Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Johnny Dooit, come to me/I need you bad as bad can be*

Ah, the forgotten joys of bundle service.

So, yeah: my washer is broken. And the new one won't be delivered until sometime the first week of August, because that's how all the appliance stores in the area roll, except for the one that has washers *starting* at a thousand smackers. I love that store, primarily because there is an ageless woman who sits at a desk, remembers my name, asks about my sister, and remembers when my parents bought their washer from her (!!!) just before I was born (!!!!!!), but I can't afford their stuff.

So I took everything to Mike and Audelia's Super-Clean Qwiki-Wash last night and dropped it off for bundle service. Forty-nine cents a pound is nothing to sneeze at, especially when everything comes back free of stains (even the ones Max left the last time I wiped mud off of him) and neatly folded or hung.

I had forgotten how nice it was to have bundle service. Seriously? The worst parts of the laundry--the drying and folding--are done. Nothing's shrunk, nothing's stained, and the only T-shirt they hung was the LOLObama one I have, which has forty-something cat heads on it, with the last one a black cat.

It took me a moment to think--*hard*--before I realized that, cost-wise, not cancelling the washer delivery and selling the dryer was a bad idea. It was that nice to come home to a basket full of clean laundry, all folded the way I like it. I hate folding.

And meanwhile, in the back yard....

My neighbor's tree fell over.

That doesn't really express what happened. In the last two weeks, we got as much rain as we normally get in a year. The neighbor's tree is--or I should say, *was*--a seventy-foot-tall pecan tree that had mostly grown sideways in the way that pecans have.

It fell over by degrees, onto the garage that belongs to the house behind me. It just pulled out of the saturated ground and fell over slowly, not doing much damage.

Today, driven by a combination of further-saturated ground and high winds, it just sort of rolled off the garage and landed in my back yard. So now I have seventy feet of tree across an eighty-foot-wide lot (the shed is undamaged), and I have to wait until the already-overburdened tree company can find space in its schedule for a non-emergency tree removal.

It's not inconvenient--Max can and does walk under the bulk of the trunk easily--and it's not really damaging the fence, since the fence was installed by Army guys a zillion years ago and won't come down short of a direct meteor strike, but it is weird to look at.

And meanwhile, back at Sunnydale,

I got a third broken monitor fixed, got the second broken door fixed, reassigned two computers to a different printer, and took care of a patient in between. The guys from Engineering and Computer Services are my pals; they're my own personal Johnny Dooits. (And I don't even have a Love Magnet, and please no comments from the peanut gallery on that.) They show up, they fix the problem, and with a smile and a wink, they disappear.

The patient, meanwhile, was one of those ones that makes you glad to be in nursing. She had a clot in her left MCA, which is an artery that perfuses pretty much everything that's important in your head, while still letting you live.

Her friends got her to the hospital within fifteen minutes of her falling over, and could actually provide a good history for her once she got to our ED. We couldn't give her TPA, because her clot factors were all out of whack (she has a fake heart valve), but we were able to go in and yank that big ol' clot out of her head.

This morning she could barely stand. This evening she was walking with a normal gait. This morning she could say "yes" and "no" if you gave her time; this evening she was speaking in two- and three-word phrases. We got the clot out last night.

This is hugely exciting. She might have some residual difficulty with word finding, or maybe a bit of a limp, but the option prior to the MERCI procedure was a life lived trapped in her own head, without the use of the right side of her body. If she hadn't shown up at our hospital, where we're part of an ongoing study of MERCI retrievers (I always think of a shaggy dog with a French accent), she would've languished in long-term care for the rest of her life.

As it is, she's getting her speech back. She never lost her sense of humor. She's aware enough of the left side of her face to try to make it match the right when she smiles. And, most important of all, she's bilingual and didn't lose either language, which means her language centers fared okay.

I burst into tears when I asked her, "What do you want to drink with dinner? Coke or Dr. Pepper?" and she replied, "Iced tea."




*A big Head Nurse prize to the first person outside my immediate family who can identify the source of those lines and give me context. Google will not save you now, young Padawan.

10 comments:

messymimi said...

Bundled service sounds like a dream come true. Especially when you use a clothes line.

A friend's roommate was once sitting in the living room when the tree in the back yard decided, after a hurricane, to come inside and introduce itself. He calmly got up off the couch out from under it, unscathed, because it was propped up by the fireplace.

He grabbed his cell phone, climbed back under the tree onto the couch, and called the roomie/homeowner to let him know.

I'm glad the lady is doing well.

Rachael said...

so... are you gonna tell us in the next couple days what song that is? it's bugging me :)

bobbie said...

Johnny Dooit puffed his pipe and looked carefully at the dreadful desert in front of them--stretching so far away they could not see its end.

"You must ride," he said, briskly.

"What in?" asked the shaggy man.

"In a sand-boat, which has runners like a sled and sails like a ship. The wind will blow you swiftly across the desert and the sand cannot touch your flesh to turn it into dust."

"Good!" cried Dorothy, clapping her hands delightedly. "That was the way the Magic Carpet took us across. We didn't have to touch the horrid sand at all."

"But where is the sand-boat?" asked the shaggy man, looking all around him.

"I'll make you one," said Johnny Dooit.

As he spoke, he knocked the ashes from his pipe and put it in his pocket. Then he unlocked the copper chest and lifted the lid, and Dorothy saw it was full of shining tools of all sorts and shapes.

Johnny Dooit moved quickly now--so quickly that they were astonished at the work he was able to accomplish. He had in his chest a tool for everything he wanted to do, and these must have been magic tools because they did their work so fast and so well.

"The man hummed a little song as he worked, and "Dorothy tried to listen to it. She thought the words were something like these:

The only way to do a thing Is do it when you can, And do it cheerfully, and sing And work and think and plan. The only real unhappy one Is he who dares to shirk; The only really happy one Is he who cares to work."

D. and her friends are trying to reach the Emerald City ~

Jenn said...

It is from The Road to Oz when they need a boat to cross the desert. ;)
Never doubt the power of Google!

Gretchen said...

Clearly your google-fu is inadequate, because finding the source took me all of 10 seconds. But I'll leave it for others to find, if they so desire.

"I'm always, always good"

Laura said...

Johnny Dooit is a handyman in the book The Road to Oz. He is summoned by the Shaggy Man with the Love Button by the phrase "Dear Johnny Dooit, come to me, I need you bad as bad can be." He builds a sandboat using tools from his copper chest to carry Dorothy Gale et al across the desert.

Never doubt the Google-fu!

Jo said...

Drat! My Google-Fu is far from inadequate; I was just hoping somebody else out there had a copy of The Road To OZ lying around.

*sigh* Cookies for everyone, I guess.

bobbie said...

I used to have every single one of the Oz books ~ they were lost during a move years ago...

Joy K. said...

So now you file this away in your mental "file cabinet of little luxuries." The next time the prospect of doing the wash makes you break out in itchy hives, bundle it up, take it to the cleaners, and enjoy.

tottergirl said...

It is from one of the OZ books by L.Frank Baum, though I can't remember exactly which one.