned On My Summer Vacation

2008-08-07T09:16:00.008-04:00

I really don't know what I was thinking.

See, a few months ago, when there were still the remnants of all that winter snow in the mall parking lot, the kids were in raptures over one of those crappy little 'fairs' that were set up by the chain toy store. You know the sort: a small Ferris wheel, some sort of half-assed mini roller coaster, probably a tilt-a-whirl, a few win-a-.99-cent-prize by spending $5 and seeing if you can toss a ring around a bottle and some cotton candy and popcorn concessions.

Their pleas of "pleasepleaseplease" were answered with a 1-2 punch of "No!" and "We'll see about going to the big State Fair in the summer."

A trip to the fair in summer, being months away and warm and bright, seemed like just the ticket. Visions of tents pitched on the grass, breezes amidst the trees, parades of well-groomed cows and the like, accompanied by all sorts of fair food. What's not to like? Sort of a grown-up version of our small county fair that we went to a few years ago.

Oh, Stupid-o mio.

Concrete. Miles and miles of concrete overlayed with a cacophony of screaming. Unbelievably overpriced, with tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of people scuffing along in the opposite direction of where ever it was we were trying to get to.

And to top it all off, I inflicted the whole thing on poor pal, Teri, who I've not seen in 2 years. "We're going to the fair! We'll be near you! Do you want to meet up with us and do the fair? We can get to spend some time together while the kids enjoy themselves."

Alas for her and her girls, meet us they did. The cranky, over-heated family who didn't bring enough cash for both riding and eating, or really even just riding. (Who the hell doesn't take credit cards these days, I ask you? That's not just unamerican, it's anti-commercial. Don't they watch TV? Life stops for those who taketh not the bits of plastic.) After a few hours of dragging around, we called it a day and packed it in, leaving poor Teri a little cotton candy colored puddle in front of the cursed Ferris wheel. (We'd gone back on purpose, right before leaving, so Colin could ride it, as promised, but he decided that he'd really rather not ride it after all and just.wanted.to.go.home.) As a topper, Sara succumbed about 1/10th of the way back to the car (conservatively a generous 1/2 mile (1 km) away, swimming like salmon up a stream of lemmings) and so Charles and I lugged her back, between us, Colin dragging behind.

Had we only stopped and indulged the lil' darlings all those months ago with the crappy parking lot fairlet, we'd have saved us all a bunch of woe, not to mention a chunk of change. Live and learn, cupcakes. Live and learn. Trade not the small pain of today for the large woe of tomorrow.

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A couple of weeks ago, though, I got to meet another of us, Teresa, out from Seattle to visit the relatives. We met up at the very large farmer's market around the Madison capital square and I got to sit and laugh with Teresa and her sister and daughter while her brother-in-law entertained her niece and nephew. It was, as it invariably is, an all-out gab fest as two people who've never met in person and yet know scads about each other's lives finally get to sit down and sip coffee and nibble baked goods. It's never long enough, is it? And what is Teresa like? Just like she looks: You have to hug her as soon as you see her. She absolutely sparkles. It should come as no surprise to know she teaches kindergarten. I don't know if only lovely people teach kindergarten or if teaching kindergarten makes people lovely. (I strongly suspect the former. 5-year-olds are sweet but I think were it me in a classroom of them I'd be heavily medicated or lobotomized and Teresa is neither.) I forgot my camera but she brought hers and posted one of us if you care to scoot over and wave "Hi" to her.
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And while we're on the topic of catching up over the past few weeks, what happened to The Pool? Well, it was replaced with a more modest and demure inflatable one that was used with reckless abandon by kids and dog, alike. When it was about to qualify for protected status under the umbrella of the endangered species act as a habitat for several newly emerging life forms, I emptied it, scrubbed it out and left it to desiccate a bit in the sun before filling it anew. Then one of those freak violent summer storms blew up out of nowhere. It ended up down at the bottom of the pasture impaled on something large and sharp, leaving it with a ragged rent in the side, rendering it no longer either "inflatable" or a "pool". Luckily, the pools are still on sale at an even more reduced price. I did toy with putting 5-6 of them in the cart. I think I will live to rue the day that I did not. I was wondering why Jocelyn was disparaging inflat-a-pools in her comment. Now I know.

I'm just a-learning lessons left and right, aren't I?

-----------

Speaking of learning, I did finally take that agricultural medicine test last week. Not that anyone was really wondering, but take it I did. It was well and truly taken. Now I just need to wait for the results and then figure what the hell I'm going to do with all that newly gotten knowledge about tractor safety and the lot. Assuming I pass, of course. If not, then I guess I'll not need to decide. Win-win.

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Interlude:

Here's the two fawns who seem to be growing and learning without their mum. They keep eyeing my vegetable garden but have decided that the tomatoes that have taken over most of the space aren't what they'd really rather eat. Aren't they pretty? I tried to post a larger, cropped picture but flickr wouldn't have any of it for some reason. Trust me. They're adorable and still have their spots.

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Firmly entrenched in the heading of "When Will I Ever Learn" is finding that I have somehow agreed to serve my Network and can be found on the roster of the Physician Practice Committee. Gads. For almost 8 years I had successfully avoided such things but found myself thinking, "Hmm. This could be interesting and a way to make some positive changes in the good ol' firm. And breakfast will be served."

All this must have taken place right before lunch when my defenses and blood sugar were at a double ebb for I found myself responding that I'd be delighted to take a seat at that table. I now find that I've somehow become one of 2 physician leaders of the Patient Access sub-committee of the original committee. That's 2 committees. What were they thinking? What was I thinking? I'm the one who sits in the back and nods in agreement from time to time while eyeing the danishes and wondering if I can somehow snag another one while looking like I'm just stretching, sort of a variation on that old first-date-in-the-movie-theater move where his yawn ends with an arm around your shoulders. Now I'm to be at the head of the table at the horrible hour of 7 am, expected to contribute many things of worth AND I've not heard a word about food at these sub-committee meetings. I fear a large tumor has taken over the logic and reasoning bits of my frontal lobe. Here's hoping it rapidly eats away the rest of my higher functions and personality so I won't suffer too long. As an added bonus, we're to round up several other physicians to serve along with us. Ever try lining up docs to do such things? Forget herding cats. It's like herding birds. Birds who never return your calls. Can't say I blame them.

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And while we're on the subject, is there anyone else who would be horrified to find that the gown you were handed by the nurse for your daughter to change into at her kindergarten check-up/meet-her-new-doctor-now-that-your-insurance-has-changed appointment had 8 McDonald's characters spread across the front in various medical garb, all grinning horrifically?

I felt like putting posters of "Supersize Me" up all over the exam room. Good grief.

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So, that's my hiatus in brief. Well, not really brief, actually.

I'll leave you (and you, Teresa as I promised you one, and you, Jocelyn, as you appreciate the inappropriate conversationalist that is the manic gardener, and you, Teri, as you are a true friend as you're still speaking to me despite the horror that was the state fair) with the following of my lovely tree lily. It topped out at over 6 ft (2 m) high and smelled of sweet, sweet summer. Don't look too closely as each cup was full of gorged and stupefied earwigs. The good with the bad, as is life.

Hope the rest of you are well and you avoid state fairs and committee meetings.

(Oh, and if you happen to not look where you are vigorously weeding along your raised garden bed, and put your hand --gloved, thank god, but inadequately so-- in a hornet's nest, this will lead to a most painful stinging, causing a stream of fuckingshitfuckingshitsonofabitchFUC!KING!SHIT! to issue from your mouth as a reflex, and your small children will learn how to correctly pronounce, enunciate and vocally inflect those most taboo of words. They'll be the pride of the school playground in a few weeks.)

Haikus For My Own Private Waterloo

2008-07-22T19:48:00.002-04:00

I suck as a mom,
not for the obvious, but
for the stupid stuff.

I make them eat their
vegetables and drink their milk
And do their homework.

Their wails make me smile
as I set the course; mixing
Athens with Sparta.

But then I get a plan.
Something to make them smile,
Glad I am their mom.

Good in it's way, but
then I get cocky and make
promises. I'm doomed.

Like just this Sunday:
"Hey, Colin, let's have your friend
to play in the pool!"

What pool? Well you ask.
Really more a plan as it's
still stuck in its box.

See, after years of
inflatable pools that
die and go to ground,

this year we made a
change and got a Slip 'n Slide
for their summer fun.

But it was no pool.
Nope. It was a little fun,
but it was no pool.

So, "Fuck it," I said.
Life's too short to not have a
pool in your backyard.

The problem is it
kills the grass as it sits there,
for more than a week.

But, wait! We've a slab
of vacant concrete poured by
the prior owners.

It's flat! It's grass-free!
It's level (I think it is).
The place for a pool.

Off we go, to Toys
R Us, Where pools are on sale!
(Who needs measurements!?!)

So, after breakfast,
and laundry. And dinner prep.
And my exercise,

I head out to the
Midwest backyard, where its now
90* in the shade.

Colin's friend arrives
with flip-flops, swimsuit and towel,
ready for a dip.

Alas, the pool is
still theoretical and
laughing at me.

See, it's a full yard
(a meter) too big for the
handy cement pad.

The pad, I might add,
is only mostly level,
for all it's grass free.

Two options there are:
Charles says let it go and get
another, smaller pool.

Me? I say let's do
the more miserable way
and build up the slope.

Thar's rock a-plenty
in the fire pit. I can
build a pool rampart.

Yeah. Good plan, that. Hot
and humid. The sweat burns with
the dirt in my eyes.

I forgot the bush
I had to transplant so the
pool wouldn't crush it.

(Colin and his friend
went down to the basement and
played video games.)

Charles, always wise,
remained exiled on Elba;
he had to study.

Hours later, I
Once again filled the bastard
and prayed for success.

Let's define 'success',
shall we? It holds some water
and is sort of round.

Maybe it is less
than half its expected depth
and shaped like a "D"

And there's a sort of
waterfall at one place as
one side collapses.

On a side note, I
noted a water beetle
made the pool its home.

This was only a half
hour from starting to fill the
cursed fucking pool.

(How a water bug
got in that fast? I'm flummoxed.
Call her 'Harriet'.)

So, there we are kids.
I tried, I really did, but
I suck as a mom.

Tomorrow, you can
splash in your puddle and make
friends with Harriet.

Maybe now you'll find that
the poor Slip 'n Slide is not
such a wretched deal.

-------------
The following day,
my own private Waterloo
sinks to sad, new depths.

Hell with it. I'll clean
it and donate it to some
poor sap at Goodwill.

The rock, of course, will
all have to be schlepped back to
the fire pit site.

The transplanted bush?
There it stays. I'll plant a spare
in its former spot.
------------

I want it noted that
I was just transiently
thwarted in my quest.

The next day I found
Another pool, smaller, less
tricky to put up.

Napoleon has
nothing on me for stubborn
personality.

*34 degrees C for the civilized world.

Anyone want a minimally used pool with filter-pump (complete with O rings lubricated) and ladder assembled? You need a 13 foot (4+ meter) scrupulously level spot of yard or you will rue the day and regret the loss of your sanity. Actually, I've been using the ladder in my multi-month window-washing quest, so at least the ladder has been pressed into honest service.

Call of the Sirens (Part VII)

2008-07-14T20:31:00.001-04:00

And so, we come back to our continuing saga of a goof attempting to become a physician. We've seen her go through the first two years of unrelenting butt work and are now in the spring of her discontented third year, having finished everything but pediatrics, something she already knew she didn't want anything to do with.

Which, of course, led her to just relax and have some fun and be told she should really go into pediatrics by lots of misguided people. But nonono. She knew better, she did. She could never see the tinytiny eardrums of those tinytiny infants, brought in by their terrified parents worried that they had ear infections. She also knew that she just couldn't take a life of constantly reassuring those worriedworried parents. But most of all, she knew if she went into peds, she'd have ended up in prison for having messily and publicly murdered the first person she came across to abuse a child. Either that or she'd have offed herself after the first time she made a mistake that endangered a child.

No. Peds it was not to be, fun as it was. She did learn how to give a good shot, though. How vaccinations would happen in the out patient clinic was someone would have a small child who needed several vaccines and the call would go out to all available nurses, nurse practitioners and me, the lone med stud. As soon as we had enough bodies, each armed with a syringe, we'd sidle on up to the tot, peacefully resting in the arms of a trusted adult. We'd each grab a limb, syringe firmly grasped in the other hand and, on the count of three, we would simultaneously stab the little angel, instantaneously transforming them into a howling, sobbing devil, complete with bright red complexion, banshee howls and visage of doom and destruction.

They said this was apparently less traumatic than giving each shot separately. Maybe they were right. I think there were studies quoted. There are always studies quoted in medical education. There seemed to be about the same amount of screaming this way as there was when my own two got their shots, one at a time, and there wasn't all the distressing repeat performance for the subsequent injections that happened with giving them in series.

The other thing I remember was that lunch and a show was provided each noon. Lunch was usually some sort of sandwich assortment and the show was usually something along the lines of "Pediatric Eczema and You" or "Meningococcemia: Know it. Fear it." Good times. The peds residents and attendings were also a happy, cheerful bunch, almost to a person.

I'm sure they were all heavily drugged or lobotomized. Perhaps both.

So that's that for the third year of med school. The rotation that was by far the most fun was the one I'd known from the start that I had no desire to pursue. I'm sure there's some sort of life lesson in that but I'm damned if I'm going to learn from it.

Now, the fourth year of med school is sort of like the third, but the rotations are usually smaller bites and you have to decide what the hell you want to go off and be an indentured servant for at the end of the year. You get to take ENT ("otorhinolaryngology" for those who crave big, multi-sylabic words) and learn to use the head mirror (that mirror thingy that olde-tyme docs wore strapped to their foreheads), which is actually really hard to use. At least it was for me. There's this trick to peering through the hole in the middle while focusing the light from the lamp across the room that reflects off the mirror and into the patient's throat, all while using an angled mirror (like the dentist uses) to see around the bend in the throat to examine the vocal chords, while NOT making the patient vomit all over you by inadvertantly bumping the back of their throat with the mirror. Of course, now-a-days, you'd just use a head lamp to see, or, even better, a fiberoptic laryngoscope, so you could actually see 'round the bend of the throat and not make everything thing up. ("Oh, yeah! I see it! That bitty nodule on the miniscule vocal chord. Really. I see it. Promise.")

You'd also do a week or two in ophthalmology (the eyeball guys), and get really skeezed out by all things horrible and eyebally. (The worst? The enucleation surgeries where they removed the whole damned eye for some sort of hellacious tumor or other. Heart rending and really gross. Yeah team.) Why the hell anyone would want to go into that was beyond me, but they did. It was a highly sought after residency. Blech. Two of my friends went into it. I'd always thought them sane, but I had to reconsider after that.

There was a week spent in the auditorium doing Law And Medicine, which scared the shit out of us. "YOU WILL BE SUED." "IT WILL BE HORRIBLE." "YOU WILL WANT TO KILL YOURSELF." "THIS IS NORMAL." "YOU WILL THEN TURN TO COPIOUS DRINK AND/OR DRUGS." "THIS WILL RESULT IN THE LOSS OF YOUR PRACTICE AND YOUR LICENCE AND YOUR FEW SHARDS OF SELF RESPECT." "HERE ARE SOME MORE CAUTIONARY TALES OF REAL PHYSICIANS, EACH ONCE A WONDERFUL, PROMISING PROFESSIONAL, NOW TO BE FOUND UNDER THE BURNSIDE BRIDGE WITH THE DISBARRED LAWYERS AND OTHER BUMS." Gah. "But don't let that bother you."

There were several electives, like dermatology (oozy and dull and all the rashes looked like all the other rashes) and ICU (terrifying but cool); and you also had to take neurology (oh, good GOD the damned neurologists and their 5+ hour attending rounds with nary a chair in sight; oh, how we all hated neurology with all their fiddly tests that never worked like the books said and their confounding and complicated tracts and cross-tracts. Like learning the wiring of an enormous 1910 house.)

And then, there was surgery. And the sirens called. Oh, yes they did.

But I am tired and there are children to be put to bed. So I will leave you here with images of eyeballs and rashes and a line of drooling, incontinent patients (and students) with horrible neurological diseases in your heads.

Because I'm not a pediatrician and, therefore, not nice like that.

20

2008-07-09T18:02:00.000-04:00

20 years ago found the above starry-eyed, broke kids standing up in front of their nearest and dearest, dressed in meringue and tails, promising to care for, love and provide really good beer to for the rest of their lives. As neither of them could think of anything they'd rather not do more than stand up in front of a couple hundred people and be the center of attention, the whole damned ceremony, from bridesmaids slow-stepping down the aisle to Pachelbel's Canon in D, (I'd always loved the music and this was at least a year before I'd heard ANYONE else use it in their ceremony.) to the last of the bride's train disappearing out the door at the end, took 5 minutes. 10 minutes tops. For real.

They then went off with those nearest and dearest and ate cake (which they did not smear on each other and the white-white dress and rented tails) and cold cuts (poor, we were) and drank good beer and cheap champagne.

All while making their very best friends dress in the height of wedding fashion of the late '80s: the tea length, off-the-shoulder dusty rose dress and the morning coat, with cravat. Amazingly, some of those friends still speak to us, although not the majority. If anyone wishes to step forward and identify themselves in the pictures, feel free, otherwise, I'll preserve anonymity. (Hi, Stacy!)

There was no dancing (including no Chicken Dance), as Charles detested dancing, and the music was initially classical music, followed by a compilation of U2 at the end, on the cassette player of their boom box. (With some of their wedding loot, they bought the first CD player of their lives and a TV. Marvelous Charles was already starting down that long, slippery slope of home electronics obsession.)

And everyone had their picture taken. A lot.

After that, the two kids, high on champagne, cake and love, went home to stop shaking, open the pile of loot in their skuzzy med school apartment and grin, falling into exhausted sleep. The friends all went to the campus grounds of the happy couple's alma mater, and celebrated more. (The ceremony had been held in the campus chapel and the reception in the law school library.) The friends all got very happy on the leftover champagne and food and some bushes were fertilized with minimally digested cold cuts. We have pictures of that, too, but are holding them in reserve for either a slow blogging day or the reciept of the appropriate blackmail funds.

The next day, the young pair left for a lovely week in Canada (Victoria and Vancouver), where it was very cold and rainy and they bought thick sweaters and their first few CDs for the CD player.

And how'd that all work out?

Swimmingly, thank you. Every morning, Marvelous Charles makes me a latte and asks me how I slept. If he gets up at night (because the dog, she has neeeeeeds, she does), he always shuts the door so the light and noise don't keep me awake. He tells me I'm pretty when I look disgusting. He brings me tea when I'm sick.

In short, much better than that other Charles and Diana. Besides, my Charles is way cuter.

So, happy anniversary to the disgustingly happy couple who still holds hands in public, just to annoy everyone else. We may be revolting, but at least we're revolting together.

Feel free to throw rock-filled rice balls now.

Second Childhood

2008-07-02T08:42:00.005-04:00

It came as something of a surprise last night when I found myself, after work, stopping at the local Shopko and, after a serpeginous route that took me past the sunscreen, bug repellent and little girls' sundresses (sale! $3.99 a piece--to replace the ones that have shrunk in the wash to Hollywood starlet length) standing in front of the baseball mitts, my real reason for stopping.

Me. Baseball mitts. Me. The one who spent her school years dreading the hours spent in PE, where balls were frequently thrown. Balls combined with poor hand-eye coordination, thick glasses and jeering classmates rarely lead to happy, smiling outcomes, except in trite family-oriented movies. Rest assured, there were no game winning saves in my PE history, only years of scheming how to have the fewest times at-bat or at-serve or at-pummelling as possible:

For softball, you make sure you are last in line to bat and, as able, discretely trade places with the athletic kids in line behind you who want to move up in line. It goes without saying that you go waaaaaaaaaay out in left field when it's time to switch sides.
For volleyball, you place yourself at the front of the net in the spot you rotate to AFTER you serve (I think it's front left).
For basketball, you pass the ball as soon as you touch it and never make eye contact with the person with the ball, so they don't throw it at you.
For dodge ball (the worst!), you get yourself hit as soon as possible, sometimes even faking it so you can go to the sidelines and, again, swap places with those who want to get back in, making sure you basically stay toward the middle-end (but not conspicuously at the very end) of the line.

I actually liked soccer, but we rarely played it. This was the '70s, people. Soccer (OK, yes. 'Football' for the civilized world.) was not played by middle-class, red-blooded American children.

So, back to standing in the middle of the baseball mitt aisle. I then proceeded to spend 20 minutes trying on all the sizes and models, finally deciding on that particular glove, above, being suspiciously examined by Mad-Kitty.

My very own first baseball mitt, at the age of 42. After I got home, we all went outside and played catch, liberally covered in bug spray, until Sara got unbearably cranky and Charles got tired. After years of trying unsuccessfully to ignite a passion for soccer in the small ones, we find that baseball seems to be our family's game. It goes without saying that I now love playing it.

Go figure. I still can't throw to save my life and I am at a 2nd grade level when it comes to catching and batting, but I'm having fun! with a ball! and coordinating the hands and eyes!

Never too late to indulge yourself or continue your childhood. I will draw the line at dodge ball, though. Some scars run too deep.

In Which She Inflicts Vacation Photos On All Of You

2008-06-25T08:20:00.004-04:00

So I'm back, sort of. Back in the sense that the bags are unpacked and put away, the wash is done, the house is in its usual state of disarray and the kitty has forgiven us for abandoning her. Actually, she seemed fine with the whole thing and looked rather horrified when we walked in the door all loud and stinky. She wore that look of "Oh. God. I thought you were coming back tomorrow. I thought I had another day to finish that season of My Name Is Earl."

All told, we had 4 days in lovely Door County (that pointy bit of land at the NE end of Wisconsin that sticks in such a fragile way between Green Bay and Lake Michigan) and did little but eat, nap, hang out with each other and go fishin'. (Caught nothin' but a very small bullhead that looked really pissed off, but after all was said and done, was left with a belly full of worm and tales to tell of his abduction to the drowning atmosphere above the lake and the monsters that live there. I'm sure he'll get lots of use of that tale down at the fish pub where they'll buy him pints and await the tale of how he single-fin-edly beat up the 4 enormous aliens and then escaped back to the deeps with their sweet, wriggling food. Good for him.)

We also taught Colin and Sara how to play Monopoly and how he who 1) buys up all the railroads and utilities and 2) doesn't get bored and quit after the first couple of hours tends to win. It's good to pass on such knowledge from one's own childhood to one's offspring.

We did, indeed, go to a fish boil and ladled butter on fish, potatoes and onions. We ate many cherry-inspired products, like pie. And wine. And brought back lots of pancake and scone mixes. And jam and syrup and dried cherries. And wine. I also let Sara learn to take pictures with my camera, and so for the first time in 20 years,I have vacation photos with me in them because someone else was snapping the scenes as well.

And so we all had a short, lovely, restful time, except for poor Molly-dog, who just thought the whole thing was wrong and WHAT the hell were we doing in this little house that smelled funny and had red tartan carpet in the kitchen and hall and WHAT would the kitty do with no one to chase her and give her a good butt licking. She clearly felt that it was all so wrong and couldn't understand why we didn't take her hint of staring hard at the car whenever we passed it, and just get in and go back home where we belonged.

It's always good to mess with your dog.

And so we've been and gone and returned and had our vacation.

The second half of the ag-med conference was as good as the first. I can now talk of ROPS and help you figure out what sort of respirator you need if you are cleaning out a silo, working in a CAFO or spraying your fields. I can also be found hollering from inside my car when driving past the fields and barns in my locale, "Hey! You! What the hell are you doing driving that tricycle tractor with the front end loaded!" and "Hey! You! I see you plowing that field in your cabless tractor without adequate hearing protection, sun screen, wide brimmed hat, respirator mask or ROPS!" In short, I've become even more of an embarrassment to polite society.

Now I must get the contents of the 2" (5cm) syllabus and good-sized textbook into my squash, so I can pass the damn test and make my employer proud to have spent all that money (actually, in the scheme of things, it wasn't that much money as such things go) for me to have done this, which means that I'll still be blogging sporadically for weeks to come. That study time has to come from somewhere.

Charles is winding up his days as principal at his soon-to-be-old district. He drove to work today in the SUV to load up almost all his office-ly possessions and move them to the new digs. He starts next Tuesday, which means we have only one more day of driving in to work together. The end of an era.

And, so, I'll leave you with this year's before and after shots of the front flower beds. You'll notice that the 3 low-lying juniper bushes at the front of the bed have gone the way of Wanda and Muriel, last year's alien-abducted cinquefoil and have been replaced by about 20 pretty-pretty flowering lovelies. (Well, they will be flowering when it's their time to do so.) You'll also notice that I need to get busy and divide all the pretties that have cancer-like grown and taken over the garden, transforming it into something that looks like the Amazon jungle.

Gone Fishin'

2008-06-12T21:52:00.002-04:00

Bags packed?

Check.

Paper towels and plastic bags and fishing gear and more paper towels?

Check.

Molly's food, bowls, bed?

Check.

10 lbs of kitty food left out and all the toilet lids up (because she just won't drink out of anything else and getting everyone to remember to shut the lids in this household so isn't going to happen)?

Checkity, check, check.

Windows shut so we only come back to a wet basement and not a wet 2nd floor, what with all the damn storms stacked one on top of the other from Kansas on, all pointed straight at us for the next few days?

Oh, yeah, baby! Check!

Crackers, coffee, granola bars, other junk?

Are you kidding me? Of course check. That was the first thing I packed.

DVDs for the kids in the car (clearly I was born a generation too late, having to look out the window and play the 'alphabet game' with license plates and signs) and Harry Potter V on CD for Charles and I?

Check.

Destination directions and phone number of the lovely lady renting us a place on the lake in Door County?

Check-a-roo.

See y'all in a bit. Off to spend some time with just us. Then off to the second part of that agriculture in medicine conference.

Camera?

Check.

Kiss, kiss. It's been 7 years since we've done a vacation with just us. I'd say that's long over due. Over and out.

Check.

Bleak, Living Hell

2008-06-06T09:09:00.003-04:00

There's this wan, peacefulness I've seen in the faces of grandly multiparous women. You know the ones--those with more than 5 kids. They seem serene in the face of all sorts of chaos and I'm fairly sure I know why.

They've had enough of their souls removed, a piece at a time from that horror of horrors: the school concert. In particular the Grade School Concert. At least in the secondary years, the 'music' is at least somewhat recognizable and, if you are lucky, there's a tune you know and can therefore count down the stanzas until it's done. Unless it's been butchered by scatting and whatnot by some demonic jazz stylist, and then you'd best just resign yourself to your misery.

I've heard there are some districts, pushed to the brink by budget crunches, that are forced to cut music in the schools. "Hah!" I scoff. It's not that the parents are not willing to pay the taxes, it's that they've wised up and realized that if they vote down referendum after referendum on school funding that they'll NEVER HAVE TO GO TO ANOTHER SCHOOL CONCERT AGAIN. These are fine, intelligent, free-thinking people.

"It's not that bad," you who have yet to experience the horror say. I, too, remember performing in these concerts and looking forward to the singing of "Feelin' Groovy" and "Rainy Days and Mondays", complete with hand gestures and careful swaying in time while standing on the bleachers on the stage, or the playing of "The Theme From M*A*S*H", if you were of an orchestral bent. (This was particularly subliminal as the lyrics, as most of us know, go "Suicide is painless, it brings on many changes, and I can take or leave it as I please." I wonder if the actual suicide rate did bump over the following days among those exposed to such sawed out works. Someone commission a study.)

So as I sat, with Sara at my side (the kindergartners only have to do the winter concert), in the 100+ degree F (38+ degree C) fetid, rancid gymnasium, hunched among the sweaty family members of the rest of the student body (some who spent the entire time in a slack-jawed stupor, others, like the pair behind me, desperately trying to hang on to their shards of reality by dissecting the private lives of various and sundry of their village acquaintances throughout the whole thing in normal speaking voices), I realized that I felt progressively lighter and lighter--the result of bits of my soul being torn away, piece by piece. The largest bite, sadly, was when Colin's grade performed a piece called, I kid you not, "Galactic Swamp Dance" entirely on flutophone (a cheap, plastic recorder sounding rather like a kazoo, but more nasal and grating, if possible). Painful does not begin to cover it. Nails on a blackboard could take a lesson. We had descended to the depths of hell: hot, smelly, humid, hopeless, helpless, interminable. At this point, trapped as Sara and I were, in the middle of the bleachers, having gotten there too late to score one of the folding metal chairs or at least a bottom seat on the bleachers, by the doors and the fire alarm pull, I abandoned myself to my fate and sunk into a funk. "Oh, woe is me" droned on the interminable chorus of one song. Oh, woe, indeed. Trapped like rats.

But then! Lo! Sara pulled free, and summoning her strength (and perhaps with the help of a guardian angel or 4) uttered the words of my salvation, "Mommy! I HAVE to go to the bathroom N.O.W." A small shaft of light pierced my psyche and somewhere the trace of a breeze stirred. The lackluster clapping of my fellow suffers gave me hope and a shifting of time and space indicated a slight path down from the bleachers.

I grabbed Sara's hand and took the shining way, jostling those still trapped in their misery and garnering many baleful and downright angry looks. "Sorry, coming through. She needs the bathroom." While envious, none dared to bar our escape. No one wants to mess with a child in need of the toilet.

And so, we spent the last sets of the most recent Concert from Hell seeking out and then dawdling in one of the grade school bathrooms. And then we caught the Grand Finale, standing just outside one of the gym doorways, where all the little darlin's come in and do the splashy finish-y song, some incomprehensible number called "Save the Earth", complete with cheerleaders (Yes. Really.) and hand gestures and cartwheels.

Actually, just before breaking into this cacophony, some poor kid spewed his gastric contents all over the gym floor, next to the piano, causing an interminable delay as the janitor was frantically sought via loud speaker and faculty runners. He appeared with mop and rolling pail and attended to the sick. Sadly, the rest of the audience was too far gone to break free and flee, and just continued sitting there while this took place, waiting as cows for the slaughter.

But finally, it was over and Sara and I (Where the hell was Charles? Why at school registration. So he said. I'm not entirely sure, though, as he is widely known to have an extra helping of brains and more than his fair share of dislike of such things.) struggled through the halls, with the rest of the lemming parents, in search of our young, who had been kept hostage-like from us. (The only announcement at the start of all this was that we WERE to REMAIN seated until ALL the children were done performing. NO ONE would be allowed to collect their children before the concert was over. Sneaky bastards.)

It wasn't quite as bad as this, but close. At least last night's concert had a program that could be followed, so you could count down the years until your sentence was served.

And so, here I sit, several ounces lighter, thanks to the soul-ectomy, plotting ways to organize my fellow parents into a "We'll pass any tax that'll fund schools as long as music remains firmly separated from us." Sort of like church and state. Complete separation or else no tax dollars.

I see why people home school. It's starting to sound worth it.

In Which She Reports In And Goes Overboard With The Links

2008-05-28T21:28:00.001-04:00

For most of us medico types, there is a love-hate relationship with zee conference. On the one butt cheek, there is the familiarity of sitting and have someone drone on and on about some esoteric disease topic. It's how we were raised, so to speak. Sort of like returning to the womb.

But on the other butt cheek, after the first several hours or after the first day if it is a very good conference, you realize why you were so very eager to get away from learning by lecture and so gleefully dived into trial by fire.

So, it was with a combination of up front eagerness and yet lurking tedium that I hopped in the car early Wednesday morning and headed south to the First Annual Agricultural Occupational Health Training Conference.

It's always good to go with a buddy to sit in the back with, eat meals with and make snide remarks to. I was fortunate to have at my side, C, one of the two nurse practitioners in the occupational med clinic that I am to lead at some point in the hopefully far-distant future. In addition to being a fun person to hang with (and a damn good practitioner), C had lived in Springfield, IL, where the conference was held and theoretically could co-pilot me through the roads with the help of the set of Internet directions, which feel that having the correct information 95% of the time will get you an "A".

We respectfully disagree and point out that substituting a "left" for a "right" will, in fact, lead one way the hell off in the wrong direction and get one rather hopelessly lost.

But, we made it, thanks to leaving extra-early, along with the other 30-40 of us, to the small building that is the administrative offices and classroom space of the School of Nursing for Southern Illinois University. As an added bonus, they served lunch before hand! As a special added bonus, the lunch was not only edible but really quite good, with brownies (very small but tasty) at the end. Charles and I often shake our heads over the difference between the fare of the education conference and the medical conference. I definitely chose the right field.

I settled in for the duration of the afternoon, prepared to enjoy the first 15 minutes of the novelty of sitting and having someone blither at me rather than being the one to blither for a change. And, damn, if the whole afternoon had me with my attention riveted to the speakers. I mean, really, hardly a daydream of wandering the shops or taking a nap. Unheard of. I mean honest-to-God, chin in hand, elbow on the table, eyes blinking less than usual, attention riveted on the speaker for the whole 2 +1/2 days. And the stuff I learned: The various risks of old vs new tractors (here's a hint--a covered cab WITH a roll-bar is a handy thing if you are fool enough to operate such a machine. Also--mowing the ditch with your beast of a tractor? Bad idea. They tend to roll over when used at a 45 degree angle (duh) and the odds of surviving a tractor rolling over on you? 25%. And your health benefits as a farmer? Oh, let's all laugh at your $10,000 deductible unless you're lucky enough to have a spouse with an outside job with insurance. ) And silos? "Silo" is the Russian word for "Certain Death Should You Venture Inside What With The Silo Gas And The Sucking Down Into The Grain Where Death Awaits You In Less Than 2 Minutes Plus Your Rotting Buried Corpse Won't Make The Grain More Nutritious For The Cattle And Will Be A Burden On Your Family So Don't Be A Stupid Git And Stay The Hell Out Of The Damn Thing". We won't mention the multiple deaths as a result in unsafe exposure to the manure pits under the CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) where the hydrogen sulfide gas waits for you to succumb in 4 (yes 4) seconds and then pick off your buddies as they try one by one to rescue you. Bad that. No matter how you feel about such factory farming practices, I think we can all agree that it's best that the humans don't die, yes?

Oh, and the amputations and mutilations! 3 solid hours on this topic the second day, spanning lunch, with picture after picture, enlarged on the projection screen, of the most horrendous injuries and what to do. Oh, and the auger accidents. Seemed that 2 out of every 3 horrific injuries was due to the various damn augers catching a piece of clothing and pulling the human into the enormous machine. The lucky only lost body parts (which are sometimes re-attached, if not too mangled and are able to be retrieved and brought in with the rest of their owners within 4-6 hours). My favorite was the guy who lost 1/2 his hand (the distal 1/2 with all the fingers) that they fashioned a working limb with his two 2nd toes as transplanted digits that worked as a sort of a pincers so he could grip a bit with them.

I've the pictures in the syllabus. I've all the pictures in the syllabus. You know, just in case I need help with dieting some day.

And the Anabaptists? (The religious groups including the Amish, the Mennonites and the Brethren) Seems that while they don't have the tractor and auger injuries (as they don't have tractors and mechanized augers), they've got plenty of problems, what with being kicked and trammeled by the livestock they use in place of the wicked machinery, and, yes, the damn silos, and their natural distrust of modern anything. So that's what's up with the Anabaptists. Nice folk but leery.

And then! After the first 1/2 day, (which started out with us all going around the room and introducing ourselves, the horror!) we then all re-convened at a rather good bed-and-breakfast for no-bed-and-dinner and cocktails and appetizers and conversation and damn if we didn't come together and become friendly and start to chat together as acquaintances and not just isolated, anonymous strangers at a conference. C and I fell in with a nurse from Missouri and a Veterinarian from Illinois and ended up having dinner and walking around the town the next night together as well as walking the mile to the conference together the next morning, all gabbing like old friends.

They even had us all sign the official First Poster of the Red Barn AND had us all assemble for a group photo. As C said, "I think they'll be having us back for a 10 year reunion." It felt like that.

And it was good.

And it was so very interesting.

And we get to go to Part 2 in a few weeks.

And we can't bloody wait.

And why can't all the conferences be like this?

Sabatical

2008-05-20T19:59:00.002-04:00

I know, I know. I suck as a blogger. I've been AWOL from visitin' and commentin' and all that. The digging and planting and weeding is nearly done. Well, sort of. Over half done. For now.

But! I'm off again for more conferencing and learning bold new things. Things like the human hazards of pesticides and herbicides and what to do if a farm worker inadvertently spreads some on a sandwich. And farm animal-to-human illness. And special farming community issues like what's up with Anabaptists. (I had to google 'Anabaptists'. Didn't know there were special farming issues with them. Still don't. Guess that's why I'm going to the conference.) And it's to be in glamorous downtown Springfield, IL!

A step up from Lisle, IL, I'm sure.

So, anyway, I'll be back around as soon as I can, probably this weekend, and I'll read every single word that you've all written, and leave finger-up-my-nose comments; but for now, I'm off for 2 nights and 3 days of fun and farm frivolity that is the agricultural medical conference!

Come on, admit it: You do wish you were me.

Can't Talk, Digging

2008-05-16T21:23:00.003-04:00

Sometime during the past several days of aerobic gardening, something decided to siphon some of my blood, leaving a large, red, itchy welt right over my external jugular.

I sincerely hope he has a large case of indigestion.

Damn.

Doin's

2008-05-06T20:34:00.000-04:00

There's this back bathroom in our clinic, away down the end of the long physical therapy/chiropractor hall and around the corner past the tiny excuse of a break room. The advantage of that back bathroom is two-fold: First, it's away from a passing hallway, being at the bendy-end of the passageway, next to the emergency exit door (to be kept locked at all times on pain of hairy-eyeball of our practice director). It's a good place to go for some 'private time' with one's bowels, should the office coffee be a bit too much. It's also something of a game of Russian roulette with the toilet seat, as there's someone in the clinic who likes to anoint it and not dry it off. If you've a brain in your head, you check the seat every time before you place your cheeks upon it. If you've left your brain elsewhere as you nipped down the hall for a quick deposit, then approximately once a month you find your buttocks all wet and saddened as you've once again fallen prey to the scourge of toilet seats. (Fool me once, shame on you; fool me 43,892 times and counting, shame on me.) Actually, I don't think it's urine, I think it's water. God knows why someone would repetitively cover the seat with water and not wipe it off. I know who I suspect but it's not something you can just go up to someone about (especially this Someone) and demand that if they're going to wash the seat that they have the common decency to dry the damned thing off afterward (and while we're on it, why the hell are you washing the toilet seat?????).

Anyway, it's a small price to pay for privacy.

But the second reason to use the far-back bathroom is that a few times a year, there's a show. The bathroom abuts the outside wall of the clinic and about every 3 months during the non-frozen season, these tinytiny ants use the bathroom as their landfill.

It's fascinating.

I was thrilled to find that his week marked their spring return. Usually, their public works are partially hidden by the wastepaper basket in the corner, but this time it's been moved to the space between the sink and the toilet, so you can sit and watch the tinytiny ants tote them barges and lift them bales. Today, they were expelling grains of dirt, each the size of 1/2 their heads (the ants, themselves are about 2 mm long) and and! trying to get these two round white things (?? small donut sprinkles?? Who would eat a donut while using the crapper??) twice the size of their heads out of the bathroom and through the tinytiny crack between the vinyl baseboard and the floor and, presumably to their kitchen so they could dine upon them for dinner (it was past breakfast and lunch). 2-3 ants at a time would try over and over to get the sprinkle-balls through the crack, only to get stymied at the end and have the sprinkle balls shoot out of their grasp and pop back into the bathroom, flying about an inch (a whopping 25mm, such a vast ant-distance, just think) each time.

I have no idea what happened in the end, whether they finally found a wide enough crack or if 1 of the 3 workers said, "Fuck the rest of them, we've been doing all the work and we deserve a little tiny-sprinkle snack right here. Bob, Tina, grab a sprinkle and dig in." In any case, by the end of this afternoon, the ants and the tiny, white sprinkles were no where to be seen. Just small piles of tinytiny dirt grains at each break in the baseboard vinyl.

For some reason, they made me think of the manufacturing plant some of us went out to visit last week. 'Twere clean and well run as a factory goes but I was struck by the mind rotting tedium and the workers who didn't seem to mind their minds being rotted by the tedium. The plant pays well for standing and running a machine 8-12 hours a shift, 5-7 days a week (overtime pays well and most work at least 6 days a week). It was loud in many areas (ear plugs required), so no chatting possible. Many of the machines were fed every 10 minutes to every hour or so, and the rest of the time was spent staring and standing, perhaps tending another machine in the interim. The worst of the jobs (as seemed to me) were the 2 women chasing each other in a 6' (2m) circle as they moved small pieces of metal from station to station, washing and oiling and assembling the small parts for tractors and other heavy machines. Loud, dull, smelling of oil and metal. The lives of the ants seemed more full of interest. And these factory jobs, being both well paying and not requiring an education past high school, are in this town highly sought after and diminishing in number. I don't know what's worse: Having one of these jobs or wanting to have one of these jobs and losing it.

I am so lucky to love what I do and to find it endlessly fascinating.

Anyway, sadly, someone (the cleaning service?) will eventually notice Bob, Tina, Lou and the rest of the ant crew and spray neurotoxins and clean away the tiny grains of debris and all will be back to dull toileting, but until then, I'm only using that loo, wet butt be damned. There's worse jobs than being an ant.

Call of the Sirens (Part VI)

2008-04-30T20:11:00.000-04:00

When last we left things, our heroine was poised to leap into her 3 month internal medicine rotation, in the dead of winter, having just come from the soul-leeching misery of ob/gyn. Her defenses, while never robust, were at an all-time low. As you all know, she did, indeed, end up bubbling in "Internal Medicine" on her computer Scan-tron sheet when it came to ranking residency programs and so it can be reasonably anticipated that this will be one excruciatingly long post, even for the wordy one. If you've anything better to do, feel free to use the down arrow to the right. She'll never know and you'll free up at least 30 minutes of your life that you'll otherwise never get back again.

(Oh, and if curious, here's a view of OHSU today. The skybridge to the right of center connects part of University Hospital to the blue Veteran's Hospital.)

----------
So, internal medicine it was to be. I don't think my stomach stopped churning the whole of the three months. The first half was spent, again, over at the University Hospital, this time on the cardiology service, which meant that we not only did regular general medical admissions, but also covered the Cardiac Care Unit and had double attending rounds.

Let's take a minute and discuss 'rounds'. Rounds are to medicine as dough is to bakers. There are endless varieties of rounds, some of which are truly endless. You start your day, if an underling, doing pre-rounds, usually about 6-7 am (5-6 am if on a surgical service). That's where you fly around to all the patients on your inpatient service and make sure they're all alive and nothing horrible, like a cardiac arrest or a transfer to the Intensive Care Unit happened over night, if you were not on call (and therefore theoretically left the hospital for a few hours to sleep and perhaps see something of a loved one or two). If you were on call, presumably you'd know all this and therefore would pre-round on those patients who were unstable or newly admitted over night to make sure they'd live a few hours more.

Then you'd go off to Morning Report. Here, one of the medical teams, usually the team that was going on call that day, would present a case that would then be discussed in depth, dissected, critiqued, and any blame assigned. Stressful, in a word. The presenting intern/resident/student was to be an expert on the patient and the condition being presented. All medical house staff, including the chief residents, and students assigned to the medical services were expected to be there, and it was usually attended by several of the attending physicians, including the Chief of Medicine. Many, many white coats packed into a small room.

After Morning Report, came work rounds, where you stomped around the wards and did the actual work for an hour or two. Work such as examining your patients, garnering lab and radiology reports, calling in consultants, writing chart notes, speaking to families, doing procedures, dictating admission, procedure or discharge notes, etc. New admissions from the night before, if transferred to your service because they were recently discharged by your service and re-admitted with a similar problem, like congestive heart failure exacerbation ('bounce backs'), were re-evaluated by the receiving team, patients discharged (hopefully to remain out of the hospital for the magic 2 weeks, so they were no longer under the 'bounce back umbrella'), and new admissions that came in during the morning to the day admission team were worked up. All this in just a couple of hours.

Later in the morning, or sometimes in the afternoon, were Attending Rounds. Each medical service (usually consisting of 1 resident, 2 interns and 2 students) had an attending physician, who was ultimately responsible for all the patients on the teaching service. During attending rounds, each patient was discussed and the plans were laid. All new patients were presented in depth, usually by the med student or the intern assigned to the case, and lots of pimping was done. Pimping is the time-honored tradition in which a senior medico asks questions designed to teach, instruct or downright humiliate the junior medicos, usually done in a group for maximum degradation. ("So! Dr Piffle! Give me the 5 mechanisms by which serum calcium may be elevated in multiple myeloma." "Ummmmm...Errrrrrrrrr...") Attending rounds were often done at the bedside and were particularly painful after the 24th hour of sleeplessness. (That's what you're seeing on a medical TV show when the whole damn team troops to the patient's bedside and one junior team member starts talking about the poor sick soul in front of them: "Mrs Muskox is a 67 year-old woman with a history of ovarian cancer who presented to the ER last night with a 6 week history of heavy vaginal bleeding and shortness of breath.") Often they go on for a couple of hours, minimum, except neurology attending rounds which usually went for 4-5 hours or surgical attending rounds, which were often less than 5 minutes, if they took place at all. If your feet are lucky, the attending is happy to conduct most of the rounds in the team office, in chairs. If not, you will rue wearing anything but the cushiest of shoes, and even they will be of little comfort after the second hour.

If you had time and there were no really-really sick people to attend to, you'd get to go to Noon Conference, with your actual non-cookie lunch, where someone would stand up (and not eat their own lunch) and yammer on for an hour about the renal tubular acidoses (Yes, I chose to talk for an hour on that very subject, once. Never again.) or the various treatments for esophageal varices or what-have-you. Usually, you'd sit there blissfully slack-jawed and zone out, letting the knowin' wash over and beyond you. If Noon Conference were presented by an attending known for pimping, you'd sometimes opt for plan B, which was to grab some lunch in the cafeteria and keep on working, because who the hell needs the stress of being pimped while eating? Often, however, if your team was on call, you'd have no choice but plan C, which was plan B without the lunch, unless you still had your cookie in your pocket, and then you hoped that you were eating your cookie lunch and not your cookie dinner, because breakfast was a long way in the uncertain future and the cafeteria closed by 7 pm. If you weren't on call, you'd go home sometime in the evening, prep for the next day by reading from your 20 lb (10 kg) tome of internal medicine, doing your many-page write-up, and memorizing every last thing you could for the next day's presentation during attending rounds in the vain attempt to look less shtoopid.

Typically, there were 4 medicine teams and so call rotated every 4th night, so in a typical 4 day rotation, you'd be in the hospital 60 hours out of every 84. Generally, as a student you'd get 3 days off a month and as an intern or resident, it'd be 1-2 days off a month. If your team were on call, then you didn't leave the hospital until the next evening, about 36 hours after entering the hospital. Depending on the dress policy of the hospital you were working in, at some point you'd change into scrubs, the better to slop around and be slopped on, and give yourself over to 'the zen of call', trying to just flow with it. Usually this would be short lived as you started to fold under an avalanche of admissions. It wasn't so bad as a student, as you'd usually concentrate on just one or two patients and tag along with the rest for the ride. As you didn't know as much as as, well, anyone else, including the housekeepers and the guy who filled the vending machines, you had to do a lot of looking things up in textbooks and journals (this was just before the internet was coming into use).

It is at this point that we must point out that our heroine was a less-than-impressive medical student. Filled to the brim with compassion and an interest in the subject of sick folk, she was a mousy, timid, oh-so-unimpressive lump of a thing. Presenting a case left me wanting a toilet in which to empty my gastric and colonic contents. As a result, one of the cardiology attendings I was under at the University Hospital (admittedly rather a jerk) told me at the end of his stint with me that I'd never make a good physician and I should just cut my losses and quit med school. I was mortified and crushed. And then I was pissed. What an asshole. To this day, seeing the combination of a man with slicked-back hair wearing a cashmere turtleneck with a camel hair blazer is enough to make me want to run over and hurl both insults and eggs at him.

And so ended that month and a half at The U, and it was time to change venues to the Veteran's Hospital, across the way. At that point the building was all shiny clean and new, having opened only a year or so prior. It was still a vast government bureaucracy, though, with everything done in triplicate and 4 patients per room. The nurses ruled the roost and if a task was not something specifically in their job description, the request was met with an icy stare and maybe a smirk. But! It was filled with the most spectacular patients ever. There were a few ancient WWI vets, all in their 90s. Many, many WWII and Korean War (oops, make that Korean Conflict as we apparently don't consider that a war) vets with a mind boggling array of illnesses, most having at least 5-6 severe problems all together, like coronary disease with emphysema and kidney failure, a history of cancer(s) (usually lung, colon, and/or prostate) with a frosting of pneumonia or endocarditis or decompensated cirrhosis of the liver or all of the above. The youngish (this was almost 20 years ago, remember) Vietnam vets were mostly tragic, though, as they often were AIDS patients in the early years of the disease and there wasn't much we could do for them but treat the opportunistic infections and try to stave off the inevitable. Many of them were very angry, bitter men; a combination of ill usage from the war and the disease. All but the Vietnam vets were more than willing to let a 10-thumbed med student do any procedure on them or to spend 4 hours taking a detailed history and physical. "You need to do a 5 vessel cardiac bypass on someone and want to do it on me? Sure, kiddo. You just go ahead. Like my tattoos?" Again, there's a reason they are known as the Greatest Generation.

Given all this, most med students acknowledged that the internal medicine rotation was the worst, the hardest, the most soul-destroying part of the clinical years and I'd agree. The VA was the worst of it as there was little in the way of ancillary services, most everyone was cranky, the patients were very complicated and the stress and hours were brutal. Even the coffee in the cafeteria was truly undrinkable, even post-call. The worst of the attendings was at the VA, Dr M, who was notorious for handing out poor grades and dreadful evaluations to even the best students. He would require these 20 page write-ups on each patient a med student evaluated and didn't allow you even a 3x5 card from which to present the patient. As an unbaked student, memorizing all the details of a complex vet with 20 medications, 20 prior surgeries, 20 abnormal labs and 20 items on his allergy list, not to mention the complex discussion Dr M expected at the end of the case was a nearly impossible task. Frequently smiling and seemingly pleasant on the exterior, he was Pure Evil in a chocolate brown corduroy jacket and a mustache. I remember a toupee but I may have embellished. Fortunately, I was not assigned to his service, which means Somebody wanted me to actually become an internist. Had I been under him, I'd almost certainly have quit.

Actually, I almost did quit one bleak January morning. Tears streaming down my face, I sat on the edge of the bed and told Charles that instead of walking down to the VA, I was walking over to the registrar's office as soon as it opened and withdraw. Marvelous Charles somehow managed to get me to try one more day and it wasn't as bad (probably because I stopped caring whether I did well or poorly) and then it wasn't that bad and then it was even a bit good.

So, Dr M wasn't my VA attending but Dr McD, the then Chief of (the Whole Damn) Medicine (Department) was. He was, as I recall, the President-elect of the American College of Physicians (a Really Big Deal) and one of the best teachers I've had the honor of learning from. He absolutely adored teaching and internal medicine and was incredibly patient and empathetic to the insecure. I still had the shakes, sweats and stammers when faced with a presentation or a good pimping, but he was able to guide me through it all and in the end told me that I had what it took and gave me a very good grade and recommendation. I could have named all my future progeny "Walter" in his honor.

I can honestly say that, while he wasn't the only reason I became an internist, he was the reason I held it as a shining thing to be. Years later, at the banquet at the end of my internal medicine residency, I was awarded Resident of the Year and Dr McD was in attendance. I got to gush out a mushy "Thank You" to him in front of many and tell him that he was the most instrumental out of all my scads and scads of phenomenal mentors. He blushed and I felt just plain good. Sometimes life does work out as you'd like and you do get the chance to really thank someone who meant the world to you. If you are presented with such an opportunity, seize it and make a sloppy fool of yourself and them. You'll not be sorry.

I ended the rotation still enrolled and accruing Big Debt, but with confidence that Internal Medicine was my calling and even considering doing my residency at OHSU.

Newsy

2008-04-24T19:36:00.004-04:00

After 4 years of living in this house, I've finally learned how to get the upper windows to swing over so I can clean them. With this knowledge, I then spent 30 minutes cleaning one window. I'm guessing 4 years between window cleanings is probably too long. Actually, it was probably longer than that as the previous owners were house cleaners on the same level as I am, so make that 8 years.

So, to celebrate, I've decided to admire the lone clean window and, as an added bonus to seeing how nice and, well, transparent it is, I've decided that to reallyreally get the full shiny effect, I should not clean it's brethren until after tomorrow morning, when the morning sun has really shone upon the glass.

So, that's one down, 19 to go, meaning another 9+1/2 hours, give or take.

So nice to have settled that.

It's finally spring, here and all the green things are green and all the bulb things are blooming and all the other things are doing what ever else they do.

And for final proof of spring, yesterday, I saw the year's first patient presenting for 'removal of retained tick parts'. Her husband had only been successful with decapitating the embedded tick in her shoulder and his attempts at blunt dissection with bathroom implements did not have the outcome they hoped for. But she's better and I got to excise and suture, so win-win, yes?

Of course that was preceded by the tick that dropped of my mother-in-law while she was reading on Tuesday and followed the tick I found under the computer desk yesterday. For an encore, I encountered one in my hair, getting ready to mine for red gold this afternoon, so I'm feeling a bit less sanguine, but I'll still take the spring.

It's been such a long damn winter this year. Record snowfalls and all that, and while I firmly avow that colds, flu and gastroenteridities are all caused by various viruses, I can't help but notice that Sara's missed more days the past few months of school than she's attended and yesterday was the first time in 2 weeks that I've been what I consider well. Not symptom free, but not ill, if you get my meaning.

So I feel a little symbolic (and actual) house cleaning is in order.

I also got those scary morning glories planted out by the front porch. Hopefully, they will scramble up and drape themselves picturesquely over the railing. Realistically, they will scamper up and strangle the lilies, monarda and butterfly bush and I won't be able to stop it as I'll be prostrate inside on a couch in the air conditioning wilted from the heat and humidity come July. Actually, I'm fine with summer, I'm just bone lazy, but it makes a better tale to say that I'm swooning like an Edith Wharton character.

What else, what else?

Oh! We should now take time to pat Marvelous Charles vigorously on the back. He's gone and landed himself a position as Superintendent of Schools. "Schools" as there are, indeed, two schools in the district, but we are very excited. It's tiny (the whole district has fewer students than his current school) and they have no textbooks. Well, that's not precisely true. Apparently they do have a social studies book written in the early '90s, and lord knows the world hasn't changed in the last 15 years. So we'll be adding Friday night sports events come the fall and he'll attend all sorts of school board meetings and have new tales to tell. That'll be the end of riding to and from work together, but it really is time for him to do this. It's also about 15 minutes closer than his current district and in the more stable state of Wisconsin.

He's also taking his comprehensive exams for his doctoral program tomorrow, so that's one more hurdle he'll have jumped. He's got, we think, 3 more classes to take and then he launches into all the ballyhoo surrounding the proposing, writing and defending of The Dissertation and so, with luck and a few bribes, he should be a newly minted 'doctah' in 2 years, give or take. Then we can mess with callers who ring asking for 'Dr Piffle'.

So, if you happen to have time on your hands Friday between the hours of 8:15 am and, say, 5:00 pm CDT, and you feel like sending a good thought his way as he hunkers in the basement of some cement walled ed. building on the U of W Madison campus, feel free to send them his way.

Me? I'll be taking the day cleaning another window, musing on the nature of spring and wondering if there's a service you can call to come and vacuum your property to remove all those blood-sucking parasites that make living in the country not quite so nice as it would otherwise be.

Haikus For Sneaky Girls

2008-04-13T13:51:00.003-04:00

Sara's sick again.
Again; third time in a month,
nineteenth time this year.

(OK, maybe I
exaggerate. A bit. Just
seems like forever.)

And while we hate it
that she feels so bad: achy,
snotty, sniffly, wan.

It's the fevers high
That suck our souls dry, and leave
us ashen with dread.

See, the thing our kids
do well; really, really well
is run HIGH fevers.

105 is par
for their little viral course;
eggs fry on their brains.

Colin set the way
of violently refusing
all good medicine.

He'd vomit as soon
as any flavor or form
of med reached his mouth.

Luckily, by five,
he learned to swallow his pills
and it's been fine since.

Sara can't bear to
be less of a stress to us,
so she vomits, too.

We threaten, cajole
and yell, but still the fevers
rise and terrify.

But this time, it was
different, she took it well
and smiled all the time.

"Finally!", we cried
She realizes that it
makes her feel better.

Ah, what saps we are.
For in the bathroom trash are
all her fever pills.

They don't work so well
if they're not in her system.
Sneakiness and lies.

Tough to punish her,
Flushed and ill, sobbing still, she's
sad at being caught.

But still, it must be
done. No more Samurai Jack
or Open Season.

And, Hey! What's this? A
find! While cleaning out cupboards,
something for next time!!

There is another route,
you see. I found Tylenol
suppositories!

Don't mess with Dr Mom.

High Rent

2008-04-06T15:11:00.001-04:00

'High rent', as Jocelyn called my gardening efforts in the last post, but worth it, I've decided.

These are the grow lights a couple of days ago, 5 days after I stuck the little seeds in the little peat patties and placed them under the magically radiating light sources. (See, I can't be trusted to remember to schlep the little growing things out to the deck in the morning for their dose of light, and back into the house away from the nightly frosts. I also can't be trusted to keep them adequately watered. Plant infanticide is my invariable path: They either wither in the heat and drought or become little plantcicles. So very disappointing, and I'm tired of the guilt.)

As you can see, the morning glory are the first out of the gate. Shall I repeat that they are 5 days past planting?

Here they are 2 days later, yesterday, only 7 days in the peat. Note it's not just the morning glories that are a couple of inches high.

Is anyone else a little scared? No? Just me?

A good friend of mine had a nightmare that morning glories were growing through her bedroom window and strangling her in her sleep.

I think she has a valid basis for this nightmare. And yet, here I am, not only choosing to plant them in our front garden, where they may happily twine up the front porch railing but have easy access to the bedroom windows of our children.

Fortunately, hundreds of Colin's little soldiers are scattered all over the house, keeping guard. You can see the sentries on the pass-through from the kitchen to the dining room (plant nursery, as the number of times I can be bothered to have us eat in the dining room can be numbered on the fingers of a partially amputated hand).

See them?

Better? There are many dozen camouflaged in the dining room carpet, bayonets at the ready for bare feet and malcontent plants.

I feel better.

Plus, I won't need to keep nagging him to pick up his damn soldiers, already, at least until next fall's frost.

Spring Cleaning

2008-03-29T22:55:00.004-04:00

Enough.

Enough of the endless winter ennui.

Enough of feeling sorry for myself for the lack of spring. And the persistance of grime. And mouse turds.

Enough.

Enough of yet another week lost in work and illness. (Yes. The ninth bout of crud for this season. Not approaching that horrible season of '01, where I succumbed to 14 separate bouts of crud between November and June--the first year of same-day-caring and therefore abbreviated, no less, so stop whining.)

Enough.

So, I arose with some semblance of energy and a bee in my butt. Well, a bee after a morning loafing with the small ones on the sofas, eating breakfast and doing nothing of value beyond the eating and getting breakfast for various and sundry beings. And that after sleeping in to the slothful hour of 7:04 AM CDT. ("Boy, mom sure sleeps late on weekends, doesn't she, Dad? Yes, son, she sure does, but some people like to sleep in a bit on the weekends.")

Enough.

Well, enough after lunch and a rest. And the getting of lunch for the various and sundry. And the starting of seeds in small pots of peat under newly purchased grow lights. $100 spent to save $40 in new plants. If they live. But if one is going to claim to be a gardener, at some point one really does need to commit to growing more than sunflowers from seed. (And let's face it, the sunflowers have had less than a 50% success rate. More like 5%. Sunflowers. The things that grow where birds poop them.)

Enough. 1:30 pm and out you go. To the garage where you need to expell the garage floor of winter gravel and sand and dust on the floor of cement. And mouse doodies. Let's not forget the pounds of mouse doodies. Apparently the few field mice that did manage to get into the garage this winter found it to be the land of milk and honey and bags of garbage of partially eaten foodstuffs. And it was good. And cathartic. And they did eat much of it. And now, that they are no more with us (may their little beady-eyed souls rest in peace in the great garbage-filled garage in the sky), it is time to rid the garage of their evidence, the small black ovals blanketing the garage. (Let's try not to remember the symptoms of Hantavirus, shall we? Or the Hantavirus deaths.)

A full hour spent sweeping the detritus of the winter from the garage. And now to the garden. The first day of gardening. The first day of cleaning out two of the three parts of the front flower beds, each finally with noses of the bulbs of daffodils and tulips and the first flowers of the bravest of crocuses up, finally exposed to the sun, previously hidden by the rotting, frozen plant matter of last fall's fallen, now removed. New. Green. Forgotten. Remembered.

Oh, but wait.

I forgot the visitor.

Standing 100 meters (100 yards for those of us who still cling to the outmoded) from where I paced, sweeping, was the large, antler-free quadroped, gleaning the freshly plowed cornfield across the road and looking like chiseled Adonis. Molly-dog and I surreptitiously watched him from across the road for 10 minutes as he studiously ignored us, looking buff but aware of our admiration. And then the spell was broken.

Charles, sleepy from his afternoon nap (naps are important if you start your day at 5 am on the weekend for no better reason than habit), stepped out to investigate the dual sighting of a llama in the cornfield across the road.

("Dad! Dad! Wake up! There's a LLAMA across the road! Really! You've got to come and see!)

We decide that our children may not be as countrified as we thought, if they can't tell the difference between a llama and a deer at a distance of 100 m. (The 'llama' having bounded away in a distinctly un-llama-like fashion, flashing his white tale.)

Or maybe it's not that they aren't yet countrified, but it's in their genes to see llamas.

Happy springish.

Call Of The Sirens (Part V)

2008-03-25T07:47:00.001-04:00

The next installment of one person's faded reminiscences of medical training from the mid '80s to the mid '90s.

When last we left our heroine, there she was, having gotten all of the easier rotations out of her way, which, while not stress free, by any means, did enable her to go home to dinner and her own bed at night. She was able to see something of her friends of a weekend and even get a little exercise. Nothing helps sanity like a night's sleep in your own bed and having a beer with your friends on a Saturday night.

At this point in time, there were two specialties that I was seriously considering: Internal Medicine and Obstetrics/Gynecology. The internal medicine seemed a good match with my personality--it's for the plodders, the fiddlers, those with a fair amount of patience and attention to detail, who don't mind spending their days finding just the right cocktail of potentially lethal drugs to treat senile Aunt Mary's end stage congestive heart failure, complicated by brittle diabetes, labile hypertension, not to mention Aunt Mary's propensity to take a swing at anyone coming near her who somehow resembles Myrtle, her hated neighbor of 40 years ago. It's for someone who gets a gleam in their eye when being presented with a patient having 21 problems on their medical problem list, 22 drugs on their medication list, 14 drugs on their allergy list, symptoms of "I'm weak and dizzy all over" and a desire to talk about The War; yet who won't forget to make sure tetanus, influenza, and pneumonia vaccine status is always up to date. Oh, yeah! Bring it!

Ob/Gyn appealed to a slightly different part of me; the part that loved using scalpel and suture, the part that had a pull toward women's health issues, not to mention that whole miracle of birth stuff (sniff!).

With such heady decisions in mind, at the age of 24, I faced the next 18 weeks--a month and a half on ob/gyn, followed by 3 months of internal medicine, all in the depths of winter. Nothing like seeing your potential future at its bleakest.

You know, I figured that of all the areas of medicine, ob/gyn was likely to be the most joyous. I was so very wrong.

Ob/gyn was a bleak, living hell, peopled with exhausted, angry, bitter beings, whose only joy in life was spreading their bile and vitriol as far and wide as they could. At least that's what it was like on the University Hospital's obstetrics unit. There were, I believe, 6 of us students, one of whom was my good friend, Adam, who became my twisted rope of mental sanity. Without Adam, the bitter and cynical (emaciated and ever-pale, living on only coffee and the occasional stale cookie) soul that he was, and therefore only minimally affected by all the toxic atmosphere, I'd have shut myself into a cupboard to hide with the emesis basins and die. Adam, who cajoled me down the stairs, smelling of placenta and urine, after yet another sleepless night spent watching the scratchy patterns on the fetal monitor strips, checking cervices for dilatation. ("Um, 5 cm?" "NO! Idiot! 6 cm! Can't you feel the difference? And she's +1, not 0! Worthless scum!") Another night, following a day and being followed by yet another day, of getting literally pushed out of the way with a 1-2 combination of hip bump and elbow swing, deftly executed by one of the interns, who dashed in at the end to catch the baby, and cut and sew up the episiotomy. I did get a few deliveries myself over the weeks, but it wasn't the experience I'd wished for. Adam, who, no matter how angry my rantings, always topped my woeful grousings and made me smile ruefully, as we tromped off in the early morning hours, cups of bad coffee in hand, to check all the new moms on the MFBU (mother-fuckin'-baby unit), to make sure their C-section incisions were healing well, and cajole them to get up and walk around, dammit (the more you walk, the faster you fart, the faster you fart, the faster you poop, the faster you poop, the sooner you get the hell off our service and out of the hospital).

For a couple of weeks during the day, we were also farmed out to the inpatient gynecologic service, which was mostly ghastly bizarro tumors. The 'best' was the one the size of a beach ball in this very lovely woman. Fortunately, she had a good outcome, if a prolonged hospital course. The worst was the one with a horrific vulvar cancer that required not only the removal of her genitalia (external and internal) but half her pelvis and one of her legs. You don't forget that. No, you don't. She was youngish, in her 40s, I believe. We also spent time in the gyn clinic, doing lots and lots of pelvic exams, or at least the female students did. Poor Adam and the other guys seemed to spend a lot of time standing outside closed exam room doors. The women would let the guys in for the history taking part but were less than thrilled with them being there for the exam, which was understandable. The WWII vets in the urology clinic were a different matter. I only had one request that a male examine him. You can't beat a WWII vet for toughness. (Or maybe they were just being pervy.)

In speaking to my colleagues who drew their ob/gyn rotations at the private hospital across town, I heard that their experiences were completely different, with cheerful residents happy to teach and nurses happy to help and guide. None of us of the MFBU brigade believed such blatant bullshit.

Ob/gyn was pure, toxic evil.

So. That left me with only internal medicine on my now very short list, which, of course, put me into a state of extreme-freak. Nothing like knowing that you not only need to love it, but that you need to impress the socks off the attendings so you can get strong letters of reference for your applications for residency programs in a year. Don't want to end up as a house officer in the unheard of and uncared about residency program at St Mary's Hospital of the Long Forgotten in Blackhole, North Dakota, no-siree-bob. This is not to disparage North Dakota. I personally find North Dakota rather pretty, but it does have the reputation of being near the ends of the American earth, which is a bit odd as it's in the center of the continent. The vagaries of geography and extreme cold.

I think we'll take a break, here, as we next travel to the wonderful world of internal medicine, which in the true spirit of an internist, will be discussed in excruciating detail. (Bonus factoid: Why are internists called 'fleas'? Because they're the last thing off a dead body.)

Intersections Of Alternate Universes

2008-03-20T08:35:00.000-04:00

Our scene: A medical exam room, Room # 2, that's quite a bit past its prime, but clean and reasonably well stocked with antique magazines proclaiming "At Home With Mamie Eisenhower" and "What Do Your Biorhythms Have In Store For You In 1977?" Seated is a young man, waiting to see the physician. He appears to be normal and sane. Enter our heroine with a pleasant "Hello" and an introduction. She sits and enquires of our young man how she can help, and listens politely.

Young Man: "I have a rash on my arm. It comes and goes and it won't go away."

Our Heroine: "I see. Does it hurt or itch? How long has it been like that?" (Etc, etc, many in-depth questions about the rash and the young man's life, career, and other assorted necessary questions.)

Our Heroine then proceeds to examine the rash, which looks like a classic spot of eczema (aka: atopic dermatitis). She is thorough in her exam and then sits down explaining eczema and its treatment and the expected time frame of outcome. She hands YM a prescription for the appropriate cream to treat it and discusses moisturizing. She then asks if there are any other concerns.

YM: "See, that's not it. I drank some hot tea from Fastfoodplace a few days ago and it didn't taste right. I got a bacterial infection from it and now it's in my blood and my body and coming out through my skin. I need a strong antibiotic for it."

OH: "Oh. OK. Let's talk about bacterial infections in the blood and skin and what you see with them." She then proceeds to briefly discuss this so YM can understand that the patch of eczema on his arm that waxes and wanes is in no way caused by bacteremia (bacteria in the blood) or its related conditions. She is not laughing nor joking.

YM (angrily): "Well, I see I will have to go all the way to Milwaukee to get competent medical care. This is from the bacterial infection I got from the tea. Just give me the antibiotic. I heard you were a good doctor and you clearly are not. I don't deserve to be laughed at. I deserve proper medical care."

OH (very calmly): "Well, it's certainly your right to go where you choose for your medical care and I'm sorry you feel that you are not being taken seriously. I take all the patients I see very seriously and give the best care I am able to. I realize that you disagree with me, but your rash does not require antibiotics."

YM (now frustrated and very angry): "How can you say that? You didn't even test me for infection. I want a urine test to show the bacterial infection in my body. You didn't even do a urine test! I want proper medical care, not some incompetent to sit there and laugh at me!"

OH (completely bewildered but trying to remain calm): "I can see that you're upset, but I can't treat you with something for which you have no medical indication. None of your symptoms fit with a urine or any other infection. Treating you with an antibiotic would not only not help you but would be potentially harmful and I'm not going to risk hurting you."

YM: "Well, I'm going to Chicago to see a real doctor, who'll treat me seriously!"

OH: "That's certainly your right. I'm sorry you feel that way. Good day."

Exit Our Heroine.

It is then that she realizes what has happened. It's the only explanation that fits. In that very small and unassuming exam room, there was an intersection of two alternate universes. In one were our two beings. In the other, were a person with necrotizing fasciitis or perhaps staph scalded skin syndrome appalled that the physician was trying to treat him with multiple broad spectrum antibiotics and possibly wide debridement (the cutting away of all potentially damaged tissue, to the point of removing healthy tissue so as not to miss any infection--very disfiguring in general) and hyperbaric oxygen therapy for what they felt was only a mild case of eczema. Horrifying, indeed. I hope the bad outcome is averted.

In my case, the only bad outcome was that YM stood at the desk and amazed our front and back office staff by first demanding and then filling out a complaint form about me and my substandard medical care. (An aside: Apparently the rules of grammar and spelling are only minimally similar to those of our reality.) After he left, I couldn't help chuckling a bit over the vagaries of the space-time continuum. After all, this was the first time that I knew of that a complaint was lodged against me for my personal care. For better or worse, I'm known as 'that nice doctor, who really listens'. I may not be that good, but, dammit, they can't accuse me of not seeming to care.

While I truly wish I'd been able to make the young man from the alternate universe understand what and why I was treating as I was, it was cool in a way.

Not every day this happens.

Pity.

(Oh! And the next day, we found that he'd gone and filled the prescription for the cream. We knew this because the pharmacy called and said that his insurance wouldn't cover what I'd chosen and I needed to substitute a different cream. I'll take that to mean that the kink in our respective universes shook itself out and that the poor young man with the life threatening systemic bacterial illness is now recovering nicely with all the antibiotic therapy his reality can give, while the young man with the mild eczema, now back in his own plane, is rapidly improving under the appropriate cream, having avoided horrific and unnecessary therapies for his annoying but benign condition.)

Here's to all being right with the worlds and the universes being in their own spaces. I'll also be extra careful of where I stand in Exam Room #2. You never know when that may happen, again.

Note: Of course, most of the details of this tale were changed. I'm not a complete idiot, just a partial one. The substance remains unaltered.)

Sometimes, The Suitcase Has It Right

2008-03-16T20:26:00.004-04:00

Chicago suburbs: Just so you know, you suck.

No really. You do. Now, I'm sure that there's lots of good things to be said about them and I'd be willing to bet they're filled with lots of lovely people and food and drinks and parks and what-not, but all that is cancelled out by the fact that each and every time you need to use a traffic ramp, to either enter or leave the freeway, you must pay a toll. And that's just so very wrong.

So, until you change this by, say, replacing it with a potato chip tax or a bottled water tax or a car tire tax, I'll continue to disparage your good name and assert that you do, indeed, suck.

Which leads us to how I spent my days off last week. No, it was not cleaning the house or reading a pleasant book or filling plastic eggs with Easter candy (all worthy things that I now need to do at the end of this week), it was spent in the glamorous Chicago suburb of Lisle, IL. (Motto: We're just an exit and another two tolls down from Naperville.)

I had my very first occupational medicine conference and, boy was I excited. Well, slightly excited. Somewhat.

The day I left, Wednesday, started rather dreadfully. In fact, if I believed in omens, I'd have faked appendicitis and never left the state. Being the anal soul I am, I had packed all I could the night before and made a list of all that still needed to be packed the next morning. As I'm ready to head out the door, I quite naturally go to zip the suitcase. It was full but not over packed. It had never been used, in fact I had to cut the tags off. It clearly had issues as within the space of 3 minutes, both of the zippers had broken off and I was cursing steadily under my breath as I jimmied the damn thing open, pulled my trusty duffel bag from the closet shelf and crammed what I could inside, adding a second small case for good measure. So, now we have me sweaty, cranky and leaving later than I wanted. And laden with an extra bag.

I staggered out to the minivan (because nothing says "cool" like a grey minivan) and heave the luggage in, pull out of the garage and reach for the remote to close the garage door. It's evaporated. What the hell? Who the hell drove the van last! Me. Being (all together, now) anal, I always return the remote to its place of repose, in the dash. Ah. Charles. Yes. He drove the little black Honda and must have taken MY remote to open the door as the Honda is missing its remote. OK, fine, I'll just take the one from the shameful SUV, that I hope we don't need to use until next November, when the snows start to lay deep. I hop out of the van with much vim and vigor and ......wait for it.......hit the solid sheet of ice that is the surface of the driveway. Slooooooooowly, I fall as a result of Somebody's law about a frictionless surface vs force and bodies in motion tending to stay in motion (damn Newton) and hit hard. During the approximately 5 hours it seemed to take to actually land, I was able to consider quite a lot of things:

That this was going to hurt like hell.
That it'd be a very good thing to avoid hitting my head.

That this was a really stupid way to start the day.

That this was a really stupid way to injure myself.

That if I lost consciousness, I'd likely lie there until Sara left for school after lunch, as there'd be no reason for anyone to look for me.

Oh! Wait! Work would probably miss me and I'd only lay here in sub-freezing temperatures for about 2 hours, and the cold would probably be a benefit to the head injury, slowing metabolism and retarding swelling (actually, they thought I was going to the conference that morning, like my partner, rather than working the morning, joke on me).

That this is really taking a long time to hit the ground, lets just get it over with, already, and remember to watch the head, shall we?

That this is really, really, really going to hurt.

There's something to be said for planning, as I did, indeed, not hit my head, just my wrist, back and butt, and nothing broke. So good. Oh, and the neck got a good whiplash-y sort of thing, but that's a small price to pay.

Got up, trotted (slid) gingerly to the house, where a large bottle of ibuprofen was sitting conveniently on the counter (Waiting for Colin, in the throes of the influenza, to need another dose.), swallowed 4 and poured a goodly amount in a sandwich baggie for later. I then drove like a nonagenarian, just waiting for the kamikaze deer to leap in front of the van to finish my day, but all was well.

After seeing the morning's patients, I hopped in the van and drove the 2 hours to where the conference was held, in a Hilton. Actually, that was harder than anticipated, as I kept taking every wrong turn possible (seems the area had grown up a bit since the directions were posted on the Hilton website), but after an additional hour and much paying of tolls for the use of the unavoidable on- and off-ramps (Chicago suburbs, you really suck), I did arrive, somewhat safely and more soundly than I deserved to be.

The good people at the Hilton were very welcoming and didn't even lose my reservation. And they keep a good bar (which my friend and colleague, J, and I availed ourselves of, for therapeutic reasons, of course; wine is a good muscle relaxant). And as I was feeling a bit shell-shocked, or freeway exit and ice shocked, we had no alternative but to avail ourselves of their rather good hotel restaurant. Salmon topped with crusted scallops has healing powers. As does chocolate-ginger creme brulee.

The conference itself had some good talks and a lot of meh talks. I am just not an occupational medicine doc at heart. I am an internist. I love my same day care clinic. But I know my job, as it currently exists, will be gone in a year or less, and I really love the people I work with. I had a group I loved once before and left them for my sanity. I don't want to do that, again. For me, the people I work with are even more important than the work I do. And it is still medicine. It's still doctoring. It's just from the work comp end, rather than the private end. And I am a good doc, I'll provide the best care I can, regardless.

I was also rather surprised to find that, if I wasn't the youngest one in the room of about 150, I wasn't far from it, at the ripe age of 42. Good lord, but we are a group of stodgy, old farts. I'll miss that about internal medicine conferences--the mix of ages and styles. I was one of the few not in a suit or at least a sport jacket (a suit? for a medical conference?), choosing to wear jeans and cotton shirts. Also annoying was that most of those in the audience who raised their hands were not actually asking questions or seeking clarification, but making statements trying to impress others with their methods. I hate that. Always makes me want to throw something squishy and smelly.

A few days later, I returned to home and hearth, husband and kids, laundry and dog hair, all in one piece, with a glimpse of my future and no closed head injury, so it's all pretty good, isn't it?

I'll take it.

Call of the Sirens (Part IV)

2008-03-07T08:12:00.000-05:00

I know I've bored you all stiff with the first two years (bored myself reliving it), but I wanted you to get the idea of what it really involved. But now, NOW!, we finally get to what most people think of as med school: Running around in short white lab coats, making egregious errors that nearly cost people their lives! Woot!

Oh, but wait just a minute there, Grasshopper, before you hit the wards, you must take your Medical Boards Exam Part I. A two full day fill-in-the-bubbles exam over the first two years of your basic science knowledge. You were given 2 weeks at the end of your second year's courses and the exam to 'refresh' your knowledge. We mostly sat on the grass and tried to re-learn biochemistry and the vagueries of spleen pathophysiology while wishing we were on a beach with a drink in each hand. The only thing I recall about the exam, aside from the length, was one question that made me start to laugh hysterically and mostly silently, sitting in my seat, shaking violently making those Eeeeep! Eeeeeep! sounds that wouldn't be suppressed from my glottis. The question? "What is the velocity of the axon of the giant squid?", which was followed by your 5 choices: A-E.

For me, that question pretty much summed up the whole damn thing. I mean, really! REALLY!! What the hell?

Somehow, I passed. Chalk another one up to a personal skill in taking standardized bubble-tests.

Ok. Off to the wards in our business casual clothes and short white lab coats!

Can we take a minute to examine the horror that is the short white med student lab coat? Can we? White--for starters--because it will show every blood, pus, iodine and ink splatter to greatest effect. Short--cuts across the broadest part of the butt. Unflattering on Victoria's Secret models, horrific on we of the German thighs. Large pockets from waist to hem-- the better to cram with pounds of pocket sized reference books (at the minimum a Sandford Guide, a Washington Manuel and a pocket pharmacopaea), computer print-outs of patient labs and radiology reports, journal articles, reflex hammer, peripheral brain (the small self-made notebooks of our collected wisdom not found in the published reference books) tongue blades, phlebotomy tourniquet, vacutainer holder (called the 'vacutainer' for short) for drawing blood, hemoccult cards and bottle of developer (you know, to check the smear of poop on the tip of your finger for blood, after you did the rectal exam), pen lights, fistfuls of drug-rep pens, calipers, cotton swabs, culture tubes, and a cookie or some other snack, as god knows when your next meal would be.

The vacutainer holder was a particularly prized item and when we had one, we guarded it with our lives. It's that little 2" / 5 cm plastic sheath that you screw a phlebotomy needle into one end and slip the vial for the blood in the other, so you can easily draw blood with just your one hand, leaving the other to position the vein, grab the cotton ball, or eat your cookie with at the same time. If you didn't have one, you needed to use two hands and a syringe, which was much more awkward and left you without your cookie lunch. The only way to get a vacutainer was to inherit one from a finishing 4th year student, steal one (not too cool, unless it was from a non-med student) or somehow get one of the phlebotomists to give you theirs. That's how I got mine. She will ever be in my nightly prayers. You knew who your very good friends were, as they were the ones who would lend you their vacutainer if asked.

Within a month or 3 (If the coat were particularly well-made) all the pockets on the white lab coats sported a large safety pin at each corner to hold them in place, as the pockets were actively ripping off the coats. Still and all, it was pretty amazing what could be carried around on one's person, thanks to those wretched short coats.

So, now you have us in your mind, a shuffling army of quasi-alert Quasimotos, bent and twisted with the sheer weight of our pocket-crap, off to learn how to actually become doctors.

Being of cautious nature, I requested, and got my first assignment as the easy-peasy ambulatory care rotation. Basically, you were farmed out to area family practice and internal medicine docs and mostly followed them around like little shadows that bulged at the midsection. It was there that I learned that a 28 year old sales rep who comes in with vaguely cardiac sounding symptoms deserves a stress test, which was done during lunch, which was positive, which led to the urgent call to the cardiologist, which led him to the balloon angioplasty, which saved his heart and possibly his life, all done before dinner. Don't ever doubt the worst-case scenario and proceed accordingly.

Then Surgery I, which was basically hanging out in ortho, urology and general surgery out patient clinics. If surgery can be said to be dull, than this was, indeed, dull. The only operating room stuff you got was the occasional joint replacement with the ortho folks, and those usually went to the students that wanted to go into surgery as a prime chance to brown-nose. Meh. But, not too taxing and no on-call, so sleep at night and regular meals.

Fall brought 6 weeks on psychiatry, which landed me at the VA (veteran's hospital), which mostly had WWII vets on the medical wards and Vietnam vets in the psych unit. As with most psych units, the nurses basically ran the show, the residents groused about the damn bossy nurses, and the attending hid in his office. I recall the attending as being nice, quiet and brown -- brown hair, brown beard, brown tweed jacket, brown pants. Soothing to the extreme. We students hung out, discussed the pros and cons of various nasty psych drugs (This was just before Prozac came into wide use, and so we were still using tricyclics for depression and worrying about tricyclic overdoses -- nasty, nasty arrhythmias that you couldn't do much about except watch the monitor and pray.), watch various interventions and what-all through the one-way mirror, talk to the inpatients (mostly a group of nice, if really fucked up, guys) and eat lunch. So far, this third year med student stuff was a piece of cake, yes?

We also had to do a long evaluation on one patient, so I chose this nice guy that I seemed to hit it off with, exchanging pleasantries and the occasional joke, to do the extensive interview on. I asked him and he agreed (I think he was really bored), and so, over a couple of days, I got his whole life story and wrote it up. I then got torn a new orifice by one of the nurses, as how the hell could I have talked to someone as fragile as he was? (This was after I'd asked who'd be good to interview and was told, "Eh, anyone.") He had been admitted, once again, for barricading himself in his house with a shot gun while having flashbacks of his Vietnam experience. Seems he was a butcher by trade, and while he was not working as one, for obvious reasons, he'd occasionally agree to butcher a deer carcass that a buddy needed to have done, which would set him off, etc, etc, and he'd finally land in the VA for a few weeks of med adjusting, group therapy, and calm talk about how maybe he should just tell his buddies to go find someone else to cut up their dead deer. Actually, he seemed better adjusted than most of the staff, and as I'd been completely up front with him about what I needed and what it involved, and he seemed perfectly fine with it all, I though he'd be a good subject. Fortunately, he backed me up, also, so I was out of the mud I had inadvertently stepped in. As a group, the med students were also accused of sneaking in and viewing someone through the one-way mirror without permission of the staff. We hadn't, actually, and had all been together in the office doing chart stuff, so that didn't stick, either. It was a very strange place: orange and brown and creepy, messed up staff.

So, from psych, I learned that they are all bat-shit crazy, the staff even more so than the poor patients, who at least had an excuse and were trying to get better, and were a decent set, at least at the VA. The ones at the university were a different matter. There the borderlines flourished and the severly schizophrenic wallowed and the 4-point restraints were used with necessity, but as I was only there for a Saturday on call (Woot! Only one whole day on call! With a nice, casual, non-abusive intern, who was polite to the patients and knew how to ferret out this and that.)

I think we'll leave it there, as after psych, we hit the harder stuff, where sleep is removed, stress is amped up, lives are on the line, and many, many meals are missed. Even the cookie-meals.

Gritty stuff, indeed.

Love Letters

2008-02-26T09:00:00.004-05:00

Dear Patients of Last Week,

While it was nothing but an unmitigated pleasure and a true delight to spend 15 minutes with each of you locked in a tiny exam room listening with rapt attention to the particulars of your sputum (purulent), your body aches (extreme) and your fevers (impressive), I'd have really preferred that you'd kept your mask (kindly provided and requested to be keep in place by our friendly and courteous reception staff) on rather than removing it as soon as the nurse was out of the room. Your well-meant touch of asking me why doctors don't get sick was so very humorous that we both laughed heartily, especially after I replied that I was just getting over my 8th bout of illness since October and then stared pointedly at your pointless mask, dangling from it's elastic band at the level of your sternum.

When I next get a bout of severely unpleasant gastroenteritis, I shall be sure to have you over to share a piece of cake and drink out of the same cup of friendship.

Big, wet smooches!
Diana
(You know, that lady doctor)

-----------------------------------------------------

Dearest Neighbor Steve,

You are the bestest neighbor anyone could have and have such a nice large pack of dogs. While we all think Bad Dog Bailey is a sweetheart (well, except Molly-dog, who hates her with the fire of 1000 suns), we think she's more of a sweetheart when she's in her own yard (about 200m away as the dog runs, and runs she does, through the tick-infested tall grass that separates our lands) and not making Molly throw herself against the windows with alarming violence and much spittle. It is also less than joyful when we let said Molly out to relieve herself (after carefully going out ourselves to scout for any wandering canines that would tempt her to badness in the bitter cold), only to have Bad Dog Bailey come trotting from around the side of our house as soon as Molly is let loose. After a half an hour of me trying to get now Bad Dog Molly to get the hell into the house, I am forced to give up and return to warmth and light. Sorry And Frozen And Oh-So-Hungry Dog Molly does finally agree to come in, an hour later.

Please don't take it as anything but a gesture of good will when you see the unsightly high cement wall that we've constructed along our shared property line that is topped with broken glass and razor wire. Good fences and good neighbors and all that.

As you've already lost one lovely pup in your growing pack to a passing car (Poor Maisy, we hardly knew her), we've made a deal with our florist so that for every 5th bouquet of dead-dog lillies we send to you, we get a 6th free! So, that's good, yes?

Yours in Dogginess,
Diana
(You know, the one married to Charles, the mother of your son's friend, the one you studiously ignore when in company together?)

-------------------------------------------

Dear Mad-Kitty,

While I think you are the world's best cat and find most of your antics hilarious, (like the one where you jump out and grab me from behind, around the knee and then skitter off, leaving me to pick myself and whatever I had in my arms up from off the floor, you little dickens) this does not mean that you get to be pissy when, unbeknown to me, you've chosen to bury yourself under Sara's bedclothes and then are launched into the air in the middle of a nap, when I go in to turn down her covers. Your pointing out that you clearly make a (very small) lump in the rumpled bed does not bear weight in this circumstance. You are roughly the size of any one of the 107 dolls and stuffed animals that inhabit her bed and are indispensable to her peaceful slumbers.

If you choose to lurk and nap thus, you will be unceremoniously tossed, again and again.

Yours in fond nappage,
Diana
(You know, the one who feeds you and makes the bed all warm for you.)

---------------------------

Dear Driver of a Subcompact Last Night,

Hello!
Let me introduce myself. I am the white knuckled driver of the large minivan, driving home last night in the snowstorm at dusk. There was no one behind me, nor anyone in the approaching two lanes of the highway when you, coming out of the side street as the highway passed through your small Wisconsin town, pulled out right in front of me.

Whee! Wasn't that fun! We nearly collided! I nearly slid into the median as I cursed loudly and tapped the breaks as hard as I dared, fishtailing away! Such a hoot! I know you were just being neighborly and, as I've memorized your license plate, and it's a very small world, not to mention a very small town, I'm sure you won't take it amiss if I flick a lighted cigarette in your window next summer. I don't smoke, but after last night, I felt compelled to start.

Yours in future emphysematous rapture,
Diana
(You know, the one driving the fishtailing minivan, wishing for a third hand, so she could have waved a middle finger at you without taking the necessary two hands off the wheel last night.)

-----------------------------------
Now where's the damn stamps?

Call of the Sirens (Part III)

2008-02-19T21:58:00.000-05:00

{Here, we have the ongoing saga of what it was to go through medical training way too many years ago. Don't worry, this yammers on about the second year, which had little gore and no glamour. The second year is like that for many things: Too young to be of consequence, too old to be novel. Dull and sadly forgettable. Pimply and annoying. Best just gotten through. Sort of like the crust of a mass-produced pizza, without any dipping sauce. If you missed the prior chapters, that's what the side bar's for, isn't it?}

Between the first and second years, we had our last summer vacation, ever. Some of us (like me and my pal, Lisa, (Hi Honey!) got hitched). Some went on vacations. Some got jobs. All of us reconvened in the fall in the same damn place we'd left a couple of months prior, but at least it was all so very familiar.

And so we come to the second year, the year of pathology. Having spent pretty much all of the first year learning all about what normal was, we finally got to the really sexy part: The Diseases.

Buuuuuuuuuut, not so fast, grasshopper. The first 6 weeks or so were spent in a little side-step of torture known as 'Bugs and Drugs'. Spoken of by those who'd gone through in ashen-faced whispers, often accompanied by the rapid slamming of several shots of cheap liquor, Bugs and Drugs were what broke most spirits. 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 6 solid weeks of nothing (and I mean nothing) but microbiology and pharmacology.

Now, I've always loved microbiology and what doc-to-be doesn't love the idea of those enticing drugs, but even a steady diet of chocolate can make you ill and this was more like a steady diet of partially corroded batteries washed down with concentrated bleach. To make matters worse, there was no context, just volume and pain. We were taught thousands and thousands of tiny microbes, some deadly, some benign, most we'd never encounter in our long clinical lives (and if we did, we'd just look them up). Many of the drugs hadn't been used in decades, but were thrown into the mix. Yohimbine (WTF?) next to metoprolol (vital) next to cisplatinum (vital if you're off to do battle with cancer as an oncologist, not if you're an orthopedist). So we learned them all, sorta, and promptly forgot them as they were at that point meaningless. We weren't to encounter patients in a theraputic setting for almost a year, so we really couldn't even use the information until then. It'd be like taking driver's ed as a 13 year old.

After Drugs and Bugs, I recall a loud party with the class band, Mostly Large Cells, named after a histologic description of something, probably some sort of lymphocyte, on a slide. Sort of a party of desperation. If it's a false memory, then that's a shame; there should have been a party if there wasn't. No better way to clean out all that recently sort-of-acquired fragile information, thus making way for the next bolus, than by lots of alcohol and dancing.

The rest of the year was spent in blocks of pathophysiology--what can go wrong with the heart for 4 weeks, the GI tract for 3 weeks, the lungs for 3+1/2 weeks, etc, etc, etc. An exam at the end of each section. 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 8 months. All in an amphitheater that was identical to the chilly, gray, flourescently-lit cement cave of the first year, just rotated 180 degrees (the first and second year classrooms sat parallel, foot to head), in the Basic Science Building.

But, at least no formaldehyde. And no good stories, at least none worth remembering. More interesting but less novel. Same instructors. Same classmates. Same everything, just rotated 180 degrees.

Ok, maybe there were a couple of good stories, but mostly it was just a grind.

There was a bright spot toward the end of that year, though, and that was that we had some classes in actual physical diagnosis, where we practiced using our stethescopes and reflex hammers on each other on Saturday mornings in the abandoned patient care rooms in the outpatient clinic building of the University Hospital. Yes. That's right. Go ahead and snicker. We played University-sanctioned 'doctor' with each other. We also had two rather awkward evenings where we learned the male and female exams with people paid to be clumsily examined by 90 med students, many of whom were blushing furiously or madly pretending that they weren't at all flustered by it all. The male paid-patients were just average joes, and just stood there, buck nekkid, but the females were 3 local nurse practitioners who knew exactly what we should be feeling for and would tell you, "No, that's not my ovary....no......closer...to your left.....no YOUR left......there! That's it! Make sure you get a good feel so you know what it feels like." Good, but decidedly disconcerting. Of course, you were graded on your exam skills and bedside (drapeside?) manner. If you didn't pass, you had to do it over and over until you got it. Which makes sense.

We also spent time each week in one of the primary care clinics (I was in the University's Family Medicine clinic) talking to real, live, actual patients, learning how to gather their histories about their sore throats or their baby's diaper rash or other similar concerns. We started learning how to do formal presentations, the backbone of the upcoming years of attending rounds, and how to start filling in the shoulders and shoes of a physician. It was cool. We were hot. Even if we looked uniformly dweeby, stubby and fat in our short white coats, stumbling over the words that we tried to make sound natural.

We were also scared to death as we knew that as of July, we would be released into the assorted clinics, inpatient wards and operating rooms. Pity the poor souls who were assigned to us. Pity them, indeed.

Bathroom Humor

2008-02-18T13:44:00.003-05:00

Does anyone else find the humor in the bottle of hand soap in our clinic bathroom plastered with the name, logo and prescribing information for the drug Cialis, or is it just me? I'm guessing there's an accompanying bottle of hand lotion somewhere, yes??

And do you think it was intentional or not on the part of the drug company?

(And, no, for those who remember my diatribe of two years ago, I didn't use it, preferring to wash with the soap from the dispenser on the wall, labelled instead with the name of the soap-dispenser manufacturer. I also tried to peel off the drug label, in an act of vandalism and defiance, but it wouldn't budge. Apparently, they're on to me.)

Haikus For Stupid Pets

2008-02-12T07:04:00.000-05:00

The cast of characters: Molly--70 lb (30kg) 2 year old German Shepherd Dog, and Madison--5 lb (2.5 kg) 2 year old cat. Both born within weeks and on the same farm as each other.

Oh, you stupid duo.
Worse than brothers and sisters,
At least in our house.

First, YOU. Dog. Yes. You.
What the hell were you thinking?
The small cat is armed.

Don't you corner her
and piss her off. Just DON'T. You
get what you deserve.

And YOU. Cat. Yes, you.
Those claws of yours don't retract
When hooked to the nub.

Mrararo! (Caterwalling)
Hnnnnnnnnnnnnn! (Dogerwalling) I turn.
Dog has grown a beard?

Dangling from both jowels,
All 10 claws sunk in her face,
Deep as they can go.

A foot off the ground,
Mad is, swinging back and forth,
While Mol shakes her head.

That fails, so Mol takes
her paw, slides it down Mad's arm,
to her throat and pulls.

Now Kitty's choking
and swinging and driving her
claws in even deeper.

(Dammit! Once again,
the camera's at the other
end of the whole house.)

With a large sigh, I
cross the kitchen and try to
disengage the cat.

Sadly, she's sunk in
so deeply that I can't back
her claws from Mol's face.

After much wrestling,
I close my eyes and riiiiiiiiip them
out of Molly's cheeks.

Cat is mad.
Dog is sad.
I have had
enough.

(Yes, this is an old picture but it fits.)

Snow Day

2008-02-06T20:36:00.000-05:00

I am always reminded of that Simpson's episode. You know the one, where Bart get's his wish that school is cancelled by this huge snow storm so he can eke out this extra day to study for that test that, should he fail, will mean that he has to repeat the 4th grade.

Snow Day! The rest of the town gets to play in the snow, of course, and it is named "The Bestest Day of the Year" or something like that, by the mayor. Today, we were the rest of Springfield, except it was too damn blizzardy to actually go out and play in it. Charles and I did honestly try to get to work today but were stopped in the middle of the road, about 100m from our driveway, by drifts of snow that blocked the road that were half way up the car's windows. Turns out there are a few things that the shameful SUV can't get through, despite it's much touted 4 wheel drive.

Anyway, I've always wanted to live somewhere that got big-ass snow falls. Snow that was past your knees. So much snow in a day that you shouldn't (and couldn't) go anywhere but stay your house, strolling from window to window, mug in your hand, to see how much higher the snow has piled in the last 5 minutes.

I figured Wisconsin would provide this.

So far, it's had snow. Nice amounts. Just not a big-ass amount like the old timers talked up. Yet.

But finally, FINALLY, I got the dream. More snow than we could deal with.

The pictures speak for themselves:

The front Door.

The swamped front porch. (And, yes, the porch is raised so you have to step up onto it.)

Molly wading up the walkway after forging off to that great white latrine in the yard.

The (heh) driveway. Note the lack of a large pile of snow blocking it. (Don't confuse the drifts with snowplow-induced piles.) That would be because the highly touted Wisconsin plows have been absent THE ENTIRE DAY because it was just too much for them. Poor fragile plows.

The road. Beaker's head (Remember Beaker? For those of you who were wondering, he's still there, patsy for the plows; but today, he was granted a stay of execution.) can be seen as the small dark green rectangle to the left of the road. Wave to him, as we doubt that he'll be seen for days after the plows finally do bury the rest of him with the feet of snow that are currently lying in the road. Poor Beaker, we knew him well.)

The house. You can see where we had to excavate the garage door so an attempt could be made for Charles to get out again tomorrow. That is, if the plows have made an appearance. If not, it was a wasted effort.

Guess there'll be enough for us to ski this weekend.

All in all, it was pretty cool, especially if you pushed the thought that if something happened to someone, there was nothing anyone could do. No ambulance could make it in, no car could make it out. I found myself cursing the lack of a stash of sutures and some good anesthetic. And a crash cart. My kingdom for a crash cart.

Best to just sit tight and drink tea and eat pumpkin bread and look at the snow. Which we did.

Mid Life Crisis

2008-02-03T06:36:00.000-05:00

I am an adulterer.

I'm not proud of it, but it is what it is.

See, for decades, basically since I was out of footie jammies, I've not been a lounge-around-in-a-robe sort of person. It's not that I don't own a robe. I own a perfectly fine robe. Its got flowers on it. Blue and maroon ones, if you will know, lined in a blue terry-cloth. It wraps around and ties with a tie and hangs to the mid-calf. I wear it when I'm ill or chilly of an early morning. A perfectly fine robe that, as it does fairly light duty as a garment, is only washed a few times a year and is only slightly rattier than the day it was bought, I'm guessing some 20 or more years ago. I'm pretty sure I got it to go to college, primarily for schlepping down the hall to and from the dorm showers, again of an early morning. So, as you can see, Faithful Flower Robe was set to go through life with me and would probably have attended me on my death bed, should I have died of an early morning, before a shower.

You can see where all this is going, of course. I'm led to believe that this is how most affairs occur. You truly aren't looking. Perhaps you've wondered about it, why others seem so enamored with their robes that they seem to seek out their company. They speak of whole days lounging around together, reading or watching romantic movies, sharing a carton of ice cream, falling asleep together on the couch. But not me. No. FFR was perfectly comfortable, if neither handsome nor sexy. Why jepordize a nice, stable relationship. I'm not that sort of person.

And then, there I was, of an early Friday afternoon, killing time while Lilian was doing her time in rehab (cardiac, not ilicit substances; what kind of folk do you think we are?), wandering around the town's Shopko, looking at this and that, and what do I spy? A table with these young, nubile, soft robes piled on top. On sale. Before I knew what I was doing, I was fondling them. Surely there won't be one in my size.

There were two.

Surely they must be flawed: Bad breath. Some odd ink stain on the front. Dry clean only. But no. Pretty, washable, no embarassing ink tattoos in visible places, and a cheap date at under $ 20. Before I knew it, I had chatted him up, plopped him in the cart, whisked him home, washed him (who knows whose grubby hands had been on him before I found him?) and, before dinner was even thought of, I was wrapped in his arms. And since then, I've looked for any excuse to curl up with him. Instead of a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, when I come home, it's straight for him. He's had to be washed twice in two weeks after two unrelated food incidents marred his good looks, and he just gets softer. I find that wearing him over sweats just isn't nearly good enough and have taken to wearing shorts and a t-shirt in Wisconsin in January, so I can feel him snuggly 'round my arms and legs. If I lived alone, I'm sure I'd wear even less, channeling that wretched Brooke Shields / Calvin Klein ad from 20 years ago, "Nothing comes between me and my {obscenely soft robe}."

And the worst of this? Where have I installed Obscenely Soft Robe? In my closet, on the same hook as Faithful Flower Robe. FFR has to know about us, despite my tale of telling him that OSR and I are just friends and that I'm doing OSR a favor by spending time with him when I'd clearly rather be with FFR. I mean, they must talk, mustn't they? The sweaters on the facing shelf must also be aware, them and the shoes (such a clique-y bunch, the shoes) which means the rest of the closet knows. How can FFR hold his head up? I should do the right thing and just end it all, once and for all, with OSR, but here I am, on the couch, wrapped in his soft embrace and I know I'm not strong enough. Plus, I can't return him. I've lived in him for two weeks and I'm pretty sure I've (ahem) lost the reciept.

But there may be another side to this, which occurred to me as I saw them together this morning, sharing a hook, sleeve-by-sleeve. I wonder if OSR may possibly be sharing his affections when I'm not around.

If so, I don't want to know.

The Call of the Sirens (Part II)

2008-01-23T21:03:00.000-05:00

{Disclaimer: From this point on in this series, we will be talking about med school and beyond. There will be blood, guts, dead bodies, poop and other gross things. If this bothers, please don't read. It's not that thrilling and I'd feel bad if you had nightmares. Really. There's plenty of nice things to read on the 'net. No one will think less of you. Especially me.}

The night before the first day of med school found Charles and I (an engagement ring with the teeny-tiny diamond chip still feeling new on my finger) sitting on the grass in front of the house, both in a fog, feeling as though we were poised together on the edge of a cliff with one foot in the air and the other about to follow. We knew, based on rumor, television and novels, that medical school was a harsh, rewarding, soul-stretching, bankrupting, monster-creating experience. We'd been together for four years (not counting that 4 month split the prior winter where we both lost our senses but fortunately found them again) and knew we were bound together, but weren't sure where we were bound for.

Very scary. Very surreal. Very big debt if I found out that I hated it.

Backtracking, in high school I had a friend, Linda, who was in the majority of my classes. Linda, another friend (Doug), and I all wanted to become doctors and decited to re-unite as members of the class of 1991. Linda, indeed, was there and it was lovely to see her. (Don't know what happened to Doug. I heard a rumor that he went into something with finance but who knows?) Also in class was another high school alum, Essie. Essie had gone off to a nursing program in college but decided that her personality was more in line with that of a doctor rather than being the one following the orders of the asshole doctor. Knowing her, this was clearly the case. Essie was never one to suffer fools lightly nor silently. There was this incident our first year when she told one of our instructors not to be such a "fucking jerk", to his face and in front of several others students. I wasn't there, sad to say, but he was, indeed, a fucking jerk and he was less of one after she pointed it out to him.

That first day was of orientation, where we were herded around here and there, given lists for hundreds of pounds of books (literally, as this was in the pre-internet days), talks about what was expected of the behavior of future doctors (including the unspeakable sin of not paying off one's student loans), bowed, cowed, wowed, and photo-ID endowed.

That last ended up being a lesson I've since taken well to heart. See, it was toward the end of that exhausting first day and one by one we were sat upon this tall stool and had our pictures taken. I had no idea how important this photo was but it was to follow us about, displayed on our chests, attached to paper work, sent off to off-site clinics and so on for 4 years. Being strung out and frankly pooped, I didn't show a sparkly smile, but just sat and gazed back at the camera in what I thought was a non-expression. Nice and benign, neutral, trusty-looking. In short, what came out was a face that looked like a cranky, crazed Charles Manson, with bangs, on a touch of Thorazine. There might also have been drool. If there wasn't there should have been.

The next day started the real deal.

What did the first year of med school involve? In short 8 hours a day, 4+1/2 days a week (Thursday afternoons off for good behavior) of sitting on your ass in solid blocks of lecture after lecture, broken up with lab in the afternoons (sitting at microscopes or standing cadaver-side). The lab afternoons were preceeded with an hour or more of lecture before the actual lab work, just so we'd not lack for sitting and drooling. Evenings, nights and weekends were spent studying.

The first year was learning about 'normal', the second year about 'abnormal'. The first year broken up into courses like gross anatomy, biochemistry, embryology, and organ system after organ system of physiology: cardiac physiology; gastroentestinal physiology; dermatologic physiology; neurophysiology (The worst. THE WORST. I could never get more than 2 pages of the damn neurology read at a time without falling asleep or succumbing to a task like scrubbing the bathroom grout for mental relief) and all the rest, ad nauseum. Exams thrown in liberally, of course. After the first anatomy exam we went out and drank ourselves silly, as was only right. Actually, as you will not be surprised, we usually drank after most exams. The better to dump the old brain cells so that they'd not clutter the pathway for the cramming in of the new information. It was all about passing the tests. Test after test after test.

The lecture hall was one of those amphitheater-type things with the speaker down in the pit and the seats arranged in ascending rows with steps going down the sides. All dark grey cement and exposed floursecent lighting. Think industrial chic without the chic. Cold. Ugly. Hard. And yet you were still able to nod off. Most of the lecturers were deadly dull, primarily because most of them were PhDs with narrow interests in their own narrow fields, such as optic nerve degeneration in the hairless rat. The lectures from the few MDs that presented to us lowly first years were usually a breath of fresh air, primarily because they were so much more practical and gave us a glimpse into what we'd be doing in a few years.

What's that? Tell about the cadavers?

Ghouls.

Yes. Gross Anatomy. ('Gross' in this case meaning 'large' as opposed to 'micro' anatomy, a.k.a. 'histology' where we used the microscopes to look at slide after slide of tissue, and used them well, although to be honest, most of it all looked like 'spleen' to me.) They gave us the standard 'treat this gift of a human body with respect' chat and all that as we looked around at each other, some laughing nervously, some green, most a combination of both. We split into teams of 4 to a body: Myself, Linda, another friend from college, David, and Mark, who was going into orthopedics to specialize in knees. He was focused, Mark was. We were told the age of the cadaver and the gender (87 year old female), which wasn't immediately apparent as they were completely encased in hard, white, opaque plastic. They looked like futuristic mummies. They would be our companions for 8 months and we would know them intimately. You have to be amazed at the preservatives. The cadavers literally ended up falling apart as they were dissected to bits, but they never decayed. Scary that.

No one barfed. No one fainted. We started with the chest, and over the months worked down through the abdomen, then the arms, legs, pelvis, ending with the back and finally the head and neck. A fun fact: The vessels had been injected with colored latex, which helped greatly. Unlike a non-preserved body, all the colors become dark, muted shades of tan, dark red, deep eggplant, bright lines of red and blue (the vessels) running through, or the creamy white of the bones underneath. We named ours "Emma" after the feisty Fruit of the Loom underwear ad character popular back in the day. A couple of tables over, some more college friends of mine named their male after our despised college organic chemistry professor, Dr D.

The other thing I remember is that, as anatomy lab ran for 4-5 hours at the end of the day, twice a week, I'd end up famished before the end of each session. I'm not saying that I was craving beef jerky or anything, but it was a bit disconcerting: Scalpel, flesh, extreme hunger pangs. The course was proctored by two professors as well as this professor emeritus who was about 150 years old and looked like this tiny, fat gnome with a cloud of white hair. I think he was Dr S. He was frightenly enthusiastic, academically brilliant and had this way of dissecting something so that everything was clear in the field, but the bits o' human would go flying through the air. He'd end up covered with flecks of tissue all over him, especially around his mouth and you'd have to stand there and listen to him, ignoring the gore. He was an amazing teacher, though, unlike the PhDs. I'm guessing he's still there, unable to die, with all the formaldehyde he's absorbed and inadvertantly ingested over the years.

And, oh, that dizzy smell of formaldehyde drifting over all. We all wore neck-to-shin, long sleeved dark green gowns over our clothes, but that provided little protection from the odor and we had the habit of wearing old grubby things for anatomy lab. At the end, the gowns and tennis shoes were discarded as the smell had irrevocably seeped in.

The antomy exams were pretty brutal, too, first the written part and then down to the cadavers, each with tags and pins indicating what you'd have to identify. My favorite was the question on the final that had a jaw bone (mandible) broken in half, inverted, lying on the chest of one of the cadavers with one of the small slips of ripped muscle end tagged to identify. Seemed pointless to me, that question, as the only time we'd be presented with that in real life would be at the scene of a particularly horrific accident, and if that were the victim's jaw, that'd be the least of their problems-- whether or not if I knew the name of that slip of ripped muscle on the shattered half of their jawbone, now sitting on their chest wall. Nope. Not so practical.

So we went through it all. All 90 of us. And you know what? It wasn't as bad as Charles and I had feared. It was often miserable, always stressful, exhausting, frequently boring (yes! really!) intense (but the least intense of the 4 years), brutal, but it was what you had to do to get to where we needed to go. And often it was truly fascinating and exhilerating and even fun.

And, for the first time in my life, I didn't feel like a freak. For the first time ever, I finally felt that I fit in. That it was OK to be smart and to study hard. I wasn't at the top of the class trying to hide the fact that I was doing well. I wasn't the brain. I was in the middle of the class, a class with cool people and dorks and average-type schmoes and we were all OK. I can't tell you how beautiful that feeling is: to finally belong.

I guess I was where I was supposed to be.

The Call of the Sirens (Part 1)

2008-01-14T20:18:00.000-05:00

Now is the winter of my content. I am at peace. I am back to normal after the flurry of the past several months. I am dull.

No complaints. No sir. But, well, there's precious little to write about if one's days are a nice placid counting of the hours. The kids are fine. The pets are fine. Most of the appliances are fine (we'll see about the bread maker in a few days).

So that leaves me with no alternative but to trot out the past.

Yes, I've decided to take a page out of our Dumdad's book, not to mention the head of our Rotten Correspondent and the rest who've regaled us with tales of their mischief and misdeeds of yore.

It's time to shamelessly prattle on about my love affair (and not always an emotionally healthy affair) with medicine. I've also got a nice, young (lord, but she is young) newly minted nurse practitioner who's mentoring with me a bit for the next several Tuesdays. As she really doesn't need to trail me around seeing mostly sore throats and coughs (the season being what it is), today we'll work on her suturing and skin biopsying techniques. To what end I could be found at 6am in a grocery store buying a packet of turkey wings and a couple of dozen doughnuts. (The clinic needed doughnuts. I could tell.) Teaching always makes me feel nostalgic about my profession. It's that young idealistic look in their eyes that takes me back away from the growly, jadedness of life as usual at the clinic. We do love what we do but it's nice to be reminded.

So. High school finished. College finished. 8 years potentially wasted on nose-to-the-grindstone studying and solid afternoon after solid afternoon in various very smelly labs while all other normal college students were off getting drunk and sitting under trees with (I'm sure) other attractive college students pondering the merits of whatever they thought needed pondering. I wouldn't know. I was seriously studying. Science-y things. Very seriously. And doing extra lab work for those all important letters of recommendation. I may not be much fun but I'm a single minded little thing when driven. And, boy-howdy, was I driven.

Then came the time to put all this silliness to the test and actually interview: MCAT scores, letters of recommendation and rather good grades in hand. In my combination of financial hardship and either witless optimism or downright arrogance, I only applied to 2 med schools, one of which I shouldn't have wasted my time on as they only took in-state applicants and a few required students from states that didn't have a med school. (I spit on you U-Dub. You could have let us applicants know and saved me the time and the fee. Oh. I get it. You want the free money. Bastardos.) So in reality, only one school applied for: OHSU. Oregon's own and only med school with a nice, relatively modest, public university tuition.

In due course, I was invited to come for an interview. It was pretty standard fare with tour and two sit-downs with two faculty persons. One I don't recall at all, but the second one stuck in my mind as I was certain that she was some sort of cyborg, with the interview questions printed on a virtual screen centered on my person. As she went down the list in a humorless monotone, her eyes went from a space about 2 cm above my head, to my forehead, to my upper lip, to several places down my neck (several short questions), to finally end, with question #20, on my upper abdomen. I soon realized that my breezy manner of speaking and trying to establish rapport was futile and just answered her questions concisely.

I was not surprised to find that she was a pathologist.

All that formaldehyde, in my experience, seems to have one of two effects on the human being: It either causes chemical lobotomies or makes them loopier than a rum-soaked fruitcake. Social skills are apparently a minus in the profession, at least if they are in a teaching institution, or at least if they are in any teaching institution that I've had the honor of working in. (There, that should cover my libel bases.)

In any case, about 2 months later, one cold, gray February, I happened to be at my mom's house getting their mail (I think they were at the beach) and I saw that a thin letter had come for me. 'Twas from OHSU and I just remember things swimming and swirling around the driveway. I'm not one to freak, but I figured the occasion deserved it, so freak I did, in my quiet, 'let's not cause a scene' WASP way, which basically was me standing in the driveway, quietly shaking.

After a bit, I decided that the damn envelope wasn't going to tremble itself open, so I helped it along and read something along the lines of, "We wish to offer you a place in the School of Medicine class of 1991...."

So I shook some more, as clearly there was more freaking out that should be done. I may have teared up. Perhaps even emitted some "Eep! Eep!" sounds. There were certainly large smiles. All I remember clearly thinking was that I was going to get to do what I'd dreamed of doing with all that single minded focus for almost 8 years, and that perhaps it was all going to be worth it.

Perhaps.

Foul Play

2008-01-08T08:15:00.000-05:00

I had just finished a run when I heard the news, Hitachi.

"Five minutes ago, I heard the crash in the kitchen and I found the bread machine on the floor!" was what Charles, who was first on the scene, found.

There you were, obviously fractured, lacerated, possibly internally hemorrhaging.

Presumed dead.

Why??

At first I blamed The Dog. Makes sense. The dog is naughty.

The cat is also often naughty but as you weigh 10 lbs and the cat only weighs 5 lbs, I didn't think that she could accidentally knock you off the counter. I suppose if she used the butcher knife as a lever and jumped upon it as one might a see-saw, she could conceivably do the deed, but it really seemed like far too much effort for the cat. Perhaps if it happened late at night when she's looking for mischief and willing to expend the energy, but it was mid-afternoon, at the peak of her laziness.

Nah. Not the kitty.

Obviously The Dog.

Unfortunately, her alibi was cast iron. She had been curled up next to Charles the whole time.

"I think it wobbled off the edge of the counter by itself," was what Charles postulated.

Preposterous. You were set well back from the edge. You've never wobbled, even with the heaviest and hardest to work doughs. Not in 12 years. Not a wiggle.

That leaves a rather shocking alternative: Suicide.

I had thought I'd shown you over and over how much I appreciated you. I'd place you at the top of my "Indispensable Small Appliances" list each of those 12 years running. That's ahead of the food processor (you know, 'Cuisinart', the funny one that lives in the lower cupboard next to the stove) and each of the toasters (both 'Oven' and 'Slot', who seem to be so very clique-y) the rice cooker, the crock pot, and all the other gadgets. Yes. You even beat out the espresso machine, who does get me going in the morning but can be replaced by French Press in a pinch.

Perhaps I didn't let you know of my deep feelings of trust and dependency, let alone adoration as you brought the smell of a variety of fresh breads into the house. And let's not forget the ooohs and ahhhs from dinner guests as you let me casually pull out a freshly baked loaf of fragrant herbed or sourdough or baguette type bread. Some people are impressed by such things. But I always gave credit where due: "Oh. It's nothing. I have a bread machine, you see. It's so very easy."

But maybe I took you for granted. Or maybe it was my not letting you take things the final step that gave you a feeling if inferiority? I mean I know I'm prone to just use the dough cycle, preferring to do that last kneed myself, shaping the loaf and tossing it in the oven rather than letting you take the job to completion. Part of it was me. I just enjoy that part. But part of it was you. When I have let you, on occasion, bake that loaf yourself, it's turned out a bit (how to say this diplomatically?), er, gummy. Not horribly so. No, no, no. Just a trice. I hate to even bring it up.

Or perhaps, even though I do try to shake things up and try new recipes, I did over do it on the light wheat baguettes and you leaped off the counter out of a mixture of tedium and ennui?

(NOOOOOOOOOO! Not another bloody batch of light wheat baguettes!!!!!!!! Goodbye cruel world!)

But then I re-imaged the crime scene in my head. You. The counter. Sara's art bin. The knife blocks. The Cuisinart. The fruit bowl. The tomato bowl. Wait.

The Cuisinart.

The Cuisinart!?!

The Cuisinart. That was sitting on the counter, a mere foot from you. The Cuisinart with the biting sense of humor, sometimes much more on the cruel side than was absolutely necessary. The Cuisinart with the wicked-sharp blade that has cut me on 'accident' more than twice as I innocently reached in the dish water to clean it.

The Cuisinart, with its jealous streak a mile long, apparently long tired of missing the top spot of the heavily sought after Indispensable Small Appliances List. Think Susan Lucci at the Emmys.

I think we have the true sequence of events.

The Cuisinart, sensing its opportunity to knock off the perennial favorite, left alone in the kitchen while the rest of the household was elsewhere occupied, started after the Hitachi, blade whirling. The food bowl that normally would have provided protection from this weapon, rendering it merely a way to chop, slice or julienne fry, was in the dishwasher. No protection.

It was either be chopped to bits or leap to certain injury and likely death.

You leaped.

My poor baby!

At least you won't have died in vain. Justice will be served. I'll make nothing but weak bouillon in Cuisinart from now on.

But wait! What's this? Your motor still works? The dough is rising? The dinner's bread is not lost and you, while not pretty anymore, are not dead?

I'll give you a few days bed rest, and repair what I can cosmetically; then we'll try you out with a simple loaf. Perhaps a small loaf of cottage white.

And then we'll notify the police.

I'm sure the oranges in the fruit bowl will sing like canaries.

So Far, I'm Liking 2008 Much Better

2008-01-03T16:31:00.001-05:00

Hush.

Do you hear that? That's silence, that is. Golden, diamond-studded solitude. Well, except for the dog. There's always The Dog. Sort of like a shadow whose nails click on the floor. She'd really like for you to either just stay where you are, so she doesn't have to keep getting up from her nap to follow you to the next room, or she'd really like for you to go outside and play in the snow. But you're used to that sort of presence and judgement in your life.

But the rest...it's so quiet and peaceful.

Remember back at the end of the summer? School was to start, and for the first time in 9 years, I was to be alone in my own house for more than a couple of minutes at a time? I'd get to watch trash on TV without constant haranguing from the small handed ones. I'd get to nap in silence (yes, yes, except for The Dog). I could eat ice cream and chocolate for lunch and no one would be the wiser except for me and my sucrose-ill self. I could finally pee in solitude, no small girl barging in no matter how I explained that "Mommy really would like some privacy, NOW!"

And all that lasted, I believe for 2 whole days: a Thursday and its following Friday. Then Lilian had her fall and her heart attack and came to be with us, along with all my darling parents in succession, with surgery and recovery and meals on trays and visiting nurses. Everything fell together very fortunately, with minimal work lost, no permanent placement in an assisted care center, no daycare.

But, no solitude that I'd looked forward to with the same gleam in my eye that a prisoner has as he counts the days until release in hatch marks on his cell wall, listening to the living noise of his cell mates day in and day out.

Cell mates that he may actually adore; whose company he may have sought out and actively recruited, but everyone (and by 'everyone' I of course mean 'me') needs, nay craves, solitude.

And today, I have it. 5 whole hours from bus pick-up until bus drop-off.

I feel like a new woman. A new woman with rumpled hair from curling up on the couch, reading. A woman with no make-up (because...why?) a woman who's clothes may be a bit ripe but are comfortable.

I don't have the full 2 days at the end of each week that I'd planned on. Lilian still has her rehab that she needs to be ferried to each Friday afternoon, and tomorrow I've got to take The Dog to the vet, as well (Diarrhea. Dog and Diarrhea.) so that'll blow the Fridays, but if I can just have the Thursdays, I will be satisfied.

Happy New Year to me.

------------------

And speaking of years that are new, you'll be glad to know that I've already achieved my one and only resolution:

As I am beyond tired of shirts that are too short. I have declared war on shirts that are too short. I have purged my closet, shelves and drawers of any and all shirts that have a tail less than a full 8" below my belt line. I have freed myself from the drafty, horrifying double whammy of raising my arms in the course of living and exposing my white, dimply bare midriff to the chill and to the offense of the eyes of others.

I will accept words of gratitude from the general public.

I will look for some sort of award for Special Services To Humanity in the mail.

I will NEVER buy an inadequate shirt again.

Should anyone wish to start a fund to hunt down those who've perpetuated such misery in the name of fashion, I will gladly contribute time and resources.

And kindling.

Filler

2007-12-23T14:18:00.000-05:00

Here we are, on the afternoon of the night before the night before. It's bitter cold and these terribly strong winds are blowing the bit of snow that fell last night from county to county. In short, it's miserable.

I am not miserable, however, partly because I'm not a deer or a crow or any other non-hibernating, non-migrating Wisconsin creature, and partly because I've almost all my Christmassing ready. Gifts nearly all wrapped; cookies baked (they'll be smeared with frosting and sprinkled exuberantly with colored sugar, red hots and colored balls by the small girl, later today). I work tomorrow and then not until the day after New Year's.

That said, and in keeping in the tradition of happy, sappy holiday stuff; trying to witter on about something that I've not wittered on about over the past 3+ blogging years, I think I'll just go on about my favorite Christmassy things: Da ornaments, shall I?

I shall.

We've scads. I'm a bit of a junkie, as you've seen. We've the entire collection of porcelain Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer figures. (I think there are a dozen in all.) We've silk fruit bought in Japan by my mother when we were stationed there 40 years ago. We've glass and glitter and those pretty eggs. I'm a sucker for the sparkly and shiny. My very most favorite, though?

So glad you asked; you're always so obliging.

This biplane made of some sort of resin-y material makes me giggle. It's translucent and shimmery, (Joy!) and the propeller and wheels turn. I've a bit of a collection of them, including a lute and a banjo.

This lovely, large glass ball encases gold-accented, glass figures of Mary, Joseph and the angel around the baby in a manger. I wish I could make things of this delicacy and beauty, but if I could, I guess I'd not be curled up on the couch with the smell of cookies in my nose, but in a dark, 3rd world studio covered with burn scars. So I'll just buy them when I find them and encourage the exploitation of 3rd world artisans. Jesus would be pleased, I'm sure.

Then we've another of a small set of hand-made birds. These weren't made by an impoverished person in Bangladesh but my paternal grandmother, Thelma, circa WWII. It's made of strips of metalic-looking plastic and hung with a paper clip. The plastic is important as it's not made of metal, which was gathered for the war effort. I'm guessing the metal paper clip was added in the decadent 50s when such things were again allowed without being thought to be unpatriotic. (Let's pause to consider how us Yanks would do now do with such restrictions when we can't even give up our gas-guzzling ways in the light of what's going on in the Middle East. And, yes, we are also part of the problem in that we have a shameful SUV. We only drive it during the worst of the winter days, but the damn thing's paid for and it's hard to trade it in and buy a hybrid SUV. Waving at ourselves in the mirror.)

And then we have what I think is my very favorite. She's a DOCTOR. She's a SHE. See her little black bag and her clipboard and her head light and her white coat with her stethescope around her neck. I love her greatly.

And lastly, I leave you with this. Any guesses?

Anyone?

This was actually part of a set that Colin was given for his birthday from a friend last year. That's a hint. Last year he was still All Star Wars All The Time boy.

Yes! It's Boba Fett's head! 'Cause nothing says Christmas like the dismembered head of a bounty hunter, nosiree! There are also heads of C3PO, Yoda, and Darth Vader, but I like Boba Fett best.

So, from our little holiday enclave to where ever you are, we wish you a lovely holiday (belatedly if you celebrate the Hanukkah). Hope you are failing to resist lots of food that is bad for you, but good for your soul. Hope those who love snow have it and those who don't, well, don't. Mostly I wish you lots of love and friends and family and really good things.

A very happy merry, dearest darlings, a very happy merry, indeed.

For Colin, Turning Nine

2007-12-17T17:16:00.000-05:00

And so you are nine, my boy. I'm having something of a hard time getting my head around the fact that nine years ago I held you, this tiny (a whopping 5 lbs, 11 oz of you), calm, thoughtful creature who arrived so very considerately, 2 and a half weeks early, on a Thursday, my hellacious clinic day, so I didn't have to go to work tired and pregnant a day more.

Those have been some of your enduring traits: Your thoughtfulness, your compassion, your willingness to help out others.

(OK, so you gripe when asked to clean your room or set the table. I never said you were a freak, just that you are a really genuinely good person.)

You are also one amazing big brother to Sara, who, let's be honest, can be on the trying side from time to time. No one gets on your nerves like she does, but should something happen to her, anything from getting punished for doing something naughty to getting lost at the back of the bus on the way home, you are right there, protecting her.

(I swear that is not a posed picture. I just snapped it as it happened.)

Teaching her.

You still love the sciences. This year, instead of geology (although you still maintain an interest, just not such a consuming one), chemistry is your thing. I think most of this interest is that you think chemistry is in part making potions, which in a way it is, it's just that instead of turning you invisible if you drink the foaming contents of the beaker, you are likely to end up with a severe stomach ache, if you are lucky. Not wanting to burst this bubble, though, I have a feeling that Santa will be bringing you a bizarro chemistry set or two, so you can make some safe potions that won't turn out to be strychnine but green slime or a superball or something. Santa loves science nerds. Santa IS a science nerd. Yes she is.

Of course, this doesn't mean that you aren't a typical nine-year-old boy. No, it doesn't. You delight in fart jokes and poop jokes and really wanted to hand out whoopie cushions for party favors this year. A combination of how I'd feel as the parent of a fellow nine-year-old boy who brought home a whoopie cushion and used it non-stop for months on end and the fact that each one cost $5, led me to steer you to the quieter yet still twisted Chinese finger traps for your friends, along with water squirting grenades, mini Magic 8 balls and the like.

Speaking of your party this year, I'd say it was an unmitigated success. We took a page out of Chuck E. Cheeze's book and had all your friends over, stuffing all of you full of pizza and cake and then turning you all loose downstairs with the video games and the big TV for a couple of hours. 7 nine-year-olds all jumping up and down (because boys of that age are incapable of not jumping up and down while playing video games) at the same time and to the same rhythm nearly shook the cabinets from the house and the house from its foundation, but the structural damage to our little domicile was worth it. May I also say that you have really nice friends who all seem to think you are quite the great guy. As your mom, I can't tell you how that makes me grin big, stupid grins. If you continue to have great friends, you will be blessed, indeed. (And I'll worry less. Slightly less. Marginally. Maybe.)

So what I really wanted to say is how proud of you I am, how you make my heart swell, how thinking of you makes me get this big, sappy look on my face. I know, I'm embarrassing. All moms are when you get over the age of 5. But dammit, that's what you get for being so great.

But clearly, I'm not alone with this view, though at least I don't sit on you.

Deck The Son With Boughs of Gooey

2007-12-04T10:15:00.000-05:00

See, we really do get into the Christmas swing of things here, come December. Currently, Colin is in the lead with his own personal Left Eye of Christmas: The white portion being glazed over with a patina of deep red accompanied by plenty of glisteny green goo piling in the corners and festooning the lashes.

I tried to drape tinsel across his brow and hang mistletoe from his ears but he vetoed that, bolting to his room and barring the door. I considered getting a picture of the seasonal boy this morning but as I left at 0'dark-hundred, he was still asleep with a blanket wrapped all around his head. Being a compassionate and thoughtful mother, I decided, after much deliberation, not to waken him to the twin assault of my fingers prying his eye open to the flash of the camera.

He can now never say that I don't love him or put his needs first.

So, what to do to top this? The Rudolph schnozz with the green nose snot has been so over done; the human equivalent of fruitcake. I could use flaky skin as snow with a few snowman shaped boils (courtesy of the multitude of staph patients I get to see) clustered tastefully across my arms. My hands are certainly cold enough to provide the illusion of being made of ice, to further enhance the theme.

Pestilence as body art, for those who've tired of tattoos and piercings.

Retail Therapy

2007-11-30T10:01:00.000-05:00

Really, as a confirmed Christmas nut, it takes so little to bump me into the season:

This past weekend, surfing around for Christmas present ideas, these caught my eye and my hands, without my control, one-clicked them off the site. A couple of days ago, in the midst of my "I just don't feel like doing a damn thing for Christmas" funk, they arrived: Two large wood boxes filled with sparkly, glittery, glass ornaments. I'm such a fool for pretty-pretty ornaments.

Aren't they great? Don't you just want to put them in your mouth? Or at least dash out and kill a tree to hang them on?

Follow-Up

2007-11-26T08:33:00.000-05:00

So, Diana, what's going on out there in the land of brats and cheese, corn and cows? You've had a thing or two going on and have provided no feedback. What gives?

Well, thanks for asking! (Aren't you the kind ones to do so?)

Let's see...

Thanksgiving was nice and quiet and all the food turned out, so that was pretty perfect. Sadly, we were to a man Jack of us (Woman Jill? Kid Joe?) coughing and hacking (the bouquet of the phlegm blended so nicely with the gravy), so Lilian decided that an upper respiratory infection just wouldn't go well with her sternotomy scar and stayed away from all the festive nose-blowing. As her skilled nursing benefits were up (and as she was up and around), she and her few belongings shuffled across the small parking lot and back into her own apartment under the watchful eye of her neighbor, on Saturday.

Yes! Lilian has re-entered the building! She was to have come to us after leaving the nursing home, but, again, the coughing and sniffling and liberal usage of tissues made this not the place to be. She still plans on returning to us in the near future, though, so that's where we are on that front. So, cheers!

After our usual 2 false-alarm forecasts, we had our first snow on Thanksgiving, which was pretty and went away after a few days. Molly-dog and the kids were ecstatic. I was cooking. So, cheers!

After 7 months, my favorite road re-opened, "New! and Improved!". Before all the grading and paving and levelling and all, it had been this thrilling roller coaster that, if you theoretically (ahem) exceeded the speed limit, you could get the pit of your stomach to drop several times along it's length as you crested hills and plummeted down the other side. Yeah, sure, it was somewhere north of hazardous during a winter storm, but who the hell drives a roller coaster during a blizzard? That's when you take the interstate that's flatter and frequented by lots of snow plows. Now, while not flat, the high hills and big drops are gone, which is sad. I'm assuming it's still pretty (one of my favorite places on Earth is along this road: a bucolic pasture where cows graze and calves gambol and a stream wanders through it) but as it's dark when I drive in and dark when I drive back, It's going to be a while before I see more than the newly installed guard rails with their high-visibility reflectors. The whole thing has the feeling of a top-secret military landing strip. (Remember, this is waaaay out in the country where we don't believe in such wussy things as street lights. The moon and the stars were good enough for our fore bearers, so that should be good enough for us. If you're stupid enough to be out on a moonless, starless night, well, you just deserve what you got coming. Plus, most of the dark months are accompanied by a nice, reflective blanket of snow, which should be more than enough for the team of horses pulling your sleigh to see by, right Half Pint?)

Still and all, it's good to have the county road back, face lift and all. Trims a good five minutes off our commute each way. So, cheers!

For some reason, I'm just not in the holiday spirit right now. I've dragged out a few decorations (and by "few" I mean "3"). Santa has ordered a few things online but hasn't the slightest interest in trotting off on Rudolph to an actual store. This is very odd as I'm usually a Christmas fool. Good thing we've got a few more days this year. I'm thinking I'm going to need them.

As of yesterday, I think we've finished Lousefest '07. The last dousings of Rid were done. The final combings of the locks were clear. The microscope was returned from the counter of our bathroom to it's rightful place, the microscope-shaped space in the dust on my son's desk. Well, it's mostly done. The toys and such in the plastic bags in the garage still have a week to go, but think of how happy we'll be to see them. Sort of like a mini Christmas at the start of December! Maybe that's my problem. I'm missing my wood-handled, soft-bristled hairbrush. The nasty-assed cheap-o hard plastic brush that I found at the back of Charles's drawer is so cruel to my delicate scalp. The kids are well-versed on the evils of coming into contact with any spare hats or hairs of anyone else on the planet. They now don't even flinch when I leap out at them from various closets and doorways shouting, "True or false! We never, never, upon pain of death, even if it's 180 degrees below and we've forgotten our own hats put someone else's hat on our head?!?" More importantly, they get the answer to the question right with 100% accuracy.

I'm also positively giddy at the thought of not dealing with 2-3 times the amount of laundry in the course of a week and am looking forward to not having to make my kids' beds more than once a month. (Hey. They're little. They don't stink. Much.) So, cheers!

Sara's first kid birthday party went well. It was apparently the first birthday party for several of the little girls in her class and quite the social event of the season. The pinata was an especially brilliant touch, as it took up lots of time in first, getting everyone in their coats and shoes, then trotting them out and around the back of the house, where we'd hung the damn thing from the balcony (it was a large, pink crown. I'm regretting it wasn't a huge Dora The Explorer head or something equally despised) and then giving each kid multiple whacks with first, a soft bat, and then a hard plastic bat and finally, a hefty stick, until one girl had enough and took it to pieces. Go her! Then more time was spent with all the gathering of the candy and putting it in their bags and then going inside and shedding coats and shoes and all. Basically, with the pizza before and the cake and presents after, that was the whole damn party! Double cheers!!

Colin's birthday is in a few weeks and none of us, including the birthday boy, himself, can decide on a party idea. In a few years, he'll be old enough to do the planning himself. I'm secretly hoping he'll go my route of least bother and just have a family party from 5th grade on. And if he doesn't decide on that, I'm thinking a well-placed bribe may swing things in my lethargic favor.

I just don't do parties well. Guess that's one more thing for their future therapy sessions.

Speaking of which, that may be an idea for Christmas: Therapy gift certificates as stocking stuffers. That and journals in which to write down all my parental failings, birthday parties and all. I get why children's party planners are in business. I can see the appeal of just pulling out a check book (or applying for a bank loan) each year to give Junior a lovely birthday without ripping parts of your soul out to do it. I'm even dreaming of googling the location of the nearest Chuck E. Cheese, which goes to show the depths of my desperation. I won't actually do it, mind, as that'd take effort, but I'm dreaming of it.

And the furry ones? How are they now that they've turned 2? Very much the same. Mad-Kitty still has the propensity of getting herself shut in drawers and not meowing for release (meaning we still get to literally comb the house at 10 pm after we've gone to bed and realize that not only is she not in her usual place, curled up next to me, but we've not seen her for hours). Molly-dog still loves everyone and pees at any bit of praise or censure. A few days ago, Charles was dismayed to find her at the study window watching the UPS guy deliver a package. She was not barking (like any respectable German Shepherd). She was not even just watching. She was wagging her tail so hard that her body was moving back and forth, her ears flat to her head, whining in excitement that here, at last, was someone new! Someone she might possibly get to go out to greet and pee all over the shoes of, just to, you know, demonstrate her adoration and all. And, by the way, if here were interested, show where we keep my grandmother's silver and the stereo equipment. Clearly we need another dog if home security is a concern. We'd wanted a Shepherd who was submissive and non-agressive, but this is ridiculous.

And, finally, there've been no further zombie squirrel sightings on the UW campus, and I never did get that caramel latte, with or without the ricotta.

So that's the state of my Union. Yours?

Haikus for Fucking Lice

2007-11-16T20:09:00.000-05:00

"Mom, my head itches."
We think nothing of this phrase;
we eat our dinner.

But after, I look:
combing through his lovely hair
with my sure fingers.

Huh. What the fuck's that?
He has stuff stuck in his hair.
Probably some food.

Think I'll trot off to
his room, find the microscope,
and make up a slide.

(Best Christmas present,
I'll tell you, very handy
to have for such things.)

Damn. The specimen
seems to have vanished off the
tip of my finger.

Another sample.
A slide. Then a cover slip.
Eye peers through the lens.

Fuck. It's wriggling there.
Trapped beneath the cover slip.
Nowhere else to go.

(Sorta cool, though.
I can see my son's blood move
through his intestines.

That's why they don't let
me go out much in polite
company. I'm weird.

I find icky, gross
disease states and such horrid
vectors kinda cool.)

Hurriedly, I go
through the instructions for the
eradication.

I beat back the urge
to race to the car and drive
to a pharmacy.

Tomorrow morning
will be soon enough to get
pediculocides.

Barkeep, set 'em up!
Nix all 'round for each of us.
Kill the fuckers dead.

I don't care if it's
not necessary to treat
if it's not on you.

So, tomorrow we
will procure a case of it;
soak 'til we are prunes.

Then we'll spend the rest
of the weekend combing hairs,
all in a circle.

Who's to blame for this?
Who knows? Smart money's on the
friendly neighbor's kid.

So, now we are all
itching with imagined blood-
sucking parasites.

Don't share hats or combs
or coats. (Don't play football with
the damn neighbor kid.)

For Sara, Turning Five

2007-11-09T20:14:00.000-05:00

Ah, my beautiful girl, now you are five.

Once again, I sit in staggered awe at the person you are. Somehow you are much older than your years, yet still retain the adorable wonderment that is the stamp of one of your age. You see what others are doing around you and don't even question if you can do it, too. You just do what the rest of us are doing.

We all read. Therefore, you decided to read. Really read. Real words. You made the hair on the back of my neck stand up a couple of weeks ago when we cracked open that wonderful thing that is a brand new book. (In this case, what has become your favorite of the past 2 weeks, The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid Of Anything.) Curled up in the rocking chair in your room as part of your bedtime ritual, we opened it and, as I was curious, I started pointing to the words in turn on the first few pages. Damned if you didn't read 80% of the words cold. You'd been 'reading' for ages, but as it'd been books we'd read over and over and over and over, I just figured you were reciting.

Nope.

When you were helping me with the wash (and may I just say what a large help you are, my best girl, always willing to help with the dusting and the toting of the laundry and the dumping of the flour into the batter) last weekend, you then read all the words describing the laundry settings on the washer. Well, almost all of them; 'delicate' gave you pause.

You also can do your 1+ and 2+ additions, which you learned from your brother being quizzed one day. I guess what gets me is that you can just do stuff that we don't realize you can do because you don't make a huge fanfare out of it.

Which doesn't mean you are not a drama queen, though. Noooooooooooooo. You can throw a fit with the best of them over the smallest (one might even say 'non-existent') thing. Your stubbornness is also legendary. You will forgo candy and popcorn and playing Guitar Hero in your refusal to eat a bite of your dinner. A dinner, I might add that is not composed of meatloaf, beets and liver with onions, but grilled chicken, salad and pasta. And you used to eat absolutely everything I put before you. You will even insist that you are tired and need to go to bed at 6:30 pm rather than eat your nice dinner, and then proceed to go to bed, sitting there happily reading and singing to your dolls and animals until you fall asleep 2-3 hours later.

Lord, help us when you are 15. (And there is no way in hell that you are moving downstairs to the basement bedroom. No way in hell. We are either putting you in your brother's room, which is right across from our room, or installing you in our closet through your high school years.)

You love to play ball sports and are rather good at them, unlike me. You must get that from your dad. You also love to draw and paint and anything else of that ilk, which you do at the kitchen counter while I fiddle with the food. It's lovely.

You are warm, generous and very empathetic. You are tough in some ways but a small bump on the leg will be grist for conversation for days. You will not take medication for any amount of love or money or loss of privileges. This makes it particularly difficult when your fever is over 104, let me tell you. I blame most of my gray hairs on those times.

You are very protective of your idol, your big brother. I am suspicious that a lot of the things you've accomplished have been because you admire and want to do what he does so much. Good taste in your role models.

Starting school has gone better than I had expected, thanks to your amazing teacher, the fabulous Mrs B., who was Colin's 5K teacher. A wild woman at home, you are very shy around people you don't know. The first several weeks were hard on you, especially because you really do still need an afternoon nap most days. You've adjusted, though, as we knew you would. You are making friends nicely and are thrilled with the thought of your first 'real' birthday party, with a pinata and pizza and, of course, cake. Your dad and I were particularly thrilled with your choice of cake: Chocolate with chocolate and chocolate. And roses. (Just like Robert the Rose Horse, natch.)

But best of all, to me, is that you still love to be with me; you want me to sit with you on the couch and "cuddle" with a book or a game. You want me to hold your hand in the parking lot or walking through the house (the latter can be difficult if my arms are full of laundry or crap or dishes). You want me to read to you before bed and color with you in the kitchen.

And that makes me the luckiest one of all.

This morning, at 5am, I woke to you singing "Happy Birthday to me! Happy Birthday toooooooo meeeeee....."

Happy birthday, indeed, my best girl. May this year be filled with happiness and wonder, just like you.

Curses

2007-11-06T08:00:00.000-05:00

Our scene: Evening. Large waiting area with big comfy chairs and soothing, sage green decor. Seems to be a hospital, but without the smell. I am ensconced in a double-wide chair with an acquaintance, Heather, who is like a daughter to my MIL, having a lovely chat and catch-up. I've always liked Heather. Lilian, herself, is seated several feet away in another overstuffed, comfy chair, smiling and happy. 2 others are seated near by, part of our party. Shouts of "Mom! Mom!" and Colin and Sara run up, giving me hugs, accompanied by Charles and my dad.

Charles: I'm going to the coffee cart. Anyone want anything?

Diana: Ohhhh! That'd be lovely. How about a decaf caramel latte. Or maybe a pumpkin one....NO! I know. One of those Venetian ones if they can do it all fat free.

Dad: Hey, that wouldn't be too bad for you, especially if they have the fat free ricotta cheese along with the fat free milk.

Diana: No it wouldn't, especially with the cinnamon. Actually, though, I think I'll go with the caramel latte. With whipped cream.

As Charles exits in search of a lovely caramel latte, harsh, harsh light suddenly streams into the room, morphing it into my chilly bedroom at 4:15 am. It seems a child has gone to the bathroom and left the light on to hit me square in the eyes. Weeping with sorrow and frustration, I haul my sorry self up and out, staggering to the bathroom, eyes screwed up against the assault, and hit the switch. Bother. Might as well pee.

Back to warm bed in search of those last 45 minutes of sleep (success) and that promised caramel latte (failure).

The office coffee this morning, while good, is just not the same. I'm not even overly fond of caramel lattes. Pumpkin, yes, but caramel seems just sweet without the flavor. So now I'm craving something I'd rather take a pass on.

Yes, we must live with life's little disappointments but was 5 more minutes too much to ask? And why does this never happen with broccoli? Or that odd Venetian latte? Awake, I'd certainly not be craving a coffee drink with ricotta cheese, cinnamon or no cinnamon. I'm not into chunks of cheese in my beverages.

Santa will remember and note this little incident on his list. At least he would if he knew which innocently shut door hid the evil child.

4th Hurdle: Taken with Feet to Spare

2007-11-02T08:15:00.000-05:00

Never, but never, bet against an elderly Latvian former WWII refugee.

Oh, yeah.

Halloween day, they transferred her from her bed in the hospital, where they'd taken pity on her (as aided by the lowish cardiac ward census) and not assigned her a new roommate in 48 hours, to the local nursing home that is part of the old fart's complex that also houses her apartment. Prior to her discharge, she was doing a bit better again, with some return of her sparkage.

The evening of her transfer, we all trooped into the nursing home, bearing a box of diabetic ice cream bars, as requested, and two suitcases of "clothes to exercise in" that I'd culled from her closet. The kids in their costumes (a knight with a sword almost as tall as he was and a forest fairy, complete with wand and wings) and the adults in their coats, thinking of how very good that beer awaiting them back home will taste. After much tracking and backtracking (the signs in the nursing home are apparently there to confuse rather than clarify), we finally found her sitting up in bed, cheeks rosy, eyes bright, telling the nurse her life's story. She looked like she did about 10 years ago and I don't think she drew breath for 10 minutes as she rattled on non-stop, relating her day's activities. If I didn't know better, I'd think she'd been dipping into the gin.

I want what she's having.

Well, without all the cutting open of one's chest cavity, of course.

She had a roommate, who was pronounced "very nice", and she's thrilled to be there where she knows so many people. I think she's going to choose to get better. The next day they were going to move her to a private room and start twice daily physical therapy. I know we're not home free, but she's only a week post-op and looking better than she has in ages. She's getting her drive-me-crazy personality back and she's in her element. She even knew her nurse, who goes to her friend's church. Everyone knows everyone in this small town.

Somehow, I think even the meatloaf will be palatable.

Thank you all, again, for all your patience and good wishes and just for being there. There really is nothing like a strong, supportive group of friends. You have helped me more than you will ever know.

And now back to our regularly scheduled blog. There's been too much seriousness, lately, carnivorous squirrels notwithstanding.

Zombie Squirrel Of Death

2007-10-30T23:00:00.000-05:00

In celebration of this beloved day of haunts and ghouls, I leave you with the following true tale, as witnessed a couple of weeks ago by Marvelous Charles on the UW Madison campus.

Seems our hero was strolling to class one gorgeous fall day in late afternoon, when he noticed a fellow human looking with an expression of fascination and horror at something on the ground. As is only natural, he found his eyes swivelling to the object of her gaze and found himself with the following image seared upon his psyche for all time:

A large, fluffy gray squirrel, the sort that gambols around parks and playgrounds, sitting on the ground, by a tree, with a dead bird in its paws, wing sticking out askew, holding it as one would an ear of corn. Fluffy was tearing into the carcass with a gleam in his eye, clearly enjoying his gruesome meal.

It seems that squirrels are either carnivores or this particular squirrel was a zombie and was getting his daily allowance of rotting flesh. Or perhaps he was an experiment from the zoology program gone horribly, horribly awry, released upon an unsuspecting public. In any case, I'll never look at one the same way, again. Nor will I ever linger near one, at least not without a stout stick and a sack of carrion at the ready to distract and defend from possible squirrel attack.

You can't make this shit up.

3rd Hurdle: Knocked Down

2007-10-28T06:13:00.000-05:00

Well, finally! The first shoe dropped.

When we went in to visit yesterday, we found her looking like she'd been through the wars, and as she was a WWII teen aged refugee from Latvia, that is saying something.

She apparently developed atrial fibrillation in the night, resulting in her third night of no sleep and an amiodarone drip (a yucky drug with a slew of short and long term potential side effects but the best option for short term treatment of this heart arrhythmia). It's a common occurrence and usually doesn't result in any long term complications, so I'm not fussed, but to her it is just one more thing.

She also had another evacuation of the roommate. This one apparently was quite ill and had so much going on that they moved her to a private room so as not to disturb Lilian. (Now, of course, we are all thinking, "Um. How about if Lilian gets moved to the private room and be done with it?" but that would be crazy talk.) So, for those keeping track, she's had 4 roommates since she was rolled out of the ICU, only one of which was discharged (she with the bed-ramming husband). Last night, Charles and I were taking bets on the fate of her 5th roommate. I am betting it'll be a good old fashioned 'Discharge to God', which will be discovered a bit past midnight and result in the creepy bustle if activity that accompanies a hospital death, including the scrubbing down of the room by surly housekeeping staff, because who the hell wants to be mopping a floor at 3am?

This will, of course result in her 4th night of no-sleep. No wonder she looks and feels like she's been trampled by vast herds of bison.

So, for those keeping tabs:

Post op day # 3
4th roommate removed in 48 hours
First post op complication (a. fib)
3rd night without sleep
Spark gone. Last night she didn't even have the oomph to feed herself.

But, on the plus side, no meatloaf. Judgement restored.

They had been talking about sending her home with us on Monday (heh, yes, day after tomorrow), but I can't see how she'll manage that. We're pulling for a short stay in a nursing facility for some intensive rehab so she can come back home with us.

I'll keep you further posted on these General Hospital Days Of Our Lives, because what else have I to write about? At least Charles and I are getting lots of that car time together with our trips back and forth twice a day...

2nd Hurdle: Crossed. (grudgingly)

2007-10-27T08:39:00.000-04:00

For those still hanging in there with us, nothing bad has still not happened yet, unless you count the pinch-sized bruises on our arms that we keep giving each other to check our state of reality.

Yesterday, they rousted her out of bed for not one, but two 'walks' down the hall. I used the word "walk" as it is what you call human ambulation, but I suspect "totter under duress and possibly gunpoint" would be a better term. As one who is not used to illness, Lilian is like most of us and does not enjoy what having one's body fail entails.

In short, she does not enjoy ill health.

She has had her share of horrors the first 24 hours after leaving the ICU, including the really, REALLY cranky old man in a motorized scooter who repeatedly kept banging into her bed right after they moved her to the regular cardiac ward, despite our saying, "HEY! Please watch what you're doing." He was apparently married to her roommate, who was loud, but soon discharged. As he scooted past us, he glared his gloweriest at us, apparently for not allowing him to continue to ram the bed of a woman 16 hours post bypass surgery, bloody chest tube and multiple IV drips, not to mention various other catheters emerging from her bruised person.

May he have a long, miserable stay in the level of hell populated with all the others of his kind. They can all be horrifically rude to each other and at least deserve their glowers.

Then they gave her a new roommate, a 96-year-old lady, who, according to Lilian, "looked 96 years old," (her way of disparaging someone). She apparently was moved after a solid hour of screaming, yelling and hollering about this and that. I don't know if she was intentionally doing this or just really confused (imagine that in a scary hospital), but given her prior roommate, maybe Lilian is just unlucky in attracting the only horrible people in Wisconsin. (State motto: We're really cold but really nice.)

Then the meatloaf was horrible. (As a confirmed hater of meatloaf, I found this hardly surprising.)

Then they started having her get up and around by sitting in a chair and by the previously mentioned totters down the hall. She also spent time with the social worker and the physical therapist. No rest for the weary.

So that's where we are in all this. She looks beaten but she's got a glint in her eye that she didn't have in the days leading up to all this. She seems to be mentating better than she has for the past several weeks. She has the strength to resent what's happening to her and more power to her. No one should have to endure hospital meatloaf, even if of one's own choosing.

1st Hurdle: Cleared

2007-10-25T08:35:00.000-04:00

Damn! but I hope I'm made of such tough stuff when I'm 82.

Lilian came through her surgery beautifully, well, if being on a ventilator with tubes coming out of one's trachea, chest, bladder, and internal jugular vein is considered beautiful, that is. The lovely surgeon was able to bypass everything with only 3 vessels rather than the 4-5 he anticipated, which resulted in about an hour or more less time on the bypass machine and only 2 long scars on her extremities where the vessels were harvested from: One on her arm and one on her leg.

What bothered her most prior to going into surgery?

Having to remove the bobby pins from her hair. She had thought that as she would be wearing one of those surgical shower cap thingies she would be able to keep her hair up. "No, no, no," said the nurse and out they came, much to her chagrin. I think she may have tried to keep a few in place but the nurse made her comb her fingers through her hair twice to make sure they were all out. They are in a urine specimen cup (unused) awaiting her recovery.

When we saw her late yesterday afternoon, she was able to rise to consciousness enough to nod to questions, such as "Do you have pain?" ("Yes" and then "No", as the lovely morphine took effect.), and she wiggled all 4 extremities. From this, I can say that she had no catastrophic neurological event, and that's definitely something.

The next few days will show us what sort of path the return journey will take, but for now we are just extremely grateful that she has done so well.

As always, thank you for all the wonderful goodness you sent. (And, Cagey, your care package was waiting on the table when we straggled home all limp and wrung out from the day. The Choxies went far to revive our spirits. Sadly, Sara is now a junkie, as are the rest of us. She had to be told in no uncertain terms that they were not acceptable breakfast food. At least not acceptable for small-handed ones. I then had to turn away so she wouldn't catch a whiff of the hypocrite on my breath. Ahem. The stickers will entertain them later today, while I try to get some things done, so I bless you twice for your wonderfulness.)

Over and out.

Better

2007-10-21T09:48:00.000-04:00

I can't tell you all how much your comments and support have meant.

Things have settled down a bit over the past few days. Thursday, Lilian and I spent 5 hours (including travel time) waiting for this and that related to her impending surgery, mostly at the cardiothoracic surgeon's office. It is fortunate that I'm not lacking in butt cushion as the chairs, as per health care regulations, were. Sitting in the overcrowded waiting room it struck me how waiting in a patient waiting room is just like waiting at the airport for your flight. Well, except for the lack of multiple food courts to pass the time. The endless sitting with full knowledge that the time you have been given for a departure from the waiting area is only a vague estimate, usually greatly delayed. Unless you choose to try to dash to the bathroom, and then your number is called.

Also, we found out how little the HIPAA privacy act does to actually protect the patient from the whole world knowing what is going on in your private life. For instance, as we sat in the holding cell, listening to one of those daytime court TV shows that I tried unsuccessfully to cancel out with my book (Teri Gross's All I Did Was Ask -- very good for such situations where you want to read but need to be able to close the book at a moment's notice), our presence was being noted by the driver of the monthly shuttle from Lilian's retirement apartments. He was there shuttling a passel of little old ladies to their own physician appointments. So all her doings were known all over the apartment complex within a matter of a couple of hours.

Now, of course, this wasn't really news to them as she receives multiple calls each day from the tell-a-friend network, but there you have it. Should you need to keep your visit to your physician truly private, best to wear a full gorilla costume in the waiting room. Otherwise, you are guaranteed to be spotted by the least discrete someone you know who knows all your nearest and dearest.

Don't say I never warned you.

So. We've now got a date for her surgery (4-5 vessel CABG, AKA: Coronary Artery Bypass Surgery): Wednesday morning at 0:dark-hundred. And then we can finally know what we are facing for the long haul. I quite liked her surgeon, a very neat, snappy dresser with a nice, patient bedside manner. (A CT surgeon SHOULD dress like he stepped out of a GQ Magazine advertisement. We all know what one makes a year and dressing otherwise is false modesty. Plus, how can you trust one who looks anything but fully pressed? Good God. He spends much of his days with both hands in people's chest cavities. Would you trust this to a slob?) He politely listened to her discourse on her recent trip to Latvia, despite being about an hour late, explained what she should expect from her recovery in thorough but not overwhelming terms and left her feeling that she was in good, competent hands. As did I. He was just what a CT surgeon should be. Her cardiologist also impressed me as did all of the nursing staff we encountered, the surgeon's own nurse even taking us the short cut through the back halls and back elevator to save us half the distance to the lab. Absolute angel.

Dad has graciously agreed to be here with us to watch the kids and berate the naughty dog (who ran into the street while she was supposed to be having a nice run around the property with him) and watch over Lilian upon her recovery when Charles and I are working. This means that the search for daycare can be put off for now. If Lilian pulls a miracle, we may not need to arrange it, if not, at least that's almost 3 months that Sara will have to adjust to all this, which can only be for the better.

My sanity is much restored, thanks to the above and Marvelous Charles, who has been a rock in all this, and all of you, the best friends in the computer anyone could ever have.

Wish us all well come Wednesday morning. We'll need every bit of it.

What's Going On

2007-10-14T08:47:00.000-04:00

OK. It's time to talk of many things: Of shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings and why Diana is in such a distracted state and whether pigs have wings....

It's been a hell of a less-than-two-months, my dearest darlings. Some of you know some of this. Some of you know most of this but not all of it, as the last bit we just found out, so there's something for everyone. I needed time to see how things would sort out and get my head around all the life changing ramifications of What's Going On. Oh, and just to continue my cryptic, woman-of-mystery patina, some of the WGO will be just alluded to as this is not the place for it and it is not my tale to tell. Basically, this is all about me and how it affects me and all other self-centered bits and bobs.

Why did I take so long to clue you in? Because this little personal refuge of a blog is where I come for a break from what irritates and annoys, a place for the funny and bizarre that I encounter. It's rarely the place for the cold harsh face of reality.

That's not to say that I've not discussed things that made my heart rend, like this and this and let's not forget this. But mostly I like to keep this a sunny, cheery, cynical place where you can come in and put your feet on the furniture and have a glass of wine or a cookie (or both).

Sometimes, though, my need to make things all shiny and happy is outstripped by the need for some good-old-fashioned support from my friends and this is one of those times. Plus, sometimes you just need to get everything out and look at it outside of your head.

So, here goes:

About a week after we'd all finally crawled from our respective germ-coated couches and decided that we just might inflict ourselves on the world again, we headed off to run our Saturday morning errands, coming home at lunchtime to a slew of frantic messages on the machine. To sum up, my mother-in-law, Lilian, had fallen the day before and had severe back pain. Charles headed off to take her to the emergency room. The upshot was that she'd had a heart attack the day before, which caused the dizziness which led to the fall and the pain in the back that finally had her calling for help. It wasn't the first fall. It wasn't even the 41st fall, apparently, but she's one who loves to blame every thing on her medication and refused to tell her doctor about all these falls. (sheesh.)

So she's been living with us full-time while she slowly recovers from the fall and the fall-out of the fall. We've added walkers and bath benches and hand-held showers and many, many pills and appointments to our days. Home health nurses and physical therapists make visits. I can now give an enema and empty commodes with the best of them. Or at least on par with a first-year nursing student. Word to the wise: never underestimate the bowels in the grand scheme of things. Never.

In the course of events, the three of us traipsed up to Madison last Thursday so she could undergo a coronary angiogram with the hope that she'd be a candidate for coronary artery stenting and all would be well.

(Excuse me while I laugh at the beautiful naivete': Hah! HAHAHAHAHA!)

The bottom line is that every major vessel that supplies blood to her heart (left main, RCA, LAD, circumflex and diagonal) all have stenoses (blockages) of 95-99%. If it weren't so horrible it'd be miraculous. She's sustained minimal damage to her heart but the blood supply to the whole damn thing is hanging by the diameter of a hair. And everything is markedly calcified. Not just the coronary vessels but the aorta.

So. Multi-vessel bypass surgery it is. But wait, grasshopper. There's more. Remember the calcified vessels? The ones with the thick inner ceramic coating? Bypass surgery involves bypassing the blood supply to and from the heart so the body can keep on living while you halt the beating heart for a while so you can sew in all these new vessels to bypass the narrowed vessels. (Seems the term "bypass" is apt, yes?) To do this, you must clamp the aorta (main blood vessel that carries oxygenated blood from the heart) before it branches off to the rest of the body, like, oh, the BRAIN. The clamping will crush some of the calcium and make bits break off and go floating thither and yon.

Get the picture?

These bits will lodge in distal vessels and halt blood flow. Some of these bits are enough to kill significant tissue. Stroke is a huge risk. This is on top of the memory problems that often result from just being on bypass.

Right now, aside from the blood supply hanging by a literal hair, she's in great shape. Her brain works as well as it did when I met her 25 years ago. Probably the same as it did when she, herself, was 25. She's in absolutely no pain (aside from her still sore back). But if we do nothing, she's got 100% chance of dying in the not too distant future, either quickly from a massive heart attack or more slowly and miserably by congestive heart failure.

So between a dead cert and a small chance, she's taking the small chance of more good quality life. She's not ready to die, yet.

That's enough about non-me.

How does this affect me? You mean aside from losing the mother of my husband? The "Gram" of my children? Someone who's always been there for us (sometimes more than I'd like, but that's just me being poopy)? Well, to start with, she's been the one to care for Colin and Sara when we are at work. If a miracle happens and she sustains absolutely no devastating neurological or physical complications, the soonest I'd guess she'd be able to be there as primary non-parental caregiver, getting the kids on the bus and shepherding them after school, would be early January. That means that I've got to get them into daycare. I'm not worried about Colin. He'll adjust with minimal grief.

Sara is another story. She'll adjust but it'll be rough for her. She's very much a mommy's girl and in my absence, she's a gramma's girl. She trusts few strangers. She's shy. It's been hard for her adjusting to 4-year-old kindergarten. (It's been good for her, but it's been hard. She comes home in exhausted tears more than half the days. She needs morning class but we didn't win that lottery.) Add in daycare and she's going to have a very rough few months. It's breaking my heart. Had this just happened one year later, she'd be a year older and in full-day 5-year-old kindergarten. Going to daycare for an hour before school and a couple of hours after school wouldn't be that huge a deal.

Daycare will also mean that I have to have a change in my work hours. There's no other way. In some things Charles and I can share the childcare, but as a school principal, he can't adjust his hours. My work will balk but I don't think in the end they will refuse because they need me as much as I need them. Thank goodness, as (all together now) I love my work. It'd devastate me to have to leave it and find something else. I live almost an hour from work and most daycares will let you drop off your child by 7 am but pick-up must be by 6 pm (or earlier). The nature of my work is that I can't guarantee that I will be able to walk out the door by 5, so I'll need to be off by 4. (For instance, the last patient of the day with a complaint of "cough" will invariably turn out to need STAT blood work, an ECG, a chest x-ray, etc. Can't do that in 15 minutes.)

This means that my Wednesday afternoons that are devoted to things like working in the family planning clinic at the Health Department will have to go by the wayside. I should still be able to function as STD clinic director as it doesn't involve clinic hours, just chart review, which I can squeeze in, but I hate to give up the STD clinic, so we'll see what can be worked out on that front.

Charles and I won't be able to drive in to work together anymore, which is sad. That's good time we get just to ourselves to talk and listen to NPR and just be alone together. We'll survive and it wasn't likely that we'd be able to do it next year as it's time for Charles to be making the next career move, but we weren't looking for it to happen now.

And as long as I'm being selfish, those non-Health Department Wednesday afternoons off have been so handy for things like dentist appointments and haircuts and work-out time.

What else is Going On? Well, we've been blessed by visits just after all this happened, initially from my mom and step-dad and, following their departure, my dad (the Ole RFer) has come for a couple of months. His arrival was beyond a blessing, but the reason for it was heart-breaking. That tale is not for here but it has wrought it's own long-term devastation and life on that front will never be the same on many levels.

So that's why I've been in a first-class worry. Life has been horribly eventful but not funny. Even the day spent in the hospital last Thursday was without much in the way of funny.

So, life goes on. It is what it is and we must roll with things as best as we can, but it's all been a bit much all on top of each other. It's as though everything got thrown in a tumbler and shaken around and thrown back out with nothing facing the way it was.

I'm blessed with having a strong marriage and my kids are strong and healthy, but we're in for some boulders over the next few months. Thanks for letting me spew and pretty-please don't take it personally if I'm not regularly around. It's just that sometimes coming up with a post or even turning on the computer seem like more than I can take. Uncertainty is not something I do well with. After the surgery, we'll know more what to plan for but for now, I'm just trying to have as many safety nets in place as possible and cause my kids as little sudden upheaval as possible.

Fallen

2007-10-08T09:33:00.000-04:00

Who doesn't love fall?

The roses in the spring were lovely but the rosehips are fabulous.

True, the garden is lying in the gutter with it's stockings torn and it's skirt over it's head,

but it's easier to get at it's goodies. (ahem)

The monarchs are fueling up for their migration down to Mexico,

And the box elder beetles are cannibalizing their weak and their dead

to gather strength and numbers

for their annual assault on my house.

Marching over my floors and my walls.

Mad-kitty initially tried to hunt them down but now ignores them as they apparently neither taste good nor provide good sport. Unlike the moths, who satisfy both urges. Frequently she can be found cleaning moth scales off of her pus. Yesterday, for a change, she decided to try slug, but found the texture wanting and had to take multiple breaks to clean the slug snot off her paws. She didn't want to give up, though, so tried bringing the slug into the house for further keeping, perhaps thinking that time would tenderize it, but Charles and I quickly vetoed this little plan and flung the slug from the balcony onto the ground below where some bird will reap the windfall.

Should you come to visit, please accept this advice: Don't kiss the kitty. She's a disgusting little thing.

Molly would like you to know that she'd never eat a slug and is safe to play frisbee with. As long as you don't look too hard at the frisbee.

Special Delivery

2007-09-25T17:07:00.000-04:00

I adore my job.

Under the title of medical director of the county STD clinic, I just received a box of 1000 extra strength lubricated latex condoms in lurid purple. They are in a large (but hopefully not lubricated) box on my desk.

I'm thinking as Halloween is just around the corner, maybe someone wants me to hand these out as treats to protect against the 'tricks'.

Now to decide whether to put them out in a candy dish at the main desk or hand them out to the deserving in little jack-o-lantern baggies. What would the little elderly church ladies who come in to see us say?

Too bad they aren't flavored.

I'm Not Dead, Despite Rumors To The Contrary

2007-09-19T08:45:00.000-04:00

Actually, I'm nearly all well. As are the kids. It's marvelous.

Sadly, we've had a bit more of the ill-health wind, this time involving my poor mother-in-law, who lives with us 1/2 the week and makes sure our kids have vegetables with their meals when I'm not there.

(Actually, as I'm not there, the presence of vegetables may be sheer fallacy, as she tends to be the indulgent sort with the grandchildren, but I prefer to hold firm to my vision of plates laden with vegetables and nary a candy bar or Cheeto in sight. And lots of time spent reading and working on various mentally stimulating and emotionally satisfying activities while listening to the collected works of Mozart or Billie Holiday.)

While not sharing confidences that are not mine to share, I can say that she's now home with us from several days in the hospital and doing better. Charles and I have split time off work to be with the kids and thankfully my mom and step-dad's visit starts tomorrow, so we will have some breathing room. We are hoping that my mother-in-law recuperates nicely and will be able to continue to marshall the small-handed ones, as it is so much nicer than day-care and she really enjoys it, but we will do what we have to. Time will tell.

It's been a stressful several days on top of the plague-ridden several weeks, so I've had little time for you-all, my dearest darlings. (Plus work has been a whirl-wind of meetings scheduled during my pre-work blogging time, not to mention all the patients, bless their phlegmy little souls, who are coming in droves.)

So that's what's been happening. I've also spent time shaking my fist at the filthy house and the hoard of flies, both house and fruit, who have invaded my house despite my best efforts with vacuum and plastic baggie traps. (Last count: 47 houseflies have met their maker in the bowels of the trusty vacuum and well over 200 fruit flies have either been dispatched via vacuum or trap.) For once, I'm not going to be sad to see the first nights of hard frost.

Please don't count this as a real post, just a whiny explanation as to why I'm seeming to ignore you, yet again. I suck, but we all knew that.

I'll be back soon, hopefully with something amusing to writing about and I'll continue to slowly make the rounds while cramming a hasty meal in my mouth. Love you all.

Act II

2007-09-11T08:48:00.000-04:00

Of course, you knew how this was going to play out. Our heroine finally gets on some drugs that start her finally on the road to recovery and the blush of health, when her adored offspring decide to do their rather impressive impression of viral surround-sound.

To get the full effect, it works best to recline one child on the love seat, the other on the couch; positioning yourself between them, lounging in the Big Chair.

To the tune of Strauss's The Blue Danube:

"Cough, cough, cough, cough, cough!"
"Hack, hack. Hack, hack."
"Cough, cough, cough, cough,COUGH!"
"Hoik, hoik. HOIK. HOIK!"
"Cough, cough, cough, cough, cooooooough, snort, snort, snort!"
"Wheeze, sneeze, wheeze. Wheeze wheeze. Sneeze, sneeze!"
(Snort, snort.)

If you are me, and find yourself crammed in the Big Chair between the two plagued ones, though, you will get to experience the extra sensory bonuses of surround-tactile-enhancement. This is sort of like those seats that are set up to vibrate with the movie for more realistic involvement with the theater experience.

But instead of merely shaking the seat with the coughing, you have the bilateral waves of heat giving you the impression of being in the Sahara. Add in the multi directional showers of phlegm and snot, and it will make you feel that maybe it's not the dry dessert of the Sahara so much as the hot, humid Amazon rain forest, and that maybe the horrible sounds are the mating calls of the very rare Giant Speckled Tree Toad.

Put the film, "Amazon" on the TV and you are in for a multi-sensory experience that people would pay good money for.

(In case you were wondering if I was harboring any guilt over giving my kids my illness, I will rush to deny that I did any such thing as the incubation period would have been 2 +1/2 weeks (too long for it to be my fault, thank goodness) and that their crud seems quite different from mine. So. Not My Fault and I think it'd stand up in court.)

Sadly, tomorrow is "School Picture Day", which they are almost certain to miss. This means that it all comes down to "Picture Retake Day" to get it right for the picture frames of the extended family. (School pictures are one of the staples to be sent as one of the Christmas/Hanukkah presents as well as being tucked into holiday greeting cards to our nearest and dearest.) One doesn't care to waste School Picture Day, especially if one's youngest can't seem to get the idea that for a nice picture one needs to both smile and open her eyes. She either looks like she wants to take your head off or she's doing her rather brilliant Stevie Wonder impression, sans dark glasses: eyes shut, dreamy smile, head tilted back and to the side.

So, as you can see, I was rather counting on the option of the picture retake.

And finally, send your very best hopes that poor Charles knows when to breathe and when to run from the room covering his mouth and nose, as I think his days of good health are numbered and the one thing certain to make his already crazy-busy life as grad-student and middle-school principal (not to mention father, husband and chief dog-tire-er-out-er) is to get good and sick.

Now is not the time, bugs. You hear???

Remiss

2007-09-07T10:41:00.000-04:00

Yesterday marked a large day in my little universe and yet I let it slide past without immortalizing it in the form of a post.

Sara started school yesterday.

I now have entered into that stage of parenting where I can legally toss my progeny to a state sanctioned institution for 5 hours a day (including bus transit time).

I now have time alone in my house.

Let me repeat that last sentence: I. Now. Have. Time. Alone. In. My. House.

For those of you without small children, you may not fully grasp the hallowed nature of those words.

For almost 9 years, I have had at least one small person with me constantly, unless I'm at work, going to work, or coming home from work. They have been with me in the bathroom. In the closet. Even in the cupboard under the sink where I once tried to grab 5 minutes of 'alone time', wedged between a box of steel wool pads and a petrified banana peel that had escaped the garbage. In one way, it's delightful. I adore my kids and think the sun rises out of their heads in the morning and sets in their behinds at night.

I am also someone who craves time alone.

And now I have it.

For the last year or so, I have met the thought of handing off my youngest child to school with a slight lump in my throat, truth be told. I had quite a time doing so with Colin. He was so small getting on the big, yellow bus all alone. I do miss the small-handed ones when they are away from me and I thought that when the day came to hand Sara off to school, I'd have at least a few tears prickling my eyes, possibly even stooping to openly sobbing.

Nope. I loaded her in the car yesterday, drove us down to school, trotted her down to her class, passed her off to the fabulous Mrs B (who was Colin's beloved kindergarten teacher), kissed her soundly on the cheek and headed for the door. The car keys dancing in my fist.

Free.

Alone.

Or at least I would have been alone, had the repair guy not been waiting at home, trying to fix the satellite and dismantling Charles's rather complicated theater system for much of the afternoon. ("So. What channel does the TV have to be on to get the satellite?" "The one it was already set to." "Oh. I changed some things around." "Well. You're on your own, buddy. Here's Charles's work number. I don't touch that shit.")

But today, there are no repair guys scheduled. There are no errands I am running (sadly, I'm still sickly. Actually getting more sickly. But I'm getting more antibiotics; bigger, better antibiotics, so things WILL be looking up in the future. At some point. Yes?) and I have plans to wear the fabric of the sofa cushions bare with my lounging ALONE for 5 hours, this afternoon. If someone rings the doorbell, they'd better be delivering a large box of chocolates, otherwise I shall cough purulent goo all over them and wither them with my glare of contempt.

And Sara? How is she doing with being abandoned by me? Heh. By 8:00 this morning, she was asking for her lunch, (she'd had her breakfast an hour before) as she knows she gets to get on the bus to go to school after lunch.

I think she's ready for this as well.

Status Quo

2007-09-03T21:10:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow, I'm back at work. Colin is back to school. Sara goes off to meet her teacher (starting for real on Thursday). My mother-in-law is back from her summer in Latvia and my garden is sad.

There's something about August that always seems to kick my poor garden's ass. What is green and thriving and ready to fruit in July is crispy and blighted and bug-gnawed (and prone to rot) in August and September. I'm still harvesting plenty of tomatoes and enough beans and cucumbers, eggplant and chard for our uses, but it all looks like ass.

In a small way, in a few short weeks, when the first frost kills everything for good, it is always something of a relief. All dead. Start anew next spring. Next round in the bug wars to be planned. (Next year, I'll try putting down planks for the damn squash bugs to hide under and be caught and destroyed, theoretically, more easily than looking under each damn leaf, inevitably missing a cluster or two of eggs, which leads to the wasteland of August.

Damn bugs.

We hates them, Precioussssssss.

Still haven't regained my voice. It's been over a week and, even for someone as non-talkative as me, it's gotten old. T'will be, um, a challenge (irritating? annoying? hair-pullingly-slow?) to try to obtain medical histories via whispers and written notes. Will keep my phoning to a minimum, though, so there's that.

What else, what else? Charles heads back to grad school, so we miss him two days out of the week until the Christmas holidays.

So that's where we are, now. Back to where we were. Comforting, in a way. Looking forward to the delights of real fall in a few weeks: fresh apples, cold nights, jeans and sweaters. Hard to believe it's just a couple of weeks away.

How goes it for all of you; the start of the other side of summer?

Fun With Fevers

2007-08-29T19:12:00.000-04:00

(whispered voice) Hullo all.

(cough, hack, hoiiiik)

Yes, I didn't miss me either.

Actually, I'm fairly positive that those doughty astronauts up on the International Space Station who were testing some sort of infrared telescope had to repair the optics when they mistakenly aimed it at Southern Wisconsin, thinking that it'd be a nice, coolish spot, what with the heat wave having broken and all, only to find a searing spot, roughly human-formed, spelling rude words with her limbs in a fever haze. After the third day of fevers of 103-104, you have to start to use your inner muse to entertain yourself as you really haven't the energy to lift that 2 oz paperback, let alone keep your eyes open to read it.

But! On day...oh, what the hell was it.....what the hell is today, come to ask...anyway, Inferno Day Something-or-other, Marvelous Charles had his way and I started to swallow the damned antibiotics, and, lo and behold, 24 hours later, my fever started to throw all its dirty wash (and it had lots of sick-sweat-soaked stuff, you can be sure) into its bag and started to back out the door with hurried apologies that it had an urgent matter of business that must be attended to. And 12 hours later, nothing remained but the pastiness. Charles claims that this rapid response means that he was right and it was not 'just a virus' after all. I grumbled something about not being able to rule out coincidence and who the hell went to med school, anyway, and please pass the water and my next pill, thank you.

I am also left with the total absence of my voice. And the cough. Oh yes, and the rather unpleasantly pulled back and shoulder from the damn cough. But. Gone are the fevers and I can hug and kiss the children, again, after 5 days.

I can't yell at them, but I can kiss them and that I'll take.

I also find that approximately 3 pounds of me got mistakenly crammed in with Fever's dirty wash, so, there's that for the good! Now all I have to do to lose that last 10 lbs is to continue to eat 400 calories a day and raise my basal metabolic rate to that of a small neutron star and I'll fit into my skinnier jeans.

Yeah. Right.

The kids have been most marvelous. Charles had full parenting responsibilities over the weekend, but sadly had to return to work on Monday, it being first day of school and all and one CAN NOT EVER miss the first week of school if one is an educator. If one has a massive heart attack, it is expected that one will propel oneself through the halls to one's blackboard or office in one's hospital bed and work. After all, you just had 3 months off. You should have planned it better.

The last couple of days have been survival mode. Colin has had the responsibility of making breakfast and lunch for himself and his sister. They have had nothing but peanut butter and honey sandwiches, waffles, cold cereal, milk and carrots with ranch dressing, but they are seeming not to mind it. Hell, for all I know, they are eating nothing but ice-cream and ice-cream and just smearing peanut butter on the counters, but what I don't know won't hurt me. Charles makes them a healthy dinner, so I think we're not likely to see advanced scurvy and I've sent them outdoors each day it's not been storming, so they won't get the rickets. Pellagra is possible but I think they had some meat a few times at dinner, so we should be OK there, too. The trip to the dentist, tomorrow, will sort the rest out.

And so, I leave you with my heartfelt apologies for failing to visit youse alls. It's common for me to not post for a week, but I feel badly if I don't see my friends for more than a couple of days without mentioning that I'll be off to Monte Carlo as the Crown Prince needs my advice on a 'little matter.' (Does Monaco have a Crown Prince? They have a Prince, but a Crown Prince? Is Rainier still alive? Clearly no one in Monaco will even be asking my advice on toilet tissue now. Blew that.) I especially apologize to Rotten Correspondent who knows me but a short time and blogged me such nice birthday somethings that I have inadvertently ignored in my ague. 1000 apologies, Rotten.

Oh. And one more thing. Apparently, when you have NO voice what-so-ever aside from one's inadequate whisper, one's dog will stab you in the back and, while you have shuffled off to the bathroom, will eat the last piece of chicken that you left on the table, which was the ONLY thing in the house you felt that you could fathom putting in your mush, masticating and swallowing. When you come shuffling back from the bathroom, shaking with rigors, you will soon be shaking with rage and screaming in whispers (which are not at all intimidating). You will hustle said traitor and man's worst friend into her crate to rot until you are sure that upon letting her out you will not messily murder her. It's not at all the murder that you mind, but the mess, as you haven't the strength to clean it all up, what with all the damn chicken grease that's smeared on the floor, by the plate. I add that she has never done such a thing in her almost 2 years with us. Coincidence? Don't make me laugh.

And! I also have an inkling of what religious fanaticism feels like to a zealot as I stood in my poor kitchen, still shaking, sweaty and weak; wielding the wand of the vacuum, I systematically summoned 22 houseflies to their doom. It takes a steady eye and hand and I had neither, but what I did have was the grim, steely certainty that right was on my side and that I would not fail. In short, I found the strength of 10 Dianas plus 2 and didn't collapse on the couch until I had gotten each one I could find. They apparently thought they could stage a coup d'etat on my kitchen. Not while I still have a limb to command, fuckers. Now I just need to figure out if the damn dog intentionally or accidentally leaked the news of my illness to the king of the flies, and deal with her.

So there you have my trials and goo. I missed you all and will make the rounds slowly. Rest assured, though, I will be reading all you have written. Late to the party, but making amends and covering my mouth. Tissue, anyone?

42

2007-08-23T18:50:00.000-04:00

"Forty-two is the number Deep Thought gave as being the Ultimate Answer."

"Yes."

"And the Earth is the computer Deep Thought designed and built to calculate the Question to the Ultimate Answer."

"So we are led to believe."

"And organic life was part of the computer matrix."

"If you say so."

"Ford," he said suddenly, "look, if that Question is printed in my brain wave patterns but I'm not consciously aware of it, it must be somewhere in my unconscious."

"Yes, I suppose so."

"There might be a way of bringing that unconscious pattern forward."

"Like how?"

"Like by pulling Scrabble letters out of a bag blindfolded."

Ford lept to his feet.

"Brilliant!" he said. He tugged his towel out of his satchel and with a few deft knots transformed it into a bag.

"Totally mad," he said, "utter nonsense. But we'll do it because it's brilliant nonsense. Come on, come on."

Arthur closed his eyes and plunged his hand into the towelful of stones. He jiggled them about, pulled out four and handed them to Ford. Ford laid them along the ground in the order he got them.

"W," said Ford. "H,A,T...What!"

Arthur pushed three more at him.

"D,O,Y...Doy."

"Here's the next three!"

"O,U,G...Doyoug...It's not making sense I'm afraid."

Arthur pulled another two from the bag. Ford put them in place.

"E,T,doyouget....Do you get!" shouted Ford. "It is working! This is amazing, it really is working!"

"More here." Arthur was throwing them out feverishly as fast as he could go.

"I,F," said Ford, "Y,O,U...M,U,LT,I,P,L,Y...S,I,X...B,Y...N,I,N,E..."Hi paused. "Come on, where's the next one?"

"Er, that's the lot" said Arthur, "that's all there were."

He sat back, nonplussed.

He rooted around again in the knotted up towel but there were no more letters.

"You mean that's it?" said Ford.

"That's it."

"Six by nine. Forty-two."

"That's it. That's all there is."

"I always knew there was something fundamentally wrong with the Universe."

--abridged from Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Today, I am 42. The Ultimate answer to the Ultimate question.

I am expecting great things from this year, starting with dessert, of course.

In Which I take Leave Of My Senses

2007-08-20T17:51:00.000-04:00

I present living proof of my insanity:

Paper mache.

Really.

In my kitchen. Dripping on my table. Puddling on my floor (which, thank God, is a faux-marbled paper-mache colored ceramic). Coating each of us.

See, I'm home with the little angels for 2 whole weeks. Actually, what with the Labor Day weekend at the end and the fact that I only work the first 1/2 of each week, it's a day shy of 3 weeks. Our lovely summer sitter, C, had to selfishly get her little self off to college the middle of the month and modern society frowns upon 8 year olds and 4 year olds being taken care of by adolescent dogs, no matter how good their intentions are.

Desperate to find something for us to do to take up a rainy morning on a day that was not my time-honored favorite "Let's Clean The House For Money, Kids!" Day, I agreed to have us make pinatas.

Yes. I am agreeing to do crafts.

I am not in the least little bit craft-y. Nothing personal, I just never saw the point. Knitting, sure. There's a use for that sweater. But a Popsicle stick napkin holder? Not even as a kid did I see that as anything but crap. (I was a shitty Girl Scout.) I apparently lack the gene. It must be next to the one on the "X" chromosome that confers the desire for expensive designer bags, which I also lack.

So, we blew up the balloons, and then made a quart of flour-based glue, which we dredged strips of paper in and plastered all over balloons. Which then had to drip-dry, indoors, so they wouldn't become large fly strips.

Here they are, dangling over the kitchen table where only a few pet indoor flies were present (drip, drip, drippity-drip).

Then they were tissue papered and painted. And glued and glittered.

Actually, when he realized that we WOULDN'T be filling them full to bursting with bags and bags of candy and then whacking them open and then stuffing ourselves on the bags and bags of candy, Colin rather lost interest and decided his would be an "egg". An undecorated chicken egg. (I owe him a pony or a car for that.) His is, of course, on the right.

Sara, however, took full advantage and glued and painted and glittered hers extravagantly. I am still finding green sparkles in odd places on my person, despite having had more than one shower since then. I'm not sure what Sara's pinata is. Neither is she. But it sheds the carefully applied glitter nicely, so I'm thinking it's a kindergartner from the egg dimension. Or a grade-school art teacher, from the planet Ovoid.

Today, we used the morning splitting my psyche in two as I attempted to fulfill the school supply requirements of both kids' teachers simultaneously at the local Shopko.

For some reason Sara must have a box of 8 crayons that are not the 'jumbo size', but the 'regular size'.

As far as I can tell, they make the box of 'regular sized' crayons 16 or 32 or larger and the box of 8 crayons 'jumbo sized', but not what is required. I'm thinking they can take the box of 16 and lump it. She also needs a box of 'pipsqueak markers' as she is a girl. What the fuck? The boys have to bring paper plates.

Seems like the parents of daughters, who will be subjected to multiple bizarre fashion demands over the years, should be the ones to bring the simple paper plates and the parents of the boys, who for the next several years will be happily dressed in a uniform of jeans and t-shirts, get to find the 'pipsqueak markers'.

Or maybe the teachers figure that the parents of girls need the practice.

Oh. I also realized that all the pairs of jeans I bought Colin are the wrong size. But that's OK. I can use up another morning exchanging them.

I think I don't have enough beer in the house.

No.

I know I don't have enough beer in the house.

In Lieu Of Our Regularly Scheduled Blog...

2007-08-17T08:53:00.000-04:00

I almost never do this but THIS had me laughing so hard that I was unable to do more than make those sobbing little "eep" noises, which caused poor Colin much concern from the adjacent room:

Colin: "Mom! What's wrong?"

Me: "Nothing honey. I'm just reading something funny."

C: "But you sound like you're crying!"

M: "I am just a little but it's because this is so funny."

C: (After coming in to look at the computer monitor.) "Are you going to cook that????"

M: (Wiping the tears streaming from my eyes): "NO. God no. Don't worry. Not even I would make that."

C: "Good."

And now my question: Did these items really end up on the tables of Americans in the middle of the 20th century? And was that the reason for the heavy consumption of martinis? And what about the poor children?

Ingrate

2007-08-08T09:38:00.000-04:00

It's now about 16 hours later and I'm still disgruntled.

As always, my disgruntle-i-tude is met with that small, yet imposing figure in my head, armed for some reason with a rolling pin, an apron and a very disapproving expression, telling me in no uncertain terms that I've got nothing to whine about, buck up and stop sniveling and think of all those poor people in China or Afghanistan or Rockford, Illinois, for Pete's sake.

I hate her. I can't even wallow in self-pity in peace.

Anyway. Yesterday. Tuesday. The Tuesday. Annual Date Night Tuesday.

Last week, looking for a movie to take the kids to, I noticed that the sorta local IMAX theater had the new Harry Potter film playing. I sighed and wished that my kids were the sort of hardened ruffians you could take to an intense Harry Potter movie and have them sit nicely and not have nightmares afterward. I then looked at G-rated movie times and moved on. But the seed was planted, and my mind worked a way to make this happen.

Charles, that audiovideophile, even agreed that going to see a flick in an IMAX theater would be even better than seeing it in his home theater and, therefore, jumped with gusto on board the date idea. The last movie we saw in a theater was in 2001. To put things in further perspective, we go out on a date about once a year, usually for our anniversary. As this year's anniversary was the pre-conference barbecue dinner with 150 other educators, I really didn't count it as our annual date.

I was looking forward to this the way a 5 year old looks forward to, well, maybe not Christmas, but certainly the 4th of July. I was even counting down the hours. Really and truly.

So, all I had to do was finish clinic on time, have us scream out of there right at 5 pm, leaving any undictated charts for the following morning, eat dinner in the car, and arrive there just in time for the 6:30 showing. We could just make it if the heavens aligned and the gods smiled.

Which of course, they didn't.

I knew damn well they wouldn't. The last patient was not the easy problem it seemed at first, and the 30 minutes I seemed to have to spare turned into finishing 30 minutes after we had to leave.

Of course.

I had further jinxed things by telling my physical therapist pal that (squee!) I had a date to see an IMAX movie alone with Marvelous Charles. No kids. In a theater. Not 6 months after everyone else had seen the movie.

I had only myself to blame.

Ah, but wait. As my life is often one of those 'good thing events didn't turn out the way I had planned or such-and-such would have turned out differently', it didn't surprise me that there was a Part 2 to the evening: Which would be the 1/2 inch of water in the basement storage room from the foot of rain that had fallen over the previous 36 hours.

Little damage had occurred aside from wet carpets and a few drippy cardboard boxes, so in the grand scheme of things, we'd have been awfully sorry to have had all that molding mess sitting there for another 24 hours or more.

Which should make me terribly grateful.

Instead, I'm still cranky and disappointed and my head is still full of that small rolling pin shaking woman telling me to stop feeling so damn sorry for myself.

Which is only making me more cranky and ungrateful.

Bah.

Theft and a Bit of Vandalism

2007-07-30T09:05:00.000-04:00

"MOM!"

"Yes, Colin?"

"The worst thing EVER! You gotta come and see!!"

This, you see, was the prize tomato. Formally the size and shape of Kate Moss's buttocks, nearly red, Colin had been watching it with a mixture of awe and anticipation. See, he was going to get to eat the Butt Tomato.

Well, he was, until whatever-the-hell-it-was-with-teeth-and-a-not-overly-small-jaw took the first bites. Over a few days and many more bites later, the huge tomato dwindled to a mere rotting shadow of itself. Colin was beside himself, "Mom. I'm just going to go out there and kill all of the bugs. They ATE the tomato. They can't live. I'm going to kill them all."

Well first, I had to applaud his zeal in defending the vegetables. Finally, a partner in the War on Bugs. (At least on the bugs that mess with the garden: The Squash Bugs. Also the Cucumber Beetles. But mostly the Squash Bugs.) But then I had to clue him in that the evidence disputed that the chomps were from the mouths of bugs, as there were definite teeth marks (as far as I know, bugs are completely lacking in dentition) and the bites were larger than 3 of the biggest Squash Bugs put together, end to end. Bigger than a tomato Hornworm could manage at the end of the summer. About the size a dog or raccoon or elf would make. Maybe a pixie, if it were a very large pixie.

A couple of days later, looking out the bedroom window, I noticed that the ground squirrel who has his burrow opening just to the west of the garden wall, was playing with a red something. At first I thought it was a piece of red rubber dog toy, but then, after squinting in the binoculars, I realized that he was sitting up on his haunches, chowing down on a tomato the size of his head and torso combined. You can see him below, nearly finished with the booty. (Yes, the photo is crap but my telephoto lens hasn't much tele in its photo and I had to enlarge it oh, so many times. The varmint is sitting up with his back to the right, holding up the tomato fragment, facing to the left, busily eating.)

Bastard.

Cute bastard.

He supposedly eats bugs, too, so I'm not going to touch him, of course. Suddenly the 'accidental planting' of over 20 tomato plants for the 4 of us seems like not such an absurdly large number.

And that brings us to the abduction of 2 out of 4 foxgloves that I'd planted by a bench to be enjoyed while sitting and gazing out over the pastures.

A few weeks ago, I trotted down to smile at them, and discovered nothing but a perfect, gaping hole where they'd been lovingly planted two months before. It was not like it'd been dug out. There was no dirt spray, such as would be if Molly had taken it out. The hole corresponded exactly to what I'd dug with my little trowel; the plant completely missing. No signs of it having been drug off a little ways. I searched around in the brush and bush but found nothing. I must admit that evidence of digitalis poisoning (vomiting, yellow halos surrounding the objects in one's vision, death) as evidenced by a small furry thing collapsed by a tree (with a dent the size of a small furry head in its trunk), surrounded by its last meal, partially digested, would have done my heart good. But all I found was the second missing foxglove with identical evidence of removal. The two remaining ones just sat there, smiling at me. Maybe they got tired of the banal banter of the 'missing' two and hired the thug deer.

Finally, the week before last, someone seems to have come by and without any warning or by-your-leave, stolen our nice, paved road. Maybe they needed it over in the next county, but we do miss our road and hope they return it soon. Can't imagine what the snow plow will do to a gravel surface. It's already getting nicely rutted. Soon, it will be deeply grooved, what with all the tractors and cattle trailers that use it.

And the vandalism?

Seems the turkeys took a liking to the late season raspberries but not the kids' slide, taking a large dump all over the platfrom:

With 8 acres to choose a toilet from, why was this surface so attractive? It's even splintery.

Haikus For The Woman By The Side Of The Road This Morning

2007-07-24T09:23:00.000-04:00

Driving down to work,
6:30 AM, sunrise.
At the edge of Monroe.

Colors of muted
Green and brown and grey and white...
and bright magenta.

You stroll by the side
of the highway, in the grass,
wearing your nightgown.

Nightgown? Really? Sure?
Yes. Satiny, Shiny, and
Thankfully not short.

Grass covered your feet
So I couldn't prove the pair
of fuschia slippers.

You seemed comfortable
with your being, no need for
a coat or a robe.

Best of all, in your
hand was the leash attached to
the black, happy dog.

Strolling there with you,
tail high, around his neck
a large white lampshade.

He seemed quite perky.
So maybe the shade was more
a fashion statement.

Thank you for the smile.
I will keep your image with
me throughout the day.

In my dull clothes
Of beige and muted aqua
and brown and camel.

But my mind is now
Magenta and fuschia and
perky white lampshades.

Impatiently Waiting

2007-07-20T19:38:00.000-04:00

Tracking the Package from the warehouse of Amazon, this morning, we couldn't help but notice that not only had the Package gotten to the Middleton, WI, UPS depot, but it had departed from the Middleton, WI, UPS depot. As we are only about 45 minutes by vehicle and beltline from Middleton, WI, AND historically, when we've ordered items from Amazon, they've gotten here a day ahead of the anticipated arrival date, it was with no little frisson of excitement that I realized that I just might hold the thing I've awaited most in the last two years in my hot little hands a full day before I had right to expect to.

It is now approaching 7pm and not one of the vehicles that's rumbled down our road has been the UPS truck.

Guess it's a just punishment.

Driving to the grocery store this morning, Charles and I were quite amused to note the huuuuuuuge line in front of one of the chain bookstores at 8 am. I'm guessing that these are crazy people who not only reserved their copy of the Package in advance, but are waiting in line for the store to sell them their reserved copy 16 hours from then. Do they think the store is going to run out of the book that they pre-ordered and paid for? Why not arrive at midnight and wait in line an hour? Why not arrive at 11pm and wait in line 2 hours?

Had the Package mistakenly arrived early, as it has been rumored to have done if ordered by another online distributor, I must admit the temptation was there to have jumped in the car and driven by the hoards standing (none seemed to even be condescending to sit in lawn chairs, which would have at least shown a whiff of sense, especially if a well stocked cooler was in attendance) in line brandishing my copy of ill-gotten Package and then zooming away before they could swarm the car and take out their wrath upon us.

I've got my space at the ready: Couch up in the loft, pillows plumped. Floor vacuumed. Blanket at the ready. Plants watered. Table at arm's reach for snacks, pot of tea during the day, glass of wine during the evening, pot of tea in the middle of the night. Mad-Kitty has her instructions to curl up at my feet but not on my chest. Charles has plans for the small-handed ones and himself that involve a movie marathon in the basement. No dog, no children.

All is set.

You won't hear from me until I'm done.

It's been a long 2 years.

My Dog Has Placenta Eyes.

2007-07-14T17:48:00.000-04:00

"Aaaaaaaahhhhhhhh!!!!!"

Charles: "What's wrong?"

"Aaaaaaaahhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" (grabs counter, blinks, rubs eyes, looks again) "Aaaaaaahhhh!!" Honey! Please come in here! NOW.

Charles (from The Big Chair in the living room, which, let's be honest, is so very comfortable that you really don't want to leave it unless the house is not only on fire, but the fire extinguishers are all empty and the volunteer fire dept is on another call): "What's wrong?"

"YOUR dog has placentas for eyes."

Which, really is the only response when you gaze into your dog's lovely deep brown eyes and find thick, red, tissue completely covering what was until recently her corneas. Both her corneas.

Of course, this was a Monday evening, about 8pm. Charles had stumbled home after presenting, for over 2 hours, his school's wonderful results in the national Doubling School Performance conference (note how sneakily I slipped in the husband brag), and I stumbled home after a particularly busy Monday where no one seemed to have just a cold or just a splinter or just Dengue Fever.

I looked at him. He looked at the dog's eyes and jumped. He goggled at me. I goggled at him.

Molly looked at us and blinked frequently and uncomfortably.

"When the hell did that happen?"

"I dunno. I was just getting a bite to eat and looked into her eyes for the first time today. I know they weren't like that yesterday."

"We should call the vet."

"They'll just tell us to bring her in."

"We should call."

(both look at the phone and then look at each other)

"You call. I'm tired."

"YOU call. I'M tired."

"She's your dog and you pay more attention to her eyes. I thought they looked fine yesterday evening when you wondered if they seemed a trice swollen."

10 minutes later, we're in the car.

2 hours later and over $100 poorer, we're told that she has pannus, an autoimmune disorder of the eye, "particularly common in German Shepherds" and that she's "the youngest I've ever seen" at a year-and-a-half. The last bit doesn't mean that much, though, as the vet seemed genuinely uncomfortable and inexperienced around Molly, who, aside from shedding her entire undercoat all over the floor of the emergency clinic from stress, was very sweet. But, we believe the diagnosis as she did bring in pictures of the condition, and, even though a people doctor rather than an animal doctor, I could agree that Molly, indeed, had eyes that looked exactly like the scary pictures in the doggy eye book.

We went home with a 5 ml bottle of steroid drops that we are supposed to put in each eye 4 times a day.

Do you know how much 5 mls are in American? 1 teaspoon. For $30. Guess this is one time where pet drugs aren't cheaper than people drugs.

Do you know how hard it is to put drops in a wiggly, triangle-headed, 75 lb, submissive-peeing dog 4 times a day?

Very, very hard.

Do you know how many drops you dribble down the dog's face and onto the floor?

Me neither. I really don't want to think about it at $30 a teaspoon. Let's just say that less goes into her eyes than goes to places other than her eyes. More probably goes into MY eyes than her eyes.

So, I've taken to stealth.

I wait until she's sleeping, dive on top of her, pry her lids open and get at least one drop in at least one eye. Which, if I were a professional baseball player, would garner me a multi-million dollar contract. Such is the power of statistics.

So....good.

Fortunately, she no longer looks as if she was abducted by aliens and had placentas inserted where her corneas should be. Now she just looks like she's got cataracts.

And is it curable?

Oh, hell no.

Treatable, yes. With drops 4 times a day, or possibly surgery. Or not, if it progresses to blindness. (But then we'd not have to do the drops, so, hey, a sliver of silver to every jet black cloud.)

She can, however, sport these.

And it doesn't seem to have impacted her frisbee playing, so I'm guessing her vision is at least partly intact.

So, score one more for the Piffle team. We really know how to pick the pooches, don't we? Sweet, smart, and afflicted.

The Bluebird Of Angst

2007-07-10T08:12:00.000-04:00

Meet Floyd.

Actually, this is not Floyd, unless the person who took this photo that I've pilfered off flickr is in the habit of stealing into our yard and snapping shots of random birds. But it could be Floyd. Or Brother of Floyd.

For the purpose of our story, let's pretend it is, indeed, Floyd.

See, there seems to be something 'off' about Floyd.

Floyd is the male tenant of a birdhouse in our back yard.

It seems to be prime real estate, despite it's rather dilapidated appearance, as each spring the Eastern Bluebirds hold a jousting tournament to see which couple gets the place for the summer. We watch the doings off our balcony. It's loud and swoopy and very colorful.

A couple of months ago, Floyd and his bride won this year's House Joust and moved in, seemingly satisfied.

About 2 weeks ago, we began noticing that a male Eastern Bluebird began hanging around the windows of the back of our house. By hanging, I mean he was frequently there, either on the deck railing or literally hanging from the window screen, occasionally relieving himself down the surface of the screen, peering in to the rooms with his right eye, head turned left, as you see above. He'd fly away if we got right up to the window. He was impossible to miss. Felt like being watched by Big Brother.

Shortly afterward, he apparently tired of surveillance, making more direct assaults on the house. Specifically, he'd sit on, say, the railing of the tiny balcony off our bedroom and launch himself at the glass, hitting it with his beak, sharply, making an insistent tap-tap-tap (on a good approach, he could manage to whack the window up to 4 times before having to veer away to keep his body airborne). He'd circle around and do it again. And again. And a-fuckin-gain. When tiring of this, he'd go to another back window and repeat. He'd start at dawn (which is around 5 am-ish), suspending his activities when he sensed we were up and moving.

Let me tell you, this is somewhat amusing when one has to rise at 5am, but when one doesn't, it's beyond annoying. Like someone having left a very loud faucet dripping. A faucet that only stops dripping when you get up out of your comfortable bed.

Or if you sit in wait with your camera, as I could be found doing several times over the past couple of weeks. (Oh, yes. I've been sitting in wait with my camera, at dawn, just for you-all.) He'd wake me. I'd then sneak to the dresser where I'd stashed the camera, he'd fly off, and I'd sit for a while on the edge of the bed, waiting for him to make another appearance, while he apparently laughed at me from a distance of about 50 m away, showing up as a blue-orange speck on a green tree, against the green grass background. (Again, as the lovely picture above hints at.)

Now, of course, we have been entertaining ourselves about his motives:

1. Is he pissed at us, the landlords, for some problem with the bird house roof or possibly mad that we've not installed indoor plumbing?

2. Does he envy us and want to join the dog-chase-cat-chase-kid fun?

3. Does he envy Charles his home theater and just want to watch "Winged Migration" in high definition with surround sound?

4. Is he threatened by the vacuum? The blender? The bed spread?

5. Is he a deceased relative or close friend re-incarnated as a pretty, boy bird?

6. Does he want to raid the pantry, having tired of a diet of bugs and caterpillars, envying us that particularly tasty granola or the ice cream bars?

7. Has Timmy fallen down a well and, as Lassie seems to be no where to be found, he's trying to act in her place? (Boy, after a couple of weeks, I think I really don't want to find Timmy.)

Anyway, we have been vigilant about keeping the screens closed, not wanting a house full of Floyd. The cat is fascinated and lurks, watching him, daring him to come closer. The dog could care less except when the noise keeps her from her slumbers. I am holding out hope that he is just bored between broods, and that his mate is, as we speak, sitting on a whole new crop of hungry mouths that he will soon have to hop to to feed.

See if he has the energy to bug me, then.

(Ed. note: I wrote this a week ago, and, indeed, suddenly, there seems to be a lack of interest in our doings and Floyd and the missus have been flying in and out of the bird house quite busily. I think the new brood is hatched. Thank God. Now I just need a few good rain storms to wash all the bird crap off the screens. I could get a hose, but that's just too much like work and it's now all hot outside. We don't do work outside in July and August. We sit and think about picking something in garden for dinner and wave at the kids splashing in the slide-y pool.)

Thing I Never Thought I'd Need To Tell My Child Not To Do #46,908

2007-07-06T19:45:00.000-04:00

As I happened by the bathroom, today, in the throes of our weekly cleaning frenzy, I noticed that the toilet lid seemed to have grown a tumor.

Halting in my tracks, load of laundry on my hip, leaning back to have another look, I noticed that my son was laughing and showing me what could be done with his sister's toothbrush!

As I stood there, gaping, trying my level best to make sense of what I was seeing, he did the only thing an 8 year-old boy could do: He closed the toilet lid.

"Look Mom! See! Sara's toothbrush even sticks to the toilet lid!"

I grabbed the errant brush and whinged it into the trash.

Completely aghast and nonplussed, I asked my son, "Can you tell me why that's inappropriate?"

"Um....," grin fading from his face, "Because I was wasting time screwing off, instead of cleaning the bathroom?" he ventured.

Yin And Yang

2007-06-30T08:53:00.000-04:00

Now we come to the tale of last week. A tale of Karma. A tale of woe and salvation. And donuts.

As you all know, Marvelous Charles is in the throes of grad school. He attends in Madison at the illustrious University of Wisconsin. One of the main reasons for us moving from the small town in which we work, across the border to our rural place in the sun: instate tuition. At some point, say in 2-3 years (these academic time lines are strangely vague to me) he will have his PhD (which I pronounce "Fudd", as in "Elmer", because I can't help such things) in educational-something-or-other and we will only have to share him with work, running and football.

At least that's the plan.

Along the way, he's also looking into garnering his superintendent's license, so he can, well, superintend, if the right situation comes up. No one in his right mind wants to be a middle school principal all their live-long days. It's a good gig for now, but he'd like not to be doing it at the age of 60.

So, last Thursday, he trotted up to campus to have a little heart-to-heart with the Powers That Be about what he'd need to do to get his superintendent's license, in addition to his current course work, followed by his exam this fall, followed by writing his comprehensive exams (and orally defending them), then the dissertation proposal (which must be orally defended, too), and, if accepted, the actual magnum opus of dissertation and (well, naturally) the defense of such.

At the end of which will be much wine and song and fatty foods. You're all invited.

And this is where nature fell out of balance.

You see, the Powers That Be (who consisted of a nice woman with, let's hope, some authority and not one of the adjunct faculty having a laugh) told him that "things could be arranged" and they basically could wipe out his need for the 6 hour exam covering 2 courses this fall, wipe out his need for the 2 comps exams, and thought that the courses for his superintendency would fall in with his general requirements.

Bada-boom, bada-bing! More for less!!

Again, this is not in writing.

Filled with hope and light of foot, our Charles tripped merrily to the elevators of the grim cement rectangle that houses the education department and hopped aboard Elevator #1.

And, here's where Karma realigned the universe, which had tipped dangerously in his favor. Half way down from floor #13 (that would be floor #6+1/2), the elevator stopped. Thinking this was an odd thing for elevators to do, but remembering that he's heard of other elevators in the building breaking down (namely Elevator #2, the partner of Elevator #1), he was not as shocked as one might otherwise be.

He looked for a way to pry the doors open, as he's seen done multiple times on TV by grannies. Nope. No way. He looked up to see if he could escape through the panel in the ceiling, again as we know to do from the entertainment media. Not happening. Clearly, these elevators were bought on the cheap from the Houdini foundation.

Well, nothing for it but to push The Red Button at the bottom of the floor button panel. You know The Red Button: the one we've all secretly wanted to push but don't dare. The one that says "Emergency" on it. I always figured it sounded some alarm.

Before pressing The Red Button, shall we mention that the fire alarm started to go off.

So it was with no calmly beating heart that our beloved Charles punched The Red Button, suspended about 80 feet above the earth's surface in a machine that suddenly seemed less than kindly.

Shall we mention that our Marvelous Charles has a decided dislike of heights? Usually this means things like airplane flights and lookouts over ravines with flimsy guard rails, but his new predicament of being trapped in an elevator with the fire alarm sounding is not made more comfortable by being a goodly distance from the ground.

So, with a desperate pounding with his thumb, did he activate The Red Button:

"911. Do you need help?" came the disembodied voice from the panel.

"Oh, yes. Please."

"Are you in Elevator 1?"

"Yes, indeed."

"Shall we come and get you out?"

"That'd be nice. And the fire alarm is sounding. Is there a fire?"

"Not to my knowledge, but someone will be there in about 15 minutes."

Longest damn 15 minutes of his life, and this is a man who's played several seasons of rugby, has administered a middle school and taken weapons off 'children' who've outweighed him by several stone, not to mention faced down armed, pissed parents. He routinely diffuses enraged custodial staff, lunch ladies, bus drivers and secretaries with aplomb. He has yet to be poisoned by the head of the teacher's union. This, in short, is a man with no little courage.

He has also, in younger days, broken up an altercation consisting of 20 snow ball throwing youths and a really cranky old man by asserting his presence and authority. He may have also uttered the phrase, "Excuse me!! Can I help? I'm an undercover narcotics agent." (Phrase said in a booming voice that caused all involved to either hop back into his Lincoln Town Car or scurry back to their respective houses.) We may mock Marvelous Charles but we do not doubt his courage and resourcefulness.

But, in the end, many members of the fire dept came. They had quite a difficulty getting the doors open, but he did get to climb out through the doors and jump the 5 feet to the solid floor and not have to be hoisted out the roof, a la Hollywood.

And there was no actual fire, thank goodness, but one of the firefighters noted that he smelled smoke, likely from evil Elevator #1, just having another laugh at the expense of one of those punk college kids.

So, all's well and so forth.

Will The Powers That Be keep her word? Will the misfortune of having been trapped in the elevator assure that the good things discussed in the preceding meeting will come to pass? Will Marvelous Charles ride in another elevator again or will he forever more climb the 13 flights of stairs to his classes? Will this generalize to a more universal distrust of elevators in general?

Time will tell, but the next day he decided to start living life to the fullest, starting with breakfast:

These here are the best donuts known to man. They are a chocolate yeast dough, filled with this... this...I can barely describe it with any adequacy: a cross between freshly made whipped cream and custard tasting strongly of vanilla, not too sweet. It is topped with thick, very chocolate frosting, again, not too sweet. The good from the bad.

Vroom! Vroooom!

2007-06-26T17:21:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was a banner day for Gorbag The Half-Orc (a.k.a. Marvelous Charles).

You see him finally riding his dream:

Ever since moving out among the thug deer and the ticks 3 years ago, one thing became clear: To keep the wildlife at bay and away from our back door, we needed to mow approximately 5 of the 8 acres of Wisconsin prairie upon which we reside throughout the growing months of the year. (See, the deer don't like to leave the tall grass and the ticks like to stay in the deer traffic paths. The ticks aren't adverse to eating human when they can get it, but are happiest, again, in the tall grass, where the deer play.)

Therefore, Gorbag and I went shopping for our first riding mower. We went around to places before the snow had thawed and, after comparing advice from friends and online forums, we decided on this little beauty and brought her home (well, as it was 3 years ago, it is actually the 5000 and not the 6500, but looks the same, so good enough for government blogs and so forth).

The snow thawed, the grass grew, and she started breaking down about 2-3 times a season. Fortune had partially smiled upon us as we had ponied up for the extended service plan, where they send the guy out rather than making you bring the damn thing in. Over the past 3 years, we've soaked Sears for the price of the plan plus the mower twice over in service costs. We also exchange Christmas cards with Burt, the service guy. But, while it warms the little cockles of our hearts to stick it to major corporations for sucky products, it doesn't get the grass cut.

As the grass sprouted that first spring in '04, we began noticing various serious landscaper-guys and occasional gentleman ruralites, like us, with this new breed of mower. Fast. Low to the ground. Fast. Tough. Fast. Yellow. Fast. And, best of all, not parked by the side of the garage with the hood up, a person hopping up and down nearby throwing things at it, curse words drifting across the hills.

There was instant desire.

But, "No," we told ourselves. We had a perfectly good (Well, not really "good", but work with us. We'd paid for the damn thing AFTER doing the research.) mower at home. And what if the damn thing broke down every other month? That still meant that it could be used 6 weeks out of 8, right?

That leads us to this year. It broke. And broke again. And almost broke a third time. (There was all this white smoke that started pouring out of it, but it went away when the thing was stopped and didn't return the next day, when it was restarted.) And the second time it took 3 weeks to get it repaired. And the orc part of Charles roared and would not be denied.

So, now he has his new yellow mower, a terror to vegetation everywhere, and, as I recall, he can mow the place in about 2 hours, once he gets the controls down, with a good tailwind, as opposed to 5 hours with the other machine.

Last night, I walked him around the yard and, once again, showed him where things were planted so he wouldn't cut them down. (I do so enjoy deluding myself.) And then he hopped aboard and took 'er for a spin.

Don't worry, though, we are keeping the crappy Garden Tractor for a spare. We're sure that the new one will have the occasional break down (oh, yes, we did spring for the extended service agreement on that one, too). Plus, when they are both working, we can mow in tandem, creating patterns and love knots in the grass or mowing in formation, like fighter pilots, only with 2 of us, on the ground, and much slower.

Time for the Serenity Prayer

2007-06-18T09:02:00.000-04:00

Her: "Is it me or is the air conditioning louder than what I remembered from last year?"

Him: "Sounds louder."

A few hours later....

rattlerattlerattleRATTLE...rattlebang, rattleboom, RATTLEBOOM, RATTLEBOOM, BOOMBOOMBOOMBOOMBOOMCRASH! (silence, silence, cricket-chirping silence)

Her: "I think it's dead."

Him: "I'll call in the morning."

Of course, you know that the mercury is over 90 F. And the humidity is close to that.

.............................

So off to bed we go, hours later, all ceiling and box fans whirling away. Dog in front of the screen by the decklet off our bedroom. Cat nowhere near her usual place on the body pillow next to me. I think she found a way to open the door to the freezer and curl up around the ice cream. Either that or she's fled to the basement.

You remember small Sara, right? Sara "mommy-I-need-to-sleep-with-you-yes?". Sara "but-when-your-light-is-off-I-can-sneak-into-bed-with-you-yes?".

Last night, after each variation of the above queries was answered with a flat "NO" or a "No, honey, daddy really, really, needs his sleep and when you are there, he gets literally kicked out to the couch and then he is all stiff and sore and his back bends at all the wrong angles."

Of course, a short while after I fell into sticky, fitful slumber, I wake to find a small furnace curled on top of the pillows, between our heads. I evict the small furnace back to her own bed and fall back into what passes for sleep, listening to small sniffles from the other room. Of course, the next morning, I am hit by new guilt. See, the poor dog has been evicted from her place on the carpet by the screen by the small girl in pink kitty pyjamas.

Who is now sleeping in the middle of our bed.

What can you do?

...............................

And then there's the neighbor's dog, well, one of the neighbor's dogs. She's a very sweet yellow lab, about a year old, very jumpy, very knock-you-over, very poor manners, who looooooves to come over and play. Normally, I don't mind. She and Molly have a grand old time racing around the yard for hours at a time, stopping to do doggy things, like sniff critter poop and stick their noses into the various burrows, but now that it's hot, the kids are out there with their slidey-pool. Molly knows that only BADDOGS go into the pool and only BADDOGS steal the inflatable sliding board and only BADDOGS try to bite the side of the pool. Sadly, Bailey is a baddog. And baddogisms are contagious.

So, Charles gets to go over to the neighbor and see about getting him to keep his damned baddog in his own yard. Molly will be sad, but she won't succumb to the dark side and hopefully the pool will last more than a week, having avoided being punctured by baddog teeth and nails.

And how was your weekend?

Disgruntled

2007-06-14T10:01:00.000-04:00

I feel cranky.

I have a blog.

I will therefore inflict my crankiness on you.

(This is your chance to hit the 'back' button and flee. Don't say I don't give you a fair and fighting chance, dearest darlings.)

Gorbag the half-orc and his Weedwhacker Of Death have caused me more grief. They've now laid low 2 black-eyed-susans and 3 very pretty foxgloves that I had been nurturing around the benches at the way-back of the yard. For weeks I have been trotting out there (about a hundred yards) with a watering can in one hand and a pail in the other, to lovingly slake their thirst. I planted them where I thought was both far enough from the benches to save them from slaughter, yet close enough to be enjoyed by any quiet bench sitter. Now, there's naught left but shreds. Gorbag has agreed that perhaps it would be best if I took over the wielding of the whacker.
I love the wood floors. How I love the wood floors. How much cleaner they make the house. Why? Because I must move all the furniture every week to vacuum all the accumulated crumbs and large drifts of dog hair that scamper, oh so visibly around it's sleek surface. In addition, I have to vacuum an extra day (that's 2! days of vacuuming each week) to keep things from accumulating a visible layer of fuzz. With the grimy carpet, all this was fairly invisible. Reasonably invisible dirt bothers me not in the least. I moved the furniture once a year, whether it needed it or not. I guess like most pretty things, they are higher maintenance.
Last night I had beans. This morning I have gas. My apologies to the counties down wind. (I have my windows open.)
The lawnmower has been out of commission for 2 weeks now and will not be fixed for another week. 3 weeks without mowing this yard at this time of the year is not only unsightly, it is downright scary. We are not able to trod the path for our nightly constitutional as the thistles are now past ankle high. The thistles, as you may recall, populate our grounds much as crumbs populate the floor of a family car. Yes, there are other components (namely dandelions and clover and prairie grass), but the thistles are spread thickly throughout all. They also grow 4 times faster than any other green thing. We shall not mention the fact that keeping things cut keeps the ticks at bay.
I managed to forget to apply sunscreen before I went out to stain the horizontal surfaces of the deck last weekend. It wasn't hot. There were plenty of clouds. I was stupid. I'm now stupidly sun burnt on my shoulders. Sadly, my bra strap seemed to have escaped the borders of my tank top, so now I have a pasty-white bra strap line (complete with visible circle from the dealie that allows the strap to adjust) streaking across my shoulder. So very classy.
Somewhere, hidden in the house, my nice cup of coffee, with the right amount of cream, is well on its way to becoming stone cold.
The house is not self-cleaning, although I've managed to bribe my tamagotchi-coveting son to pick-up, dust, clean the bathrooms, schlep the laundry and help fold the clothes all for $3. Guess I really can't count this, can I?
While the 4 apple trees are all still alive, the 2 sweet cherry trees are either dead or close to it as to make no matter. Sorry, Dumdad.
It's Swimming Lessons Day. The kids loooooove Swimming Lessons Day. I haaaaaaate swimming lessons day. For an hour and a half I get to stand and watch through the window as first one child then the other mostly holds on to the edge of the pool while waiting for their turn to not-swim back and forth or to jump off the diving board. The very best days are 'water safety day' where I get to watch them sit and listen for half the class. Yes, there are a hand full of stools to perch on, but in order to get a stool, one has to be there ahead of the other parents. Having to wrangle Sara into and then out of her suit, I am never early enough. My only hope lies in the occasional day that most of the other families are missing, for some reason. Then, THEN! I get to snag one. I have toyed with the thought of leaving and running some errand, but the huge signs that proclaim that PARENTS MUST WATCH THROUGH THE WINDOW AT ALL TIMES, prevents me from doing so in reality. Sadly, progress is slow for the Piffle kids and I've literally years more of Swimming Lesson Days to look forward to. In about a year, though, Sara will be in the next age group and should be able to take them at the same time as her brother. That will at least shorten my woe.

Well, I'll be.

Worked like a charm. I've managed to sluff off all the evil into the computer and off into the landfill that is the Internet. I will then be responsible for the crashing of multiple systems as my vitriol and whininess breeds like. Sorry about that.

Yes, indeedy. Cheaper than Prozac and without all that incarceration hassle of heading up to a bell tower with many firearms.

He Meant Well

2007-06-07T20:32:00.000-04:00

"Good-bye! Thank you so much for coming out and fixing the water softener!"

"No problem. You should start to notice a big difference after 5-7 tanks of hot water through the water heater."

"Great!"

"I left the valve that had corroded and the other broken parts on top of the unit. Your husband will want to see them."

Yeah. Right. You bet he will. (Because he's so into that sort of thing.)

Right after I perform the autopsy. Just lemme get my toolbox.

And while I'm at it, I'll just fix that bathroom sink.

Haikus for Mommy Guilt

2007-06-06T08:12:00.000-04:00

Such a silly girl.
Dressed in jammie tank and shorts
Cute but not so warm.

Yet you feel the need
To join us in the wee hours,
Leaving your warm bed.

We find you curled
There, at the foot of our bed
Like some hairless cat.

You don't plan ahead,
Leaving all your blankets there,
Piled on your own bed.

Tucked in your arm, though,
One stuffed animal to hold
Against the night's chill.

So there I find you,
Small and shivering and so
Very sound asleep.

I grab you by the
Arms and haul you up by me
Where it's nice and warm.

I spend the rest of
The night bent in bizarre shapes,
Curled around your form.

I then wake and try
To walk, the pretzel woman
Gimps to the bathroom

I'm sure it's not a
Coincidence that you've done
This since I left you.

Clearly, 4 days gone
From me has left you worried
That I'd not come back.

And so, nightly, here
You come, to make sure I'm still
Here in the morning.

Guess the solution
Is to bring you with me on
All trips from now on.

There we'll be, at the
conference, me, eighty-three,
You can be my cane.

The Week In Pictures

2007-05-29T20:17:00.000-04:00

Hullo, ducklings! As per our wont in the Casa del Piffle around Labor Day weekend, we have been very, very energetic, here among the birds and the bees (get your mind out of the gutter). Thankfully, we have NOT been among the cicadas, though. I can't fathom being out among billions of large, screaming, flying insects. I think if I lived in Chicago or any other place where the 17 year hatching is going on, I'd have to hop the first plane to Baffin Island.

We do not do bugs on that magnitude. No, we most definitely do not. I don't care how good a fertilizer their little rotting corpses are. I'll take well-rotted steer poop any day.

Anyway, the following is one of those posts I periodically warn you about. As this blog is partly for me and my gardening whims, this is all about the yard and only about the yard. Feel free to pass it by. You won't hurt my feelings in the least and will be doing yourself a favor.

This year, we (and by 'we' I mean 'I') built an addition to the famous Raised Beds From Hell, constructed 2 years ago. We now have a strawberry pen/corral. We needed the extra room for the additional 3 breeds of strawberries we added to the herd this year:

Nothing prettier than a well mulched, weeded garden. Pity it won't last the week. Here's hoping they go forth and multiply. Also, schlepping just shy of 1000 lbs of cement blocks is harder going uphill from the stable than down hill to the stable. In addition, I'm not sure if there's anything more tenacious than prairie grass as far as digging it out of the soil.

I am happy to report that the 4 disease-resistant apple trees and 2 sweet cherry trees planted this year are not dead, yet. They have been sprayed by a 'biologic deer and rabbit deterrent' that Charles picked up at the garden store. The nice man on the label swore by it, and as he has an honest face, we are sure he can't be wrong. I figured it was likely either coyote piss or hot pepper oil. After spraying it on all the new plantings, I can attest that it is, indeed, coyote piss. I spent most of the time walking from tree to shrub to tree looking over my shoulder to make sure no coyote came dashing out of the underbrush to hump my leg. So far, my honor is still intact, but I've still a few more sprayings to do. Molly-dog thought I smelled very intriguing and alluring. Good thing she's too much of a lady to act on it.

After last year's demise of the hardy blackberries, we are trying once again to introduce these berries to the upper Midwest, and are pleased to note that this year's blackberry-lings arrived much healthier and are actually thriving. Well, except for that odd incident last week, where I found one of the plants completely uprooted, roots cleaned off and left to die of exposure. I have NO idea. I replanted it and it's limping along. I fear it's a mob hit, left as an example as to what may happen to my jostaberries next, (done by either the thug deer or their stooges, the killer rabbits) but have yet to be told where to leave the 'protection money'. Theirs is not a very efficient organization.

I also spent large time planting large amounts of perennials in the perpetual perennial black hole that is the front beds. After another 4 dozen plants, it is slowly looking better, especially after the hollows left by the mysterious alien abduction (ahem) of Wanda and Muriel were filled in.

But wait! What's that? Why is our heroine giggling so heartily? Can you see it? The recent find that she just couldn't resist?

A closer look:

Why, yes! That would be a rhododendron. A rhododendron that's supposed to be hardy to -30 F. Why, yes! I've clearly taken leave of my senses! Why, yes! I actually spent more than a little money for this. Why, yes! I know full well that this EVERGREEN plant won't survive the winter in the freeze-dryer that is Wisconsin 5 months of the year. I know full well that plants of the genus Rhododendron love acid soil and that the pH of mine is practically 14.0. Charles is a more optimistic soul. He thinks it will live. I guess he figures that it will learn to develop a taste for -OH, like we did for brie my sophomore year of college.

Oh, how I've missed rhododendrons. It's my only plea. I really couldn't resist. Temporary insanity. And now I will watch it languish and die, a victim of my misplaced adoration. Some one should lock me up.

Finally, speaking of acidophilli flora, I bring you something that has left my gast completely flabbered:

Here is a blueberry. Blooming. It was one of 2. See, I know full well that blueberries only thrive in acid soil, but such is the level of my adoration of blueberries and the depths of my denial that over the past couple of years I bought and planted no less than 20 blueberries. Most didn't make it past the first summer where I planted them, in a cluster, near the vegetable bed. The ones I placed around the slab of concrete that sits bizarrely in the middle of the back yard, near the swing set (was the floor of a dog kennel for the previous owners) that the kids use as a chalk art surface and a place to crack rocks, are, um, not dead. Well, at this writing, 3 are not dead. Day before yesterday, 8 were not dead, then my husband, Gorbag, the half-orc, took the weed eater to the area and whacked everything he thought looked suspicious.

So, maybe the rhododendron will not succumb in the next year. Perhaps it will grip on to life, becoming a spindly thing with 2 flowers a year that I can not bear to euthanize.

I will deserve such an outcome to torment me for the rest of my days; at least until Gorbag and his Weed Whacker of Death come through.

Bloom Picayune

2007-05-22T08:37:00.000-04:00

About a week ago or more or less or so, our darling Voyager did sort of an interview meme where you, the blogger, agree to answer 5 questions posed, interview style, by another blogger. It involves trust, as you agree to answer these questions (and who's to say that one of those questions might not be "What album of your youth are you most ashamed of buying/begging your parents to buy you for your birthday?" or "What was the most embarrassing event in your past that involved someone you had a crush on and the general public?"

Most of us in the blogging community like to spill our souls to the Internet, but really don't want to relive the repressed horrors of our mis-spent youths.

But Voyager is Canadian, and therefore not only genetically ingrained to be nice, but polite and considerate as well. Never would a Canadian with malice aforethought cause mental pain, woe or anguish, unlike we dreadful Yanks. Therefore, I decided that I would take her up on her offer, which also netted me her e-mail. Bonus, that.

(Actually, I may have had her e-mail before this, but let's just go with it, shall we?)

So, here are the questions she posed, sitting eagerly on the edge of her seat, fedora on her head, shorthand pad and pencil in hand, a press-pass around her neck:

(Feel free to imagine me 3" taller, 30 lbs lighter, and 50 shades darker, wearing the latest in faux tiger lounge wear, sipping a mai tai on the chaise lounge by the pool.)

1. What made you decide to become a physician? When did you decide? (That's not really 2 questions. O.K. it is. So I'm bending the rules.)

Good one! Actually, I started off life as most of us do, wanting to be a librarian, which sustained me in my girlish dreams until about the age of 11. Then I drifted for 3 long years, without goals or stars to point my way until my freshman year of high school, when, after class, I was walking down the hall to the locker room to change for track practice. My path coincided with my beloved coach (who also coached me in cross-country) and chemistry teacher, who we knew as The Green Booger due to his penchant for wearing the same kelly green sweats, day in and day out, when in coach mode. He was late 50s or early 60s, about the same height of the girls he coached and looking somewhat like a beardless elf. (One of Santa's minions, not the pretty Tolkien creatures.) He said that he knew I was interested science and wondered if I had considered teaching as a profession. As I was and am still a confirmed flee-er of any form of public speaking, I declined and then he asked, "How about being a doctor?" The planets aligned, the universe smiled, the sun broke from behind the ever-present cloud cover that is the Pacific Northwest from November through the first weekend of July, and my course was set. Sadly, that marked the end of my running success as I developed asthma and, while I continued to compete throughout the rest of my tenure as a pimply high schooler, his interest in me waned as my times flagged, but I still think on him with a smile on my face: The Green Booger.

(Incidentally, a few years after that, he married my 5th grade baton teacher, a vivacious, tiny creature meant to wear sequins and tiaras. I've never been able to reconcile the image of this union and have been rather thankful that I didn't ever run into them together as I might have required long therapy sessions undergoing extreme memory repression.)

2. If you had to spend a year on a deserted Island, (assume food and shelter is taken care of) and you were given a choice to bring only one of the following, which would it be?

(a) A person, but one you have never met and know nothing about, even gender.
(b) A collection of books.
(c) A solar powered i-pod.

Ah, a nice, easy question. As I am quite content with the pleasure of my own company and while I am fond of music, I can go for days without listening to it, it would have to be that collection of books. I am incapable of not reading. I would rather read than talk. I would rather read than watch things. I have had, since birth, some sort of reading memory quirk, where I can read something I've read for pleasure over and over and over and find it not only delightful, but truly fresh and new. Seriously. I've a collection of mysteries that I cycle through every few years because I don't recall who dunnit at all. Sadly, I also have difficulty retaining written information and therefore couldn't skive off classes in college or med school AT ALL. So, instead of reading the chapter under a tree, like my classmates, I had to read the chapter and then go to class and hear the damned chapter in order to get the knowledge-y goodness in my squash.

3. What is it about gardening that gives you such pleasure?

You know, I'm not sure if I can adequately express this (although you know I'll yammer on and on despite this). It's a totally visceral joy. Sort of like singing along loudly and vigorously with your favorite song when no one can hear you. Sort of like eating a really amazing meal, followed by chocolate. Sort of like having a patient come to you (YOU!) with a mess of symptoms and having you hit the diagnosis in one. It's part watching life flourish under your hand. (Sort of a demigod-hood.) It's part that you are a nut for flowers and food and growing your own, that you chose and adore is deeply, deeply satisfying. It's part really enjoying working with your hands and, at the end of your efforts, even if it's just 10 minutes, you can see the results of your labor. It's part creating intent out of chaos (note that I didn't say 'order out of chaos' as my gardens are more free form, at least in the flower areas). Nothing leaves me more satisfied at the end of the day than a day spent in great part in the garden.

4. What one quality in yourself are you most proud of?

Hm. Toughie. I'm going to say it's my ability to usually reach people, especially people who are really in pain or pissed off or scared or all of the above. I don't connect with everyone but I can connect with most. It's one of the few things I can say that I feel I am good at.

5. Is there one quality you would like to change?

Just one? If I were joking, I'd say that I'd like to sweat like a normal person and not a 500 lb hirsute man named Bubba. In reality? Really-really? I'd like to be more outgoing. I'd like to want to go to parties and get-togethers and all sorts of social things that most people like to do. In reality, such things are often torture. I don't enjoy crowds. I suck at small talk. I dislike community get-togethers. I am horribly awkward. In the words of Mary Bennett, sister of Elizabeth Bennett, while being forced to sit as a wallflower at a country dance, (from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice): I would much prefer a book. I like people and enjoy having people over, but in small numbers.

So, thus endeth the interview. Thank you, Voyager, for the opportunity for letting me yammer on about myself.

Now, who's up for some home-grown questions of their own? In honor of the occasion, I've finally set up an e-mail for this blog:

dianapiffle@yahoo.com

If you want to reach me, feel free to do so. It's not the Super Secret e-mail that many of you know and love and use, but it will serve for blogging use. An e-mail bridge, if you will.

Anyone?

I've always dreamed of wearing a fedora and press pass and will endeavor to make at least one of the questions a nice low-ball one. After all, I am married to a 1/2 Canuck and that has to rub off on me a bit.

Of Beignets and Butt-Aches

2007-05-15T21:26:00.000-04:00

{Ed. note: You might want to block some time and get a big cuppa to sustain you. This is a-gonna be a looooong one. She's a wordy thing, is Diana.}

And so I am back from my adventures. Back over a week and all settled in my comfortable grooves. I find I like the idea of travelling alone more than the actual travelling alone. It's just so...alone. I am, as we have established, shy. Also introverted. So very shy and introverted and thrust into the milling mass of migrators. Without accompaniment of friend or spouse, I felt like I was missing a limb or a sense. Actually, given that I'd done all my luggage as 'carry-on', I was, in effect, missing 2 arms much of the time, as they were fully occupied with the compact yet surprisingly heavy bags.

Thursday-before-last found me, e-boarding passes clutched in my hand (and duplicates stashed in my carry-on), 2" syllabus on how to be all the Medical Review Officer you can be in my satchel, the accompanying text next to it, clean underwear, jammies, many clean shirts (I sweat very well) and toiletries in the rolling suitcase along for the ride, nervously getting on the planelet that would take me to the place that horrified my imagination beyond all things: O'Hare International Airport.

{Ed. note: How's that for the world's longest run-on sentence? I glow with misdirected pride.}

The place where more flights get fucked up and more luggage violated than any place on the planet. (Actually, I think its reputation is also worse than several large space ports in the Horsehead Nebula.) This is why I checked no bags.

And, it wasn't that bad.

I got myself some lunch (an egg bagel at a Dunkin' Donuts kiosk) and settled in to wait my connecting flight, which came on time.

I got myself out of the Louis Armstrong airport in muggy New Orleans, staggering into a cab (hailed by a very nice skycap) and trudged, smelling like stressed, sweaty grime into the airy marble lobby of the Mariott. My home away from home for the next 3 days.

My room reservation was all in order. (Possibly this was because the poor desk attendant, seeing my disheveled person, wanted nothing more than to get me up and out of view of the rest of the groomed and odor-free patrons. She helpfully pointed out that there were complimentary bath toiletries awaiting me. OK. Maybe she didn't say it out loud, but when the thing is thought forcefully enough, it comes through loud and clear.)

So, on the first night, following the first day of stomping through and sitting in planes and airports, me and my blistery feet and blistery ass ordered room service and sprawled on the downy-soft bed and passed out on the 35th floor, only waking once to see some of the crashing big storm that beat up the sky.

The next morning, hungry and smelling of ginger and orange blossoms (rather nice complimentary toiletries, I must say), I trotted down to the 3rd floor to Meeting Room D and filled my tiny, tiny plate with complimentary continental breakfast (some OK pastries but good coffee and fresh squeezed orange juice) and sat, lurking in the back of the room, my accustomed place in such things. It's close to the coffee and bathrooms.

There were about 100 of us partaking of the joys of the course and I ended up sitting between 2 silent guys in their late 50s on one side and 3 military types in, say, their mid 30s on the other. Everyone ignored me, which was all fine and dandy. I don't do small talk with any sort of ease. The military guy next to me seemed to be feeling a bit 'off', to my learned and practiced eye: He spent the whole morning sitting hunched over with his forearms on the table and his eyes on his lap and didn't partake of any of the pastries nor even any coffee or OJ. I wondered if he had the flu, but after the break heard the snapping of plastic wrapper and the pop of child-proofed cap and noticed that a large number of Advil were poured into his palm and that he'd procured a 2 liter bottle of water to chase them down with. He handed the bottle of pills to his buddy, who seemed only a bit less undone than he did, and diagnosed them with having had quite a lot of fun the first night, perhaps partaking of the glitter of Bourbon Street a bit too enthusiastically. I would by lying if I said I didn't allow a small smile to raise one corner of my mouth. The third military guy sat at attention the whole time and seemed ready to invade a small country, should the order be given. He was wearing his uniform, too, just in case.

I then spent 8 hours the first day sitting on my ass learning all about the vagaries of urine drug testing and the duties of the physician who navigates the yellow waters of such. And it wasn't even dull. (This bit of golden goodness still has me shocked. So good were the speakers that, with the exception of one lecturer for only one hour on the 2nd day, I rarely had my attention wander and only started looking at the clock in earnest after about 4:30 pm.)

Planning on taking a bit of a stroll around the French Quarter after lunch, I hied myself down to the cafe in the lobby and had a quick omelet (the 100% carb breakfast had me craving protein). Walking by the window, I found that this was more good luck. Had I gone out in search of lunch, I'd have been caught in what was a deluge that dumped about 7" of rain on us over about 7 hours. Those who'd not had my luck came in absolutely drenched for the afternoon lectures. A nice Mariott employee came in 5 minutes later, laden with large towels that she draped over the dripping and shivering.

A large pot was also placed at the front of the room to catch the water coming through the ceiling on us, the learners on the 3rd floor. We were told that we should feel fortunate as there was flooding on the 4th floor. I found this rather perplexing as the hotel was over 40 stories tall and hoped my room was not completely submerged. I wondered if this was some sort of engineering response to the flooding from Hurricane Katrina that would spare the bottom floors at the expense of the upper ones.

So, I had room service for dinner, again, and watched the water come down and study-study-studied.

The next day, Saturday, the last day in New Orleans, dawned cheery and sunny. The 2 hung-over military guys from the day before seemed in better shape, each managing a small bit of food, and their cohort, now in civvies rather than uniform, spent the morning snoring loudly, head propped on his laptop carrier. Apparently he had decided that it was not fair that they should have fun and he should not. Every now and then, a buddy would elbow him in the ribs and hiss at him. This is why it is good to sit in the back. That's where all the naughty kids sit.

After the day's marathon session of classes, I finally stepped out of the hotel for the first time in 48 hours and headed for the French Quarter. My last night, my last chance to acquire t-shirts and beads and other booty for my loved ones languishing at home. My last chance to make it to my personal mecca of Cafe Du Monde and it's legendary chicory coffee and beignets. I had only 2 hours, as I'd promised Charles faithfully that I'd not be out past 7 pm so the brigands that roam the city wouldn't get me. So, off I trotted and had myself a grand 2 hours being the complete tourist. I found a rather cool t-shirt and souvenir shop and bought many things (including a turtle's shell and an alligator tooth for Colin). I found Cafe Du Monde, just where it was supposed to be. I waited in line for the exceptionally cranky young miss to sell me a little paper bag of beignets and an iced coffee (and a t-shirt, how could I resist?). And then I took my bounty, dreamed of for the last 4-5 years, to the banks of the Mississippi and said hello to the water that flows past my neck of the woods, 1000 miles up stream.

The river smiled back and not only didn't it smell bad, it smelled good; fresh and flowery and softly breezy. That was the high point, that. Sitting, eating beignets (spoiling my dinner, hah!), drinking iced coffee (spoiling my sleep) with nothing left but the trip home, the cramming all the information in my noggin, and the taking of the test on Monday. Child's play and a well earned moment. My own little Everest conquered. True bliss.

And so I went back to the hotel, reassured Charles that he was not yet a widower and couldn't touch the life insurance for a new projector for the home theater, and packed up as I planned to depart at about 7am. (Everyone else who took the course stayed for the following exam, which I fucked up the scheduling of.) I then proceeded to not sleep for about 6 hours (awakeawakeawake), sleep for about 4 hours (damn coffee) and then wake at about 5am. Bah. So, I breakfasted in bed on the rest of the beignets (the powdered sugar blending with the snowy white bedding) and did some more reading. I want it stated for the record that my employers got their learning money out of me over those 4 days. Yes they did.

The return trip was just fine, although the hour delay in the plane that was to take me from the St Louis airport to Madison was a bit of a disappointment as I'd already been sitting there for 4 hours. Still and all, a small thing.

Damn! it was good to be home with the small ones, who loved the beads and dead animal parts, and Charles, who loved me for being home.

And that night I slept.

The next morning I zipped into one of the Chicago suburbs to take the exam, at the desk of the assistant of the coordinator of the MROCC. I sat in a soft, comfy chair with a glass of ice-water at my hand and an extra day's study time. I swore to myself, (but didn't tell the very nice coordinator, with whom I'm now on a first name basis), that this is how I planned to take all future certifying exams, come hell or high water or leaking roofs. The others who took it on Sunday would probably have thrown their #2 pencils at me, had they known.

And so, what about all the destruction of this beautiful and completely unique city? What I saw was mostly repaired, but bear in mind I went from the airport on the west side of the city via freeway to the French Quarter, which, as I recall, wasn't damaged as badly as pretty much every place else.

From my room, I could see this across Canal Street, the only obviously damaged area that I could see from my window (there is a large version at flickr):

Across the other way, was this view:

Canal Street, itself, below my room:

And looking off toward Lake Pontchartrain:

I'd never been to New Orleans, so I'd nothing to compare it to, but the spiffed up bits I saw looked fine. There were some places being roofed or otherwise attended to, but you'd expect that in any city in the spring. There was one billboard on the way to the airport that caught my eye. It said, "Wanted: Fortune 500 Company To Invest In New Orleans"

Amen to that.

Fabulous! (At Least In The Eyes Of My Son)

2007-05-13T20:25:00.000-04:00

Mother's Day, I think, has become my very favorite day of the year.

See, it's the day that I get to see what glorious offerings my son bestows upon me to show his love on this day. He has divine, imaginative teachers and has presented me 2 years ago with the infamous Mom Poem (scroll to the bottom of the post for the brilliance). Last year was the fabulous still life card and "Mom ABCs" handmade hardcover book (again, to the bottom of the post). This year! Oh, this year, we have the splendid portrait of ME! done in construction paper, wrapping paper, yarn and crayon, (life sized)!

Take in the glorious accuracy: The lank, brown hair (never could do a damn thing with it). The tilt of the head demonstrating my infinite patience with the use of "butt" and "poop" 5 times in a single sentence. Look in the eyes to see the expression of love and devotion to my offspring. The lips, it must be said, are artistic license, as I do not have 'pillow lips' either naturally or collagenally.

I also had no idea I looked that good in plaid and will go in search of some forthwith.

The portrait also accompanied a soft-cover book entitled "I Love You More! retold by Colin", in which, across 7 illustrated pages, he tells me how he loves me 'more than the biggest garden you seen' and 'the greatest trip you ever bin (sic)' and 'the neatest room you ever seen'.

Can you see why this puts Christmas and my birthday to shame?

'Hallmark Holiday', indeed.

Fie.

(P.S.: I am truly working on the travels of me, Down Cajun way, but it is planting season here and the clock is a ticking and there's not all that much to tell, not that I won't take far too long in the telling of it. Gimme a couple of days.)

Don't You All Wish You Were Me?

2007-05-01T08:08:00.000-04:00

In the never-ending glamorous swirl of back pain, sinus infections and pus-filled boils that fills my work day, an edict has come:

"Thou shalt go and fulfill thy requirements to become an MRO!!!" came the voice from on high.

"You want me to become a Medical Review Officer?" I queried.

"Yea, verily. Yesterday would not be too soon." the Powers That Be thundered.

"Okie dokie."

In this new career plot to make-over this mild mannered internist into an occupational medicine doc, this is the latest step.

Ah. And what the hell is a MRO?

Very good question, mon ami.

The MRO is the physician (although in Iowa, I believe, it can be a nurse practitioner or a physician's assistant and in Maine and Kentucky they've taken to using moderately trained monkeys) who reviews the results of work-related drug screens, investigates any mitigating circumstances that might make a positive screen due to something other than what you scored from that guy down on the corner, and then notifies the boss/potential boss/never-to-be-future-boss of the results.

Sort of makes me a toady for The Man.

I've given it some mulling over the past few months between being given the edict and now, a few days away from hopping a plane to go take the hopefully enlightening class (because the 2 inch thick syllabus was beyond confusing). I am torn in my feelings about drug testing. Is it a necessary safety measure? Is it a horrific violation of our civil liberties?

I've come to a few personal conclusions.

First, that drug testing will not remove drug use from the work place, but may decrease it. Second, that there are, for me, some jobs that should never be undertaken with so much as a pediatric cold pill in the system, let alone other judgement altering substances. Jobs like driving a 100 ton truck down the freeway. Jobs like operating a train or a plane. Jobs like practicing medicine.

Do I have a problem with someone in a non-life-or-death occupation using something recreationally on the weekend?

As this is a public blog, I don't think I should answer that.

Does the employer of someone who does not have a life-or-death job have the right to test their employees for drug use?

I have a bit more trouble with this. I guess, as drug testing is so very ubiquitous now days, I'd wonder if someone who used recreationally might be in need of some help if they couldn't abstain while job hunting, in the almost certain event that a pre-employment drug test was required. (Either that or they had such poor judgement that, as an employer, I'd question their ability to staple papers or use a copy machine without doing damage to themselves or others.) Random drug testing of employees without suspect behavior in non-life-or-death jobs? I think that's a different issue as well.

Finally, I've become comfortable with my role in this, as there ARE extenuating circumstances for positive tests and, if it were me, I'd want someone with compassion and an open mind talking to me to see if there were any other valid explanation for my positive test, rather than dismissing me as a druggie out of hand.

There. Rationalization complete. So much better for that.

And where am I off to? Whither the wild blue in my yonder? Well, that would be South. I'm heading South to New Orleans. I'm a bit nervous as I've arranged the whole damn thing on my own and have this feeling that I've forgotten something, or gotten the dates wrong or what-have-you and I'll end up arriving on the last day of class, in my underwear with (inexplicably) spiky green hair and everyone will stare and laugh as they hand me a 100 page test that I have to finish in 30 minutes.

Oh! and look! I have no #2 pencil.

I have that kind of 'something's wrong' feeling.

I've also not flown since all the new restrictions on luggage (What? I can't bring anything with paper on a plane? But the 2" thick syllabus! I need it! Oh. What if someone lights my syllabus on fire as an attack? Ok.) and the new check-in systems. I am someone who is comfortable with what I know and can control (gosh, what a shocker). I am trying to treat this as some great adventure, but really, it's a pain in the ass, as it's 2 days of travel to sit for 2 days in a hotel conference room and study for 3 nights in a hotel room.

Did I mention the 400 page textbook that must be ingested, digested and regurgitated, along with the 2" syllabus on Monday, when I take the test?

Did I mention the primal fear that I not pass this employer decreed hoop and have to tell them that, gosh, you just spent $2000 on me for squat.

No, no. Not good. So, despite having always wanted to see New Orleans, ever since reading Interview With a Vampire, and seeing The Big Easy, if you want to know, I will not be partaking in this fascinating city outside of a walk after class and before dinner each evening.

So that you can sing along with me, when I head off in 2 days, I leave you with the following excerpt from the reading:

"As a BAT or STT, or employer, you must cancel and alcohol test if any of the following problems occur, unless they are corrected. These are "correctable flaws." These problems are:

(a) The BAT or STT does not sigh the ATF (see 40.247 (a) (1) and 40 255 (a) (1).

(b) The BAT or STT fails to note on the "Remarks" line of the ATF that the employee has not signed the ATF after the result is obtained (see 40.255 (a) (2)).

(c) The BAT or STT uses a non-DOT form for the test (see 40.225 (a)).

--from the Dept of Transportation CFR part 40

And so on, and so on, and so mind-stunningly, horrifyingly, brain-curdling, sobbingly on.

Suddenly I question if my overwhelming desire to avoid all on-call responsibilities is really worth this.

Clouded Haikus

2007-04-27T09:23:00.000-04:00

In honor of Poetry Friday and Mona, I will throw this out. (Throw this up?)

The word is "Cloud". Lovely, innocent, lazy, summer entertainment, soft and fluffy clouds:

"Clouded Consciousness".
"Clouded Corneas". "Cloudy
Urine". Never good.

It is a fate of
mine, going through life seeing
the ill in the fair.

It is a fate of
yours, you who choose to read, to
glimpse my twisted takes.

As I butcher such
a simple and lovely form
that is the haiku.

And, for those who love pictures and haven't been reading long, here are some more dark, evil clouds from last summer.

giggle, giggle, clap, clap, clap

2007-04-24T19:59:00.000-04:00

Back about 3 years ago, before the blog existed and we were still young and idealistic, we moved out to our own little bit of Eden in rural Wisconsin. The house was in good shape, 3/4ths finished, just not as, er, pretty as we'd like it. We made a list of things that absolutely HAD to be done. Things like finish the 1/2 of the basement that was a big, open, dank, dog-shit-for-decoration cave lit by a single 25 watt bulb dangling from a light socket. It looked like a place that monsters would dwell and we didn't fancy living in a place with monsters. It's bad enough when your kids have nightmares. Don't need a real Freddy Krueger popping up the stairs in the wee hours to raid the fridge and torture you. Also, we replaced the light gray kitchen counters, put tile in the hall, kitchen and bathrooms in place of the ugly light gray vinyl, painted the soul-destroying light gray walls with a cheerier, warm (although not wildly dynamic), very light demi-peach paint.

(Note: We are essentially White Wall People, through and through. We adore color on the walls of the houses of our friends, we just can't fathom it on our own walls. We tried to make Sara's room a sunny yellow and the painters obviously thought it was horrible--because it was--and painted over it with the warm bland. Colin's room, we painted a nice blue, which looks, well, cold and blah. Shouldn't have put a sign on his door that said "Don't Paint Me" and let the painters cover up that mistake, too. We need to just stick with white-ish. Know your weaknesses. Choosing wall color is a failing with us.)

By the time we'd done all that, we'd exhausted our budget. Then we had to recover from the move (it's always more expensive that you think). Then we had the enormous vet bills from poor Emma's illness. Then there was the getting of the new puppy and kitten, and various other expenses that put our Next Big Thing For The House on hold.

But...finally! The stars and expenses lined up and, golly!, there was this amazing sale as we were poking around in the floor store on a whim and, well....

ONE!

TWO!!

THREE!!!

Ain't it purdy?

Why the builder ever put down carpet in the first place is beyond me. Although, as Charles and I decided last night as we stood in our new pose: smiling in the center of the room and slowly revolving to look at all the pretty, pretty wood, had they done so, they'd probably have put in weathered light gray driftwood to match the walls and counters and bathroom decor, and we'd have hated it but felt bad as it would have been hard to rip up new wood floors to put down new wood floors, right?

(The previous owners were very nice and, having designed and built the house themselves, apparently planned to live there forever, but then had a very, VERY nasty divorce. I think that it was all the gray that did them in. Sort of like The Shining but with 'light gray everything' rather than being snow-bound in an evil, possessed hotel.)

So, Charles and I are thrilled, as the floors are pretty and are not full of dog piss.

Mad-Kitty is happy, as things she bats around go skittering all over the surface.

Molly-Dog is not-as-happy, as she skids over the slick surface.

But Colin is really, really happy, as he gets to sock-slide from one end of the hall and across the room in one 'go'. He's teaching his sister the finer points, too.

Works for me. The sock-sliding dusts the floor.

Next up? Replace the light gray tile surrounding the fireplace. I mean, really. Gray, again. We're thinking a nice, warm granite or something. Shouldn't be too expensive. There's not much to do.

The More Things Change...

2007-04-19T00:20:00.000-04:00

Remember this?

Well, like the behavior of some siblings, it really hasn't changed. In fact, after a year and some, it's gotten more pervasive.

Several times a day, we are treated to such scenes:

It starts silently except for the sound of thumping against any furniture that happens to be in the vicinity. Then there are the low growls from the kitty. As things escalate (and they always escalate) the size difference comes into play and there is the muffled meow of frustration, as the kitty's head disappears in the dog's maw. This is, of course to be expected as the cat weighs 5 lbs (3 kg) and the dog weighs 75 lbs (35 kg).

"Hey! Molly! Leave. The Kitty. Alone," someone will holler.

Molly opens her mouth and the now matted black cat lays there, scowling. She's clearly pissed that she came up on the losing end, yet again.

As soon as whoever halted the round turns away, one or the other (it's an even split) launches in again. Either the kitty goes for whatever body part she can reach (a knee, a tail, a nose if Molly is silly enough to put her schnozz in paw's reach) or Molly re-engulfs Mad's head.

My favorite was the episode I stepped in on, where I hollered, "Hey! Molly! Stop it!" Molly turned and lifted her head, with Mad-Kitty dangling from her pus, a foot off the floor, 5 front claws embedded in each side of her muzzle.

Both seemed fine with it, so I rolled my eyeballs to the ceiling and left to a distant part of the house where I didn't have to listen to it.

Unfortunately, Kitty doesn't leave it just for Molly. No, no indeed.

When bored (and an inside kitty is frequently bored, even with 2 kids, a large dog and several house plants to play with), she will lay in ambush, waiting for you to walk by. She then dashes out from behind a door on her hind tiptoes, arms stretched out to the sides, in the air, as wide as they can go, tail straight out behind for balance, and seizes you (usually me with my arms full of laundry or a glass of water) around the top of the calf, then releasing you, dances off sideways with her tail fluffed twice as big as the rest of her small self.

It's even more fun when she does this as you are descending the stairs, at night, with a large bowl of popcorn in your arms and maybe a glass of something in one hand.

Oh, yes. Ever so much fun.

Damn pets.