raccoon love

Let me share with you the absolutely exquisite sound that woke me from a deep, lovely sleep long before the buttcrack of dawn.

I startled at the noise, because it sounded like it was coming from under my bed. Initially I thought it was a dying cat- god help me- but when I opened the door to my bedroom, I saw both my big white toms, Jem and Scout, sitting there, staring at me, looking rather concerned. Apparently the noise woke them up, too.

As I listened, though, I realized it sounded less like a feline and more like a. . . like a. . .like a giant hamster in a fight with one of those aliens from the movie "Signs," you know, with the clicking and the whirring noises. So yes, a giant hamster vs an alien, under my house. At 0230. And then- oh yes, my friends, this story gets better- the pipes started rattling, and various detritus that collects in the crawl space beneath any old house started flying around down there as the hamster/alien thing rolled crazily around, nattering and clicking and yowling away. I could hear the dog in the apartment upstairs pacing, the noise was so worrisome.

If I were brave, and it were less cold outside, and a little more light, I might have stuck a hose under the house and turned it on full jet. But it was very cold, and very dark, and I was not feeling very brave at all, and did not feel prepared to deal with anything that might come screeching out at me. So I stomped up and down on the floor, and then got down on my hands and knees right next to the crawlspace trap door in my closet, and shouted in my meanest, angriest voice, "knock it off!" which had no effect whatsoever on the giant alien hamster still crashing into pipes and such, but which caused the cats great consternation.

So I got back into bed and lay there with a pillow around my ears until the giant clicky shrieky hamster thingie made its way outside, and I peeked out the door and saw what appeared to be a large, fuzzy ball that could very well have been the alien hamster I'd imagined in my head that eventually stopped making noise and turned into two raccoon butts sauntering away from me.

Raccoons mating. If you've never been blessed with the sound, consider yourself very, very lucky. I'm going to have nightmares for days.

firefighter girl turns in her bunkers for good. . .maybe

Once I got off of night shift last summer, I spent so much time lounging in the sun getting rid of my night shift pallor that I got out of the habit of writing on the computer. And frankly, I was spending way too much time in front of the screen, anyway.

So, let me get a refill on my coffee--there--and brush the biscotti crumbs off the keyboard, and I'll try to start where I left off ages ago.

MixMan is doing amazingly well with his implant. Watching him learn to hear is truly remarkable, but it's funny how quickly it becomes commonplace; now he's learned to ignore his parents when they're talking to him just like any other 8 year old boy does. And, unfortunately, he's picking up on (and using!) some tones and inflections (you know, that certain sigh of bored, put-upon youth that is accompanied by an eye roll) that he was not previously privy to from his classmates. But his teachers say that he is beginning to open up and initiate conversations with them and with other students without his interpreter present.

Miss Diva has enjoyed having a brother as opposed to someone she must act as interpreter for; the two of them love having a back yard to tromp around in, and they go on nature scavenger hunts, and they've developed an interest in all things spy. Her Diva-ness is losing some of her girly-girlness, but she still loves the color pink, and in fact has all-pink days quite frequently. She's waaaay ahead of everybody in her class on reading and socializing. And she comes up with the most stunning observations sometimes. I love tucking her in at night, when she looks at me and says, "Mama, I think tomorrow I'm going to have a sensitive day." and I know exactly what she means.

Recently, a box arrived in the mail for MixMan, and shortly after, one arrived for Miss Diva, too. Having been forewarned as to the contents, I hid the boxes in the closet for a while, because I knew that my days of limited peace and quiet would be over. The boxes contained a trumpet for MixMan and a recorder and fife for Miss Diva, courtesy of my brother. (When I told The Rock Star about this, he squeaked, "Egad! Does he hate you?" and "egad" is hard to squeak, let me tell you. But no, I informed him, my family just has a strange way of showing affection.) MixMan played that trumpet until he had a blister on his lip; he slept with it, he tucked it in and made me kiss it goodnight. Now things have calmed down a bit, my headache is gone, and we're discussing lessons.

Meanwhile, across town, a new hospital was opening, which made for some big changes at the small hospital I work at. Like how none of us are sure that we'll have a job by next year. And I'd been thinking about my profession a lot lately, anyway; how the only paramedic positions around here are in ERs and on fire departments, how the ER job was supposed to be until my injury healed and I could get on to a fire department, but how because of my injury I'll never be able to hoist hose effectively again. So, after much discussion with the honey, and a lot of soul searching, I decided to go back to school again to become a licensed massage therapist. It's a very portable profession, and I want to eventually focus on hospice care. I've seen a lot of death in the last few years, and some people go with such dignity and grace, it's an honor to be a part of that, even when I'm fighting so hard against it, pushing drugs, defibrillating, doing CPR. I want to help ease terminally ill patients into that place of grace and acceptance, and massage therapy is one way I can do so. Plus, like I said, I can do it anywhere. So I started school fall term; it should take me about a year to finish up. The honey's getting me a massage table, but I think that's because he's sick of lying on the floor for his massages.

Since my new hours weren't quite making the rent, I took a second job at a new urgent care clinic the docs from my ER opened up. And just in time, because I was informed last month that my position in the ER is being eliminated. Luckily, I have senority, so when the dust settles I'll have a job again. But for now I'm stuck in an office, learning more about hospital policies and JCAHO national patient safety goals, etc than I ever, ever wanted to learn.

I don't know what the next year will bring. I know I don't feel terribly maternal most of the time, and figure the kids are probably better off with benevolent neglect instead of active parenting from me; as long as they know I love them, I think they'll do okay. And sometimes, it's all I can do to show them that. It is so hard doing this alone. So hard. Thank goodness I have sisters and a great mom who help me with parenting advice. As long as I've got that and a what-will-become-of-me bed with lots of pillows and a cushy down duvet I can hide under, I think I'll mostly be okay.

So. That's the news from Meth Central. Happy holidays to all of you!

mixman's bionic ear

So, after almost a year of discussion and work and preparation and trips to the BigCity LittlePeople Hospital for tests and meetings and appointments, MixMan got his Cochlear Implant yesterday. He says now he can feel the bump behind his ear, and things are kinda itchy. They fired it up to make sure the device wasn't faulty, and said they got great nerve response. So on September 2nd, they'll turn it on and do the initial mapping, and we'll see if it works. The patient is doing fine, although is rather disappointed that his stylish head bandage is white instead of black, which would be infinitely more cool. He's very excited, though, about his robot ear. So now we call him RoboMan.

one in each kneecap

I am a very, very lucky girl that I have so many good, kind men in my life. I say that because I am starting to understand how women become man-haters; if I didn't have the boys I have to balance the assholes, I could very well be a man-hater myself. In the last year, I have been raped; cornered in the stock room of the ER by a co-worker I trusted (who shoved his tongue down my throat and his hand up my shirt); and groped and come onto by several patients who seem to think that the ER is a great place to pick up girls.

All of them had in common the inability to hear the word "no." Repeatedly. And, due to the red-headed temper I had as a kiddo, I was raised to talk things out, leave a situation before it gets violent and confrontational, count to ten before shouting, be cautious. Of course, my parents assumed I'd remain in a fairly sheltered Mormon existence. Little did they know. And unfortunately, in the last year, in all of these situations, my skills set has come up sorely lacking.

I have been angry, and sad, and so ashamed since last summer; ashamed that I couldn't talk my way out of a situation I was in completely by accident because all my fail-safes had fallen through. Over the last few months, I've started lifting again, and I have a heavy bag I beat the shit out of on a regular basis, and my cardio is better than it ever has been. But I am still sad, and angry, and have felt so powerless. And over and over again, I have wondered how it is possible for someone to be so disrespectful that they would disregard the wishes and free will of another person and violate not just that person's body but their soul.

People who know me will tell you that I might be cranky fairly often, but I rarely get really pissed off. Sometime last Wednesday, in the five minutes between finding a man on my patio watching me through my curtains and the moment when I lost my temper and threw myself out the door after him because he wouldn't leave, I became a person, a woman, capable of killing another human being.

But I'm pretty sure I'd rather just maim.

somebody explain to me all the assholes in the world

So last night, I'm lying in bed, reading a book, as I'm wont to do. I have the sliding glass door in my room open a little to let in a breeze, and I'm half in/half out of the covers and half in/half out of sleep. I hear a noise on the side patio, and I'm assuming it's a raccoon-- they like to tip over my plants-- so I get up to scare him off. I push the curtains aside, go to open the door a little more, and right there, I mean right there, is some guy sitting in one of my patio chairs that he's moved right up against the glass.

My first thought, as you can imagine, is "wtf?" because this is not a scene my mind can quite wrap around.

My second thought is "thank god I don't sleep naked."

And then I start getting a tad angry, and the adrenaline starts up. And I look at him (he hasn't even moved, but he's watching me) and I say, "what the f--- are you doing on my patio? Get out of my yard."

And he starts talking to me, apologizes, tells me he hopped the fence and he's just waiting for his friend and his back pack and blah blah blah and he's so sorry if he frightened me.

And I'm shaking my head, trying to get the sleep out of it, and things start coming a little more clear. Like the fact that my fence is not easily hoppable in any direction. And that I didn't hear the chair move at all, so he's probably been sitting there for quite a while. And that he's still there, staring at me, and I'm getting really sick of men who don't know me assuming that because they find me attractive that it is their right to tell me so, or watch me, or grope me, even when I tell them no.

I tell him again, "get the f--- off my porch, and don't let the gate hit you on the way out." And he apologizes again, says he'll give me some weed to smoke if I want. And he's still standing there, and he looks me up and down, and says,

"Hey, you've got that sexy librarian thing going."

I'm afraid I temporarily lost my mind. The wise thing to do, of course, would have been to close the door and call the cops. I didn't do the wise thing. I got very, very angry, and that adrenaline was really pumping, and I threw open the sliding glass door and lunged out, all 5 feet 5 inches and 130 pounds of me, and yelled "get the f--- off my porch or I will beat the living shit out of you!!"

He ran through the gate (he knew exactly where it was) to his car parked in front of my house, started it up and took off. And I sat down very fast and laughed.

and then I cried, and called the cops.

I woke up this morning and saw that he'd been watching me before I went to bed, too. The chaise lounge on the back porch is turned so that it looks directly in the dining room window at the table, where I sit and write every night before bed.

I was just starting to feel safe again, you know?

But you should have seen his face when I came out at him.

cliff surfing and more proof that i'm regressing

This is the full version of the carefully censored story I told my mother the other day.

On a recent camping trip, me and the Rock Star and a few others went mountain biking on a 14 mile trail (real mountain biking, like on the side of a mountain, with a steep drop down one side, straight into a river that stupid people ride in big rafts). anyway, about a third of the way in, we'd pulled aside up against the cliff face to let some other bikers pass going the other way; one of their back tires nicked my back tire, my bike tipped, and I slipped over the side. (Yes, you read that right, I fell off a bike that was not moving.) Frankly, I thought I was going to go all the way to the river, but I caught myself about 10 feet down. I'm very bruised- everyone at work is joking that Rock Star beats me, and I reply that no, he just throws me off mountains. I'm guessing the fall was rather spectacular to watch, judging by the look on his ordinarily deadpan face. And the fact that I regrouped before he did, which is difficult to do when you're picking shrubbery out of your hair, your heart is trying to jump past your uvula, and your limbs are so rubbery that sitting and contemplating the scenery seems like a really, really good idea for oh, an hour or so.

I did get a fairly remarkable gash in my leg and a couple of sprained fingers. Luckily, we had a pretty extensive medic bag back at camp (that's what happens when you go camping with a bunch of firefighter/medics with foresight and a lot of beer), so after things clotted up, we finished the ride and then I washed up in the river and poured down some liquid courage and we steri-stripped me. I've included a picture for your viewing enjoyment. That would be my right thigh. A week post-incident. It's going to be a big scar.

I don't recommend cliff sliding, though. I darn near wet myself.

a very brief recounting of the worst day ever

Grief, I think, is the most difficult part of our job. It's not the code blues (or 99s, or whatever your particular agency or hospital calls it when a patient crumps and dies, maybe right in front of you, maybe not), because in a code situation, training takes over, and it's much easier to think of the person in front of you whose chest cartilage you are cracking with every compression as a collection of skin and bones and cells and systems that all need to work together in order to keep a body alive. And so you try to pretend that what you're doing is to save a life, which might actually be the case, but more likely you are just keeping those organs alive on the off-chance that the person you are doing cpr on is an organ donor, or maybe you're pushing drugs and pumping someone's heart and slipping on a slick of vomit on the floor for just long enough that the person's family can get to the room and say goodbye to what they still think of as a person, but who you can tell is really just a corpse.

I hate doing cpr in front of family members. I hate the after, when I'm soaked in sweat, face flushed, trying to keep the mess on my scrubs to myself, when the family comes up to me, crying, and thanks me for all I've done, and hugs me hard. I didn't do a damn thing- there's your wife/mother/sister laying on that gurney, still dead from the abdominal aortic aneurysm she had that we didn't know about until she started vomiting and then her stomach blew up like a balloon, right in front of us. I hate watching that numb and silent grief that I can't do anything about, slicking up the fingers of another dead woman with KY jelly to slip her wedding ring off to give to her mute husband, the one she'd been married to for four decades. He asked for her toe ring, too, so I pulled the blanket back and revealed bright coral colored nail polish, so incongruous on the 68 year old foot.

I can handle the dead, the dying. It's the living that stay behind that I don't know how to deal with, the ones for whom the death is such a surprise. I didn't know your mother. I didn't know your wife, or sister, except maybe to start their IV or help lift them from the ambulance and get them hooked up to our equipment, continuing a steady stream of conversation to help them feel more comfortable. And I am so sorry that what I did couldn't save them for you, even though I did everything that I could. There is nothing, absolutely nothing that I can say to the grieving to ease their loss. All I can do is mop up the shit and vomit, tuck a clean sheet around the body, pull off the gold tokens of a life together, and hand them to you before I walk out the door to sit on the back stoop and cry.

on the menu: beer and tissues

Today was the worst day ever. Ever.

it's my magnetic personality

some of you may have heard about my previous experiences with certain monitoring equipment on the ambulance and in the ER. Well. RevMedic, you'll get a kick out of this. . .I can hear you laughing all the way down the I-5 corridor.

my new position is in the fast track section of Meth Central Med Center's ER. Better hours for a single mom (I get off work while it's still light outside!), plus I'm not tempted to do things that might get me in trouble, like

brief digression:

pushing D50 on a combative diabetic patient with a CBG of 33 who is brought in by medics after causing a rather large wreck on the freeway that sends 4 other people to the trauma center and the diabetic patient to our little ER with no IV, which I manage to get, and then without thinking, grab that big fat syringe sitting bedside on the tray, and when I'm halfway through the IV push realize that while I am certified by the state I live in to paralyze patients in the field I am not allowed to push farging sugar water in the ER. Whoopsie.

end of digression

anyway. ahem. So now I work three beds with one monitor to do intake and discharge vitals on 20-30 patients a shift. I am not rough on my equipment; I treat it with respect. I don't throw it around or stomp on it or dunk it in saline. Noooooo. However, the nurse I work with informed me tonight, after replacing the SPO2 sensor for the third time this week, that I was no longer allowed to touch the damn thing.

by the way- the Zoll is back. Took them 2 months to fix it.

karma in action

if, by chance, you happen to be Meth County's eminent and most sought after car thief, and you have, in the last few months, focused much of your attention on the vehicles in the Meth Central Med Center's parking lot, and many of the vehicles you have stolen or broken into belong to Meth Central Med Center's employees, and you decide to get stabbed by a butcher knife while mumble mumble mumble mumble (the details are still a little unclear here), and the stab wound goes into your abdomen, through your liver, through your diaphragm, and into your lung, and the person who stabs you feels some remorse (and perhaps the long arm of the law tightening around their neck) and decides to dump you in the ambulance bay of an ER, where you proceed to bleed all over the asphalt and screech loudly enough to wake the dead, or at least the security guard, you may not want to be carrying your lock-picking set or threaten the caregivers attending you that they better make sure you don't die. Better yet, you may want to gently inform your assailant that the ER on the other side of town may be preferable for future stab and dumps. The compassion index might be a tad higher.

Maybe.