Reactivating

I am not good about maintaining this blog, which is unfortunate because after my generation dies only the internet will remember us. However, I am currently embarking on a degree in American Sign Language (don't worry, still a nurse, still love it, just want to communicate better with patients) and have been assigned to keep a blog for my latest class. Strange things may appear here over the next few months related to that, so nobody panic.

Meanwhile, what have I been up to? Back in January I took a job at a local hospital. The jail paid the bills for a while and the work was interesting, but for reasons unrelated to inmates it was a hostile work environment and I am not sorry to have shaken its dust from my feet. My current job is on an orthopedic and post-surgical unit, which is much, much better than I could possibly have guessed. 

We get mostly patients who received joint replacements (hips, knees, and shoulders) and therefore work with a lot of physical and occupational therapists and a battery of equipment designed to increase mobility in a new joint patient.Other patients are those who had appendixes (appendices?) and gallbladders whisked out and the occasional hysterectomy. 

This differs from classic med-surg (regular sick and hurt people) in two key respects. Firstly, my patients typically stay 1-3 days, whereas it is not uncommon for a med-surg patient to stay for a week or even several. Think a little old lady with pneumonia or a person with a chronic bowel complaint. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, my patients are not usually sick. They are healthy people who have elected to have a joint replaced, or otherwise-healthy people whose appendix suddenly jumped ship. They are, however, people with a fresh surgical wound. This means that we are meticulous about hygiene and cleanliness, because not only do we want to keep these patients from contracting any of the illnesses that may be present in the rest of the hospital, but we also do not want their surgical sites to become infected.

My only beef with this job is the patient:nurse ratio is too high, normally 5:1 or even 6:1. For your purposes, since I am required to see each patient hourly, you receive approximately 6 minutes of my time an hour, during which I chart furiously on the computer in your room, before I must run to the next patient and do the same. If you are comfortable, do not have to use the bathroom, have everything you need within reach, and just want to watch TV or nap, this is fine. But if you are getting medication, need help to restroom (and if you have a new hip this will take a long time), or have a concern or a question you want to discuss, I need much more time to dedicate to you. 

I want each patient to feel like my only patient, and if I have six at a time, that's simply not happening. It's a shame, but it's also fodder for another post, so we'll leave it there for now.

Weird Things

Today I looked up the patron saints of nursing, in case my father should ever ask me who they were (and he will).

Bad rap or rolled eyes though it gets today, the thing about the Catholic church is that before it ruled most of the Middle Ages, controlled the crowns of several nations, and starred in a Tom Hanks movie, it was a grim, hunted faith. It is still a grim faith, but back in the day it was not considered unusual to be dragged from your home and dismembered in increasingly creative ways for the crime of being a Papist. This coupled with the early Catholic artist's habit of including suggestions of the saint's death in their iconography gave us some really excellent depictions. By which I mean ones anyone can appreciate, ones you stare at and go, is that...? Why...?

First, the facts: The patron saints of nursing are, alphabetically, Agatha, Camillus de Lellis, Catherine of Genoa, Catherine of Siena, Dymphna, John of God, and Margaret of Antioch. Also a fact is that some or all of these people are entirely legendary, but the stories are still awesome. Agatha and Margaret are particularly good. 

St. Margaret of Antioch is mostly apocryphal for soon-to-be obvious reasons and whatever portion of her legend is true occurred in the late 400's. Like most early female Christians, she was martyred in horrible ways for not having sex with someone, during which they tried and failed to burn her at stake and boil her alive. Naturally they then FED HER TO A DRAGON. She gave it indigestion and it spit her back out, so they had to behead her instead. She is therefore always depicted coming out of said dragon, which is the clue here that some of this story may be not entirely accurate, although I like to think this may also be a clue that dragons were once a thing.

St. Agatha is an even better story, since she too was tortured extensively for not having sex with some guy, who among other things cut off her breasts. She is therefore usually drawn holding one or both breasts on a plate, which is weird enough, except that the Middle Ages' customary aversion to body parts misinterpreted this image as - wait for it - a pair of loaves of bread, and for centuries bread festivals were held in her honor.

This is topped only by St. Bartholomew, who was flayed alive and in traditional artwork usually holds his skin over his arm. For extra awkwardness he is the patron of leatherworkers. 

For further reading even non-Catholics can enjoy, an incredibly exhaustive list of patron saints can be found at: http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/patron00.htm

It is worth perusing for the sheer weird specificity of some of the saints, like the patron saint against caterpillars (Magnus of Fussen), girls living in rural areas (Germaine), pencil makers (Thomas Aquinas), and people who own yachts (Adjutor).

Official.

So I am now officially an RN. An RN-BSN, if we're being precise, and employed at a local jail (yes, they need nurses there too). Onwards!

Memoriam

Today we remember those who have fallen in service to the United States of America. No amount of gratitude, glory, sorrow or honor that I, the living, could express for the dead will be adequate to repay their sacrifice, but I give it in the fullest measure I can because those men and women gave a measure still greater. To their families, who share in that sacrifice, who will touch only the cool granite of a headstone when they reached for their beloved, I offer my grief for their loss and awe for their strength. Thank you.

Honesty.

I am possessed of a very minimally disabling form of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. I hesitate to say I suffer from it; it would be more accurate to say I am mildly inconvenienced by it. I share this not to divulge a dark secret, but on the off chance that someone else out there has a similar problem and does not know why.

The name of my particular flavor of OCD is dermatillomania. It is an impulse-control disorder, specifically of the compulsive grooming variety, which also includes trichotillomania, trichophagia, onychophagia, dermatophagia, and the generic body-focused repetitive disorder (in order, the scientific names are hair-pulling, hair-eating, nail-biting, and skin-chewing). There is some debate over whether compulsive grooming truly falls on the OCD spectrum, but from where I sit, it definitely qualifies.

Dermatillomania is, from the Greek: derm, skin; tillen, to pull; and mania, madness. It has other names depending on source material and medical specialty but is best described by one of the most basic: compulsive skin picking. Disgusting? Yes. Unladylike? Certainly. Do I wish I could stop? More than anything. Can I? Not for more than a day.

The science: In the psychological field there is a technical difference between an impulse and a compulsion, but they tend to overlap in this particular realm since it is the impulse that frequently begins the behavior but the compulsion that renders us unable to stop. Like any behavioral trait, compulsive grooming manifests slightly differently in each sufferer (and some do suffer, significantly). Some, in the more traditional OCD vein, feel they must do it to prevent bad things from happening, but most do it because they simply have to.

The reality: Remember I said I was mildly inconvenienced? Trichotillomania sufferers pull out their hair, many until they are bald or left without eyelashes, eyebrows, or even pubic hair. Dermatophages chew the cuticles of their nails and the skin of their knuckles until they are left with bloody, swollen and discolored scar tissue. There are all manner of variations on this theme, but common to all is the inability to stop. In my case, I chew the insides of my cheeks, dig holes in my scalp, and peel skin from my lips and the bottoms of my heels. This is a mild, bordering on moderate, form of the disorder. Some have far more visible locations they harass, or noticeable scars from previous episodes. Some use tools, like tweezers or scissors, to better achieve the goal of removing the offending bit of skin. There are even those who deliberately harm themselves in order to have more damaged skin to pick (not to be confused with cutting for self-harm purposes, an entirely different disorder with an entirely different source).

Do not think we do such things because it doesn't hurt. It does hurt, every single time. The drive also varies slightly person to person, but usually centers around removing something dirty or uneven (like a scab or hangnail) from the body. The paradox is, of course, that by doing this a person only prolongs healing, and therefore the presence of the offending object. Neither impulse nor compulsion concern themselves with logic, however; or bow to pain, and so despite knowing they are working against themselves, and despite causing bleeding, scars, sore fingers, headaches, infection or illness, sufferers cannot stop. Truly. I have tried, every day of my life since I was fourteen years old. It is like scratching an itch that never quite goes away, one inside your brain so you can never reach it.

I first noticed the compulsion to pick at my scalp my freshman year of high school, followed by an episode the last year of college, both of which resolved not so much from effort on my part as the fact that my young, healthy body healed more quickly than I could damage it. My current relapse has lasted two years, touched off by a sunburn that caused just enough peeling for the need to pick to come roaring back to life. Two years I am deeply ashamed of, two years in which I have discovered that there are far more hair-related activities in daily life than the average person might imagine.

I can't get a haircut. I can't color or highlight my hair. Some days I can't wear my hair down because people will see giant ugly wounds. Some days showering is so painful I can barely stand it. If the hairbrush nicks one of the sore spots, it brings tears to my eyes. Often it hurts to lie in bed or against a sofa cushion in a particular position because it puts pressure on the damaged areas. My boyfriend can't even pet my head as a gesture of affection. And that's just the scalp. As for my lips and cheeks, most days I look like someone split my lip, and I am well aware I look incredibly stupid out in public contorting my face to bite just the right spot on the inside of my mouth. I have become an expert on walking with my denuded heels just above the ground so that it looks normal but no pressure is actually on the raw areas, but flip-flops are usually out of the question and a pedicure would be laughable.

It is a disgusting thing, I do know. I know I risk serious infection from having prolonged open wounds. I know exactly what sorts of microbes thrive in each and every environment on my body and under my fingernails. I am also grateful that this disorder as it manifests in my life is not more serious. Tonight I will tell myself, as I always do, that tomorrow will be different. Maybe it will; it usually isn't, because that furious need to peel back flesh digs in its claws until, if I resist, I am ready to jump out of my skin and run screaming into the night.

There must be an end to this. I graduate from my Well-Respected Nursing Program in early August. I refuse to permit such a disorder to permeate my new career. My deadline is July 31; this cannot continue.

Return of the King

Or Queen, in this case; since I am not, in fact, a man. Have not posted in a month for various reasons, chief among them that I am simply too exhausted by the mere thought of having to convey to my audience the level of frustration and hopelessness my Well-Respected Nursing Program has reached, to even make the attempt. Furthermore, nothing I have to say on the matter would be funny or probably even tactful, and social dogma dictates that if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all.


However, duty calls. So, in homage to Edward Gorey and to prevent the list of faults from growing too tedious or verbose (traits I have surely never been accused of possessing...) here is, for your reading pleasure, The ABC's of my Well-Respected Nursing Program:


Aged faculty.
Being grossly out of touch with what other faculty members do.
Claiming to be an elite institution but not having a program worthy of the student body.
Delays in grading and providing clinical placements.
Excuses rather than solutions for the issues we present.
Failure to communicate.
Grouping us for hospital assignments without regard for geography.
Harboring personal vendettas against selected students.
Inadequate clinical placements and hours.
Just about anybody is allowed to be a lab instructor.
Keeping grades, and the methods by which they are calculated, from students.
Lack of qualified instructors.
Manipulation of grades by a select group of faculty.
No standardized system for grading, teaching, or assigning work.
Only one person in the entire college knows how to use a Scantron (test grading) machine.
Penalizing students for errors made by faculty.
Qualified instructors reneging on their contracts to teach at other schools.
Refusal to act on allegations of egregious cheating.
Subjective, unjust grading practices.
Total failure by faculty to comply with their own syllabi.
Using words that do not exist, when one is supposedly an educated medical professional.
Vague expectations that change continually.
Widespread chaos.
X. Sorry, there is no X. There have been no xylophone-related crimes in this program. 
Yet.
Zero information on my clinical that starts in 3 days. An hour and a half away. At a prison.

Brief Visit to an Alternate Universe

Greetings to my single follower! I have tried and failed to find something worth saying about my Well-Respected Nursing Program tonight, so here is a vaguely amusing anecdote.

My favorite professor likes to say she has "Part-timer's" (as opposed to Alzheimer's): those Really Dumb Things everybody does that are "senior moments" in anyone over fifty or so and "blonde moments" in anyone under that (apologies to the blonde community for the expression; I am not blonde myself but assume the stereotype is probably tiresome). Examples include coming home from errands without the one thing you went for, looking for your reading glasses when they are perched on your head, and putting the cereal in the fridge but the eggs in the pantry.

My father is a purveyor of particularly fine part-timer's moments, not because he is old (which he is not) or blonde (also not), but mainly because by the time one reaches their mid-fifties they have usually amassed enough information and experience to crowd out things like "I should buy salt." Sometimes, though, he asks me something that makes me wonder if I have suddenly appeared in an alternate reality. 

The most recent disruption of the space-time continuum was when he bought contact lens solution for me at the local big-box store, even though I had Lasik a year ago (the proper response in this case, for anyone who loves their Daddy, is "thank you for thinking of me," and then everyone can have a good laugh about the whole thing). The best alternate universe moment, however, was during a car ride in which the radio treated us to "You Give Love a Bad Name." After the DJ did his bit, my dad, very puzzled, says,

"Bon Jovi is a man?" 

Interdimensional travel is now imminent, I can tell. "Sure, he's a man, why?"

"I thought Bon Jovi was a band!"

Aaaand now I am firmly established in the Mirror Universe, while explaining that the band Bon Jovi is led by a man named Jon Bon Jovi. My dad does two things with this information. First, he tells me that Bon Jovi is a silly name for a person (I didn't break it to him about Englebert Humperdinck), and secondly, upon arriving home, he announces to my stepmom that Bon Jovi is a person. Her response? "Really? I thought it was a band!"

I'll send for my things as soon as I've gotten settled here in Oz.

How to Frustrate Nursing Students 101

I am too tired to get my Irish up tonight. Yesterday seven of my classmates and I worked a twelve hour hospital shift, and were still required to get up early today to attend a special class. Sometimes these things happen, so it was not the class that bothered me but the fact that, if my Well-Respected Nursing Program had the proper number of clinical instructors and a better sense of how to run a nursing program generally, we would have had an eight hour shift yesterday, a day to study for our upcoming leadership exam, and another eight hour shift tomorrow, fulfilling both our need for study time, our requirements for a certain number of clinical hours, and our apparently ludicrous expectation that these hours would take place in an actual hospital.


Instead, we attended an eight hour discussion of why hospital births and pain meds are the devil and home births are the duty of every modern woman. Now, as both a modern woman and a modern medical consumer (and most importantly someone paying large sums of money for a supposedly quality education), I expect to be given information by my instructors in an unbiased format, or at least both sides of a controversial argument.


It is clear there are many good things to say for a midwife-assisted home birth, a birthing center birth, or even a midwife-attended hospital birth, but equally clear that the arguments "this is how women have done it for centuries," and "in 1900 almost all births were home births" are inadequate to support a valid practice. Women and infants have also died in childbirth by the thousands for centuries, and as a friend pointed out, in 1900 almost everyone also had poor dental hygiene, but we don't consider this to be a good thing. 


The fact that technology can be brought to intervene in a natural biological process does not make the use of that technology necessary or sometimes even optimal, but it absolutely does not mean that it should not be used. Surgery used to be done with a swig of rum instead of anaesthesia; that doesn't mean we should go back to basics with that. Children used to get the measles right and left but no one is advocating for little red spots either. Sonograms, amniocentesis, and genetic screening are all recent editions to pregnancy but the latter two are invaluable tools when conceiving and carrying a child, and Facebook is nauseatingly plastered with proof of the world's adoration of sonograms. So why the insistence on rejection of modern options for birth?


I do not suggest that every woman who gets pregnant should be summarily C-Sectioned so they can make their 4:30 hair appointment. Many women are perfectly capable of giving birth with minimal, if any, intervention, and in their home if they so choose. It is not unreasonable for a healthy, low-risk mother of one or two to decide she is ready to go au naturale on the next baby, and this should be encouraged for all kinds of reasons (personal comfort, financial, family bonding, keeping healthy people out of the hospital, etc.). But there is absolutely, positively, under no circumstances, ANY EXCUSE whatsoever to present hospital birth as some sort of aberration. 


A recent film by a C-list celebrity explores the touchy-feely-magical lifegiver side of birth, and lays it on pretty thick against anyone who would even remotely consider the idea of an induction, C-Section, Pitocin-assisted labor, or a medical degree in the room. The single doctor interviewed who supported hospital births was made to look like the sort of person who would prescribe laudanum for a woman with the hysterical vapors. At the opposite end of the spectrum was a man who genuinely voiced the opinion, and I am not exaggerating, that receiving an epidural renders a mother and baby unable to love each other properly. 


Now, my mother had me naturally, but received epidurals with both of my brothers, and certainly does not love them any less, or any differently. I guarantee if she is ever annoyed with one of them it is because he has left piles of moldy dishes in his room, not because she had an epidural twenty-odd years ago at his birth. Moreover, I also have a stepmother who loves us totally and unconditionally without us ever occupying her womb. Both she and my mother would quite cheerfully kill anyone who suggested that they didn't love us correctly because they did not have an authentic log cabin, peat fire, grannie-delivered birth. Furthermore, there are millions of adoptive parents and billions of fathers all over the globe who love their sons and daughters with every fiber of their being (my father included) and they clearly did not physically birth these offspring.


Birth IS an emotional experience for the parents, a major change in the life of the family, and an intense physiological process. It is not, however, magical or mystical or some mysterious thing to which only certain women have the secret key, and which modern medicine and the Male Establishment have ripped from them. It is not necessary to treat it as a medical emergency (although some can be), and the woman as an ill patient, because pregnancy and birth are not afflictions, but neither should we reject all modern medical resources simply because chimpanzees struggle to bond with infants born via medical intervention (another fine scientific opinion offered in this film, despite the little-known fact that the simian spine is configured differently than a human's to permit far easier birth, and the more obvious fact that chimps do lots of things humans don't do, like eating lice and throwing poop). 


Having teeth is not a medical affliction either, but I still see the dentist in her office rather than my bathroom. And if I do need work done, I want her to use Novacaine, not just climb in there with a pair of horse calipers. It seems quite logical that using the tools at one's disposal, as and when they are helpful, is a sensible thing to do, whether that tool is an ordinary one for a mundane task, or a complex one for an involved process like delivering a baby.


In summary, does it matter, one woman's foolishness? No, but it wasted my day and that of fifteen of my cohorts, all of whom also have a leadership exam on Friday, eight of whom have to get up at 4am tomorrow for their twelve hour shift, and at least one of whom has given birth via C-Section and does not struggle in any way to love her children. It also demonstrates the flaws inherent in my Well-Respected Nursing Program, which sadly all of us are now simply too exhausted to fight. The End.

Weekend Book Recommendations!

Still love books. Here are some more for you to love too. That is all.


Shark River (Randy Wayne White): #8 in a series, but they read easily out of order since the narrator (full-time marine biologist/part-time knight errant) is always alluding to things that happened in previous books or distant past. This one involves a Jamaican woman claiming to be his sister, an interrupted kidnapping, and the main character's usual slightly-excessive soul searching, but it's worth reading just for the descriptions of the Florida Keys scenery.


The Man With the Golden Torc (Simon Green): Adventures of a secret agent-boogie man hunter. Funny if implausible, have heard Green's other series is better but I thought this book (1st in its series) was great. The whole series is named after Bond movies, which is also good.


The Sign for Drowning (Rachel Stolzman): A sign language interpreter adopts a Deaf girl and finds some closure for her sister's childhood drowning. No tissues required: simple but interesting plot, low-drama daily life, and even has a happy ending.

The Sense God Gave a Billy Goat

My Well-Respected Nursing Program is suffering from a lack of...well, different things on different days, actually. Some days, money; many days, common sense; most days, decent faculty - and proper communication skills? Every damn day.

I am so excited to be a nurse soon that I can hardly stand myself, and am grateful for the opportunity/good fortune that enabled me to pursue it, but this program is, as a classmate recently observed, begun in confusion and will end in disarray. I wish I could give them the benefit of the doubt and say that my Well-Respect Nursing Program is an example of many very intelligent people being better at thinking deep thoughts than organizing a nursing school, but sadly the fact of the matter is that not one iota of this program has the sense God gave a billy goat. 

Disbelief? Decide for yourselves. Here is but a sample of their usual behavior: 

December: We break for the holiday without an assignment for the spring semester's clinical placements. There are fewer than 50 in my class (split into 6 groups, two each assigned to psychiatry, pediatrics, and obstetrics, which will rotate every 5 weeks) but with several other nursing schools in the area it takes time for the local hospitals to tell each how many students they can take, so we were warned this might happen.

January: We return to school FIVE WEEKS later with still no information on the clinicals and are sent to a new Blitz where we’re informed that we have only half as many clinical instructors as necessary because they all bailed out of their contracts to work at private nursing schools. Only a third of us, those on our psych rotation (including me), will go twice a week as planned, the other two thirds will go to pediatrics or obstetrics only once a week. To make up for the deficit in hours, the peds group has to do an out-of-class project (“the Denver”) and the OB group will do 12 hour days. Our clinical director orders our psych instructor  not to give anyone A’s, and denies doing so when confronted about in front of the dean.

Early February:  Just before we swap rotations additional instructors are hired so we’ll all have twice-weekly clinical, except due to their schedules the new pediatric group will have one instructor on Tuesdays and a different one on Thursdays. The original peds group still has to do the Denver but the new one does not, the new OB group will have regular 8 hour days, and our hospital assignments are rearranged to accommodate the change. My pediatric group is told we will be going to one hospital, then receives an email welcoming us to a different one, and the night before we are due to begin the new rotation are officially confirmed for the original hospital.

Late February: Syllabus has been sliced and diced so many times in previous years and the last 2 months we ask for a new one. New OB instructor quits after 2 weeks. Half of the OB kids are back to 12 hours a day once a week. The rest of us are not told how this will affect our hospital assignments.

Early March: The peds group (mine) asks for clarification on three very similar projects and are awarded a new, more massive, project (including a presentation on our day off) for our efforts, plus no clarification on the original three. This project is invented and passed along to us by an instructor fired the previous semester for being a generally terrible teacher and human being (she was kept on the faculty for “special university projects”, presumably a re-education regime of some kind).

Late March: We devise a way to combine all the projects into one coherent one and receive permission to make the change. For reasons unknown to us, our clinical director, who has never seen us in the hospital setting, will be grading it instead of our instructor, who sees us every minute of every day. At least there is no mention of not receiving A’s.

Later March: Our clinical director claims not to remember the project change. We do it anyway because it is far too late to do anything else. The other half of the peds group does something entirely different and we are somehow graded as doing to same type and amount of work, by someone who has never seen any of us work. Still no idea what hospital we are officially assigned to for the next rotation but local rumor supplies a plausible candidate. Never did receive a new syllabus.

Early April: About to swap rotations the final time and half of us due to begin the OB rotation receive an email saying they will be back to 8 hour days twice a week at the hospital the other half of us were assigned to. My half of the group receives nothing. The instructor for that hospital says her information jives with the email, and the clinical director is unreachable.

It is currently less than 48 hours before I am due to begin my OB rotation and we are still unable to confirm which of us are assigned to which hospital, under which instructor, how many hours a day or how many days a week. I rest my case.

Wednesday Weird News Roundup

"The Little-Known Sport of Dwarf Bullfighting."


Just savor those words for a moment. Feel better? Whatever ails you, that is probably the cure. I don't know how this escaped us for so long, but there is a craze in bullfighting nations wherein a little person toreador is pitted against a bull calf. The Little People of America condemn this as too close to the exploitation that people with dwarfism once faced, and no animal rights group has ever been happy with bullfighting, but it is true that a toreador of any size is a formidable, highly-trained and dedicated athlete/artist, which little people have as much right to pursue as any average-height person. Read the story at http://offthebench.nbcsports.com/2012/02/21/dwarf-bullfighting-where-human-exploitation-and-animal-cruelty-come-together-to-play/


"Man Cuts off Foot to Avoid Job Assignment"


When you finish cringing, here's the scoop: A Swedish guy was facing a health screening by the Swedish unemployment office to decide if he was able to work, so naturally he waited til his family left for the day and ran his leg across a table saw. Then, realizing medical technology was, sadly, good enough to probably reattach his foot, he threw it in a wood stove to relieve himself of that option. Allegedly the problem is not that he doesn't want to work, just that they kept giving him jobs he didn't like. Surprisingly (for him), the unemployment office is threatening to find him another job as soon as he is well enough. Not surprisingly (for anyone), he is currently a guest of a psychiatric facility until further notice. This one's from MSNBC: 
http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/03/27/10890647-man-cuts-off-foot-throws-it-in-furnace-to-avoid-job-assignment


"Woman Pleads Guilty to Illegal Butt Injections"


Sigh. I get that butt injections are a thing, but if you are looking to enhance a part of your body you use almost constantly, why would you find the shadiest person possible to perform that service for you? Or even a vaguely shady person? Or anyone at all who wasn't licensed to high heaven? I am Irish, which means, congenitally, I have no butt. Anatomically I am capable of sitting down because there is muscle covering my hip bones, but it serves solely to connect my back to the top of my legs. And yet I STILL would not allow a woman who TOLD me she wasn't a nurse (or even a cosmetologist) and insisted on meeting in hotels to inject "silicon" into my rear end. At least she didn't inject tire sealant and cement like that other case; technically speaking it WAS silicon, but the kind used for furniture polish. My favorite part is how she "plugged holes with cotton balls and super glue." That's right, she not only used totally inappropriate things to close human flesh, but this cosmo-not left holes big enough to PLUG! Strong stomachs can investigate further here: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/silicone-buttocks-injector-guilty-872315

Adventures in Babysitting

One of my regular families is a set of three boys ages 8, 5, and 2 named Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. They are excellent; polite, smart, eager to play outdoors and tell me new things. They are an Orthodox Jewish family, which is interesting to me and hilarious to them, because they are endlessly amazed by my lack of knowledge of the most basic Hebrew, and the fact that I have never had chocolate-covered matzah (I'd be quite happy to try it, I've not yet met a chocolate-covered food I wouldn't eat). I know a bit above average about a strict traditional Jewish lifestyle, keeping kosher, etc., but still live in terror I may one day use a dairy plate to serve a meat product and require the entire house to be elaborately cleansed.


Usually, however, we are off on some adventure or other. Last time it was the local water park, where Shadrach and I went down a multi-story tall water slide approximately nine hundred times and discovered that one of the water hoses, if an eight-year-old boy stands underneath it, will remove his swim trunks with astonishing rapidity. 


This time we went to a Good Deed Carnival at their school. Today was an international day of doing good for the Jewish community, a really wonderful thing for children to learn. The concept is all the more impressive for being organized, I assume, by a posse of emailing rabbis, since there's no Jewish version of the Pope to make sweeping announcements of the world's activities. The three boys and I spent the day making chew toys for the local animal shelter and blankets for children in the pediatric unit at the nearby hospital, assembling bags full of the ingredients of the traditional Passover meal for the homeless shelter, and decorating covers for challah bread to send to troops overseas.


Now, I am a little Catholic girl, so I've seen challah in the store, but I've never eaten it and I didn't know it had a name, much less that it needed a special cover. Meshach told me that challah was served on Shabbat (the special Friday evening meal), but the reason for covering it eluded me, so I asked Shadrach, aged eight. 


"Because," he told me with a casual air, "the wine goes first and the challah gets embarrassed."


I would watch those kids for free.

Weekend Book Recommendations!

I love books. You should too. That is all.


Try these:
Hounded, by Kevin Hearne (dry-witted Druid and dog defend desert from demons) - quick and funny!
The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss (secretive sorcerer spins story for servant and stranger) - very (very) long but worth it!
Medicus, by Ruth Downie (ancient Roman physician solves mysteries) - thought I was gonna go for the alliteration on that one too, didn't you?

No Such Word

There is no such word as "transendenberg." Or paranesia, for that matter. But, most of you say, we never imagined they were! We spend too much time worrying about things that do exist to worry about things that do not! You probably also spend most of your time laboring under the delusion that those tasked with instructing students of technical arts like medicine are aware of the proper vocabulary for their chosen field.


You would, sadly, be wrong. Both of the above un-words are creations of a lab instructor at my Well-Respected Nursing Program. The first is a mangled version of "Trendelenberg," the bed position that puts a patient's feet higher than their head (useful for times when you want as much blood as possible going to the brain), The word TRENDELENBERG is long, I admit, but it is pronounced exactly as it is spelled and is literally on the first page of our lab manual because it is the very first thing you learn in nursing, after taking vital signs. The instructor's version is notable for not only being a totally incorrect rendering of the term, but also for being more incorrect than the student whose pronunciation she was correcting. This was not a one-time error; she was heard to use the word in a different class later that day.


"Paranesia," on the other hand, is not a real word being misused or a mostly-real word with a few letters wrong. It is completely, completely, completely made up. The closest I could find in the ENTIRE INTERNET was the word paraenesis, a British term for a form of debate rhetoric. I also concede that Paranesia is the name of a character of some kind in a gaming community, but I neither play nor understand video games. The word my instructor was TRYING to produce was "proprioception," the normal sensation of knowing where your body is in space (if you shut your eyes and I move your hand, you still know where your hand is without looking at it).


Why is this a problem? Well, for one thing, because general ignorance is a problem. Secondly, this is not an after-school pottery class that the basketball coach was forced to teach, or an orphaned Boy Scout Troop that drafted someone's mom as den mother. This is nursing school. A nurse may not probe as deeply into a patient's diagnosis as a doctor but he is the primary caretaker and advocate for that patient during their hospital stay or office visit, which is no small responsibility. He had better be able to get an IV line in on the first try, bathe the patient and change their sheets without removing them from bed, chart data continuously, run interference on the family members if any are present, and provide patient teaching for any new information (like what asthma is or how to check blood sugar). Bonus points if the patient is under 5, because that child will have the strength of ten men when angered.


Do I want a doctor to know the word "medication?" You betcha. Do I want a nurse to know the word "Trendelenberg?" Yes, and for the same reason. "Proprioception" is less a need-to-know term than an indicator that my instructor was willing to make something up when she didn't know the right answer, which is troublesome (improvising is good; lying, not so much). It betrays a few other things, like the fact that a woman in her sixties with more than forty years of experience did not know a very fundamental term, but this is of small and personal consequence. On the grand scale, primarily, if an educated person cannot sound educated even to their peers, how to they sound to those under their care? And why are they allowed to disseminate their misinformation to the new generation?


Go ahead, google paranesia, I know you're dying to.

Faugh a Ballagh

Yesterday was St. Patrick’s Day. I am writing this today instead for two reasons: first, and most importantly, I am Irish every day, and secondly, there may be certain among you whose recollection of your activities yesterday is a little fuzzy, and I would hate for you to have missed these pearls of wisdom amidst all the merry-making. Here are some tidbits about the holiday that you may not know (and can use to amaze your friends…okay, bore your friends...).

1. The entire month of March is Irish-American History Month in the U.S. Never heard of it? That’s because Congress never bothered to tell us when they created it in 1992. Besides, American History is Irish History, just like Black History and Women’s History are American History. America could not have existed without the Irish, and that isn't just true in March.

2. St. Patrick was not Irish. He was a Briton, a kind of Germanic predecessor to Welsh people. He was kidnapped as a teenager and taken as a slave to Ireland, which didn’t allow slaves, so he escaped back to Wales where he became a priest. Eventually he returned to Ireland to endorse the brand-new religion of Christianity.

3. St. Patrick is credited with driving the snakes out of Ireland. Christian legend says they attacked him during prayer so he chased the entire country-full of them into the sea. Modern historians speculate the story is an allegory for the banishment of Druids, who often wore snake tattoos, and biologists maintain that it is simply too cold in Ireland for reptiles. Whatever the reason, the fact remains that today there are no snakes in Ireland.

4. Not everyone wears green on St. Patrick’s day. In Ireland, Catholics wear green, Protestants (Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, etc.) wear orange, and until the late 1800’s nobody wore green at all; they wore blue.

5. St. Patrick is not the only famous saint in Ireland. St. Colmcille was exiled from Ireland because he started a war over ownership of a manuscript he copied, and St. Brigid was given to a convent by her father, a pagan king, because she kept giving away his treasury to the poor.

6. There are more Irish in the United States than in Ireland – way more. About four and a half million people live in the Republic of Ireland and another two million live in Northern Ireland (which belongs to England). There are about forty-one million people of primarily Irish descent in the United States of America.
   
7. Faugh a Ballagh, the title of this post, is an old Irish battle cry meaning "clear the way!" It is pronounced fawk-a-ballick. Erin go bragh (long live Ireland)!

If you are Irish, if you are part Irish, if you could be Irish, if you married into an Irish family, if you have Irish friends, or if you just love dancing, singing, eating, drinking, laughing and good company, celebrate St. Patrick’s Day on March 17, and be proud of the Irish every day of the year! 

This One's for the Boys

Gentlemen, this is important. The following is a TRUE FACT:

The time every month which is blamed for female actions ranging from the slightly silly to the disturbingly psychotic is when OUR HORMONE LEVELS MOST RESEMBLES MALES’.

Emotionality during any time of internal chemical upheaval is to be expected, so a little moodiness or irritability is normal, but if men are not constantly bitchy and unpredictable there is no excuse for women to be when they have similar hormone levels. Which brings me to my second true fact:

WOMEN USE THEIR PERIODS AS AN EXCUSE FOR BAD BEHAVIOR AND THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE.

A small percentage women have real medical disorders associated with their cycles, but most have simply been taught that it’s okay to act like raging psychopaths and then cutely blame it on PMS. Men, conversely, have been taught that the mention of a period means they have no right to object to any insanity, because they've never had one. They even feed into it with that stupid joke about “I don’t trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn’t die.” Don’t. Stop it now. 

Consider this: Women have never been kicked in the testicles but we know that A) it sucks, and B) only a real jerk acts that way. Therefore, men, all you need to know about periods is A) it sucks, and B) only a real jerk acts that way. Treating people badly is treating people badly, whether you’re full of estrogen, testosterone, Vodka, or dark chocolate, and there is no excuse for it. Periods have appeared with tidal regularity since before we were even proper humans and to say now that it is what makes a woman act badly is to say that being a woman is what makes a woman act badly. 

  

Women, is that really the message you want to send? Men, if a girl in your life does something of uncalled-for nastiness, or stupidity, or greed, and blames it on her period, CALL HER ON IT. Tell her why. All humans have to exercise self control and common decency. You’re not a spiteful space cadet stuffing ice cream in your face because you have to pee in front of other dudes in public restrooms, and that’s way more inconvenient than a period. 

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

Ah, a new season. Today we celebrate the first official spider sighting of the year. This is the first half of a two part holiday which opens spring (the second half is the first official spider INDOORS, which you will know by the sound of twelve-year-old girls everywhere screaming).


As irrational phobias go, spiders are pretty high on the list of usual suspects, along with snakes, heights, and general insect life. Airplanes, needles, small spaces, and social anxiety may also pad out the roster, depending on your source, and we've all seen that poor redhead on Glee who has the OCD-level germ issues. Don't lie, you've seen Glee. You LIKED Glee, even if you also wanted to throw Slurpees at all those nauseatingly talented kids for being so damn cheerful (and even if you are a man and had to immediately go eat a steak and urinate outdoors to earn back those man points).


I should also mention that there is a difference between a fear and a phobia. A fear is "I drive ten hours to visit my parents because I hate flying, but when we vacation in Europe I have a couple margaritas and a Xanax and we get there okay." A phobia is "I cannot go anywhere that can't be reasonably accessed by car/train/bus, because the mere idea of flying renders me a gelatinous mass of cold sweat and exposed nerves." 


So, the spiders. Spiders have no place in a wholesome world. I know they eat mosquitoes, blah blah blah, but I would also add, I do not care. Spiders are delicate, fanged scraps of nightmare that are even now assembling their annual Committee on Being Disgusting. The one in the stairwell up to my apartment (designated Spider Zero as the first official case of the upcoming epidemic) will creep in as I sleep to digest me inside my skin, and I will wake up as a bag of human soup. 



Okay, maybe I will not wake up looking like Tollund Man, but that doesn't make the heebie-jeebies go away. As crippling phobias go, arachnophobia is not really too bad, especially since I live in an area where they do not grow to the size of beagles like in Hawaii or South America. They live outdoors, I live indoors, we seldom venture into each other's territory and this is an acceptable truce. Granted, when we do encounter one another (or I see a picture, or sometimes even read the word spider), it isn't pretty, but it's certainly not as disruptive as a phobia of something more frequently encountered, like dogs (cynophobia), public speaking (glossophobia), or dirt (mysophobia). Attics, basements, and forests are tricky places but at least I don't pass out at the sight of a podium and or have to wash my hands sixty times a day (OK, I do, but that's because I work in a hospital). 


Theoretically you can be phobic of literally anything, although fortunately most people are not. My two personal favorites are defecaloesiophobia, which is fear of bowel movements and must be a really, really uncomfortable affliction, and arachibutyrophobia - Greek roots, anyone? That's right, the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth. God love the shrink who had to come up with that one.


Maybe you have a similar Achilles heel - your child can't enter a darkened room, or your mom can barely go up a flight of stairs without feeling queasy, or your brother faints when he gets a shot. Maybe the very word SNAKE on this page makes those funny little fingers of hot ice run up your spine. 


I'm going to go wash my hands.

Suspicious Noises

Now we play a game called "Why does my computer make that grinding noise?" It is closely related to the other game I play called "Why does my car make that hammering noise?" So far, I am losing both games. In fact, even if I win both games by discovering the mysterious source of these noises, I still lose because I will have to get them fixed. 


My computer-repair expertise is usually limited to repairing whatever software issue I personally have created, and with cars to looking in need of adult assistance next to a car with the hood raised. In my own defense, I can change headlights, taillights, batteries, tires, etc., but the steaming-radiator-clunking-throttle-suspicious-piston-sound level of trouble is beyond me. I can also hard reset like nobody's business, but the Blue Screen loooves me.


The last time I witnessed a computer make an odd noise, it was followed by a puff of smoke (true story) and a very surprised look on the face of the Geek Squad woman holding it. Almost worth the cost of replacing a laptop, that time.


Now, because I am hemorrhaging money to my Well-Respected Nursing Program, I cannot replace either computer or car should either noise prove to be more than merely vaguely concerning, but am consoled by the image of the cosmic "why does my ____make that _____ noise" game as a giant exhibition of The Price is Right, some cheerful announcer spinning a wheel that lands on "car" and dropping a Plinko token that lands on "transmission" and then shouting,


"Come on doooown!...No, really lady, come away from that thing before it explodes."

Some Light Housekeeping

Mopping is a really ridiculous chore. This is not a Women’s Lib thing since I do the mopping, vacuuming, cooking (read: microwaving) and other general housekeeping around my apartment because I am the only one here with opposable thumbs. Or a pre-frontal cortex. Also, I make most of the mess, so it’s only fair I do most of the cleaning.

I am not offended by the floor being clean, or by being the one to render it so, but this is one of the most inefficient ways of cleaning a floor I can possibly imagine. A classmate of mine wipes down her desk, laptop, and any other surface in reach with alcohol swabs in every class with an almost religious fervor (we laugh but still line up sheepishly for our share of hand sanitizer), and as I contemplate the bathroom floor I hear her in my head. Why would we take an object which has retained and grown microbes since the last time it was used and employ it to smear water around the floor which is now presumably replete with both the germs already on it and the ones that have been festering in the mop?

Yes, there has been bathroom cleaner liberally applied to the floor pre-mopping, but since I can’t see the microbes anyway I can’t prove they are gone, and meanwhile there is standing water on the tiles growing Marburg Hemorrhagic Fever or something. So, cue several minutes of an un-Eco-friendly use of paper towels to quell the epidemic, and then several more deciding if I should Chlorox Wipe everything as well (did not, feel OK about cleanliness status).

I do understand that mopping is probably superior to scrubbing on my hands and knees with a brush and bucket, but it is not as good as, say, autoclaving. Which is really the level of cleanliness I would love in my bathroom, since it is where I keep my toothbrush. Which goes in my mouth. Everyday. Twice.

Unfortunately this is merely the prelude to a larger issue, which will be sorting out the plumbing (had to mop because the drain overflowed and I know not what lurks beneath). Standard practice says start with a plunger, which I borrowed from my father. When I asked for it, he looked at me, aged twenty-six, and at the plunger (handle at one end, rubber bulb on the other, no moving parts in between) and asked thoughtfully,

“Have I ever taught you how to use one of these things?”

Nothing Complicated

I love my dog like the ocean loves the moon. Sometimes life need not be more complicated than that. I have no children and no plans for any, which frees me up to spoil my furry baby silly. Ronan is a toy poodle, emphasis on the toy, and has managed to attain the quite significant weight of 3.7 pounds. He won’t get bigger unless I continue feeding him Frosted Mini-Wheats, in which case he might make it up to an entire four pounds. Don't worry, he mostly eats organic dog food, he just prefers whatever I'm eating.

The name is Irish, meaning "little seal" because as a puppy he squirmed around like a baby seal. Lately most people think it is the Japanese Ronin, which is a samurai of some description. I'd like to think my baby looks tough enough to be a samurai, but eight inches probably doesn't meet the height requirement. 

At the moment he is suffering from an ill-advised attempt at hair-dressing because it occurred to me that what every truly manly poodle needs is a Mohawk. It did not come out exactly as planned, and I do draw the line at buying hair gel for a small dog, so we will let time sort that one out. I did, however, use my brother Jacob’s beard trimmer to do both the Mohawk and Ronan’s tiny nether-regions, and he blamed our brother Wilhelm for it, so this is still logged as a win.

Yes, I named my brothers after the Brothers Grimm; no, we are not above playing mischief on each other in our twenties.

Ronan has, in fact, just learned he is a little boy, and has to pee on everything so that the Bernese Mountain Dog and the three Goldens in our development will know that he, not they (who outweigh him approximately 1000% each), owns every blade of grass in sight. He understands the function but the form is still a little shaky, because the leg-lifting maneuver is performed with the back leg of choice and most of his lower body straight up in the air. Can’t picture it? Think flying squirrel, sideways.

Because I am not totally foolish about my dog (read: I am), he usually sleeps in his own bed, except on the occasions he prefers to sleep ON MY FACE. And I do admit that I actually built my tiny dog stairs so that he could climb up on the bed and snuggle with me…