I used to own a gun.
It was a gun specifically designed to kill people with as much efficiency and as little subtlety as possible: a twenty-gauge shotgun with a barrel so short it skirted the legal limits, bought without a background check on the grey market, loaded with shells full of buckshot. I didn't buy a twelve-gauge because I'm a lady, and larger shotguns kick like hell.
If I had fired it, it would've put a huge, bloody hole in my target, the wall behind and on either side of him, and anything else within about twenty feet.
I bought it about six weeks before I had surgery, from a guy at work. I paid in cash and felt better, because I knew that in my weakened, post-surgical state, as a woman living alone, I would not be able to fight off any intruder who had gotten past shatterproof windows, steel doors, and Max.
(I still miss Max terribly. I never felt safer than when he was lying in the exact spot where he could see both the front and back doors at the same time. He was a Good Boy.)
Still: I was looking at several weeks, if not several months, of recovery from a nasty surgery. I felt small and alone and afraid, and so I bought a vaguely illegal gun that required no skill to shoot. I'm such a newbie that a friend of mine cleaned and loaded it for me and showed me how the safety worked.
Once I got better, I sold it back to the guy who'd sold it to me, for the same price, as it had not been fired. Now I have a can of wasp spray, which is both blinding and neurotoxic. In the words of my hippie massage therapist, it'll fuck a body up.
Beloved Boy owns a number of guns. He hunts, so he has guns, QED. He has one self-defense weapon, a semi-automatic Czechoslovakian pistol with a reminder to "Owner's Manual: Read Before Using" etched on the barrel. Its clip holds 18 rounds of ammunition which, if it hit you in the right spot, would be instantly lethal. If it were to hit you in the not-right spot, it'd be very messy and damaging. If you hold the trigger down, it shoots, then pauses, then shoots, which (as I understand) is what makes it semi-automatic. It's a gorgeous piece of technology and not one I'd ever want to use.
That said: I support the right of the individual to bear arms. I support the idea and practice of a well-armed local defense force, as exemplified by the National Guard. The Second Amendment and I are buddies from way back.
I do not like semi-automatic weapons with large-capacity magazines. Nobody needs them, and nobody should have them, including Beloved Boy.
Because, frankly, all it takes to kill a human is a single-shot, pump-action shotgun with the correct sort of ammo. Load that sumbitch with the right stuff, and you're pretty much done with the discussion. More than that is way too much icing on the cake.
Guns aren't meant to paint pretty watercolors. You wouldn't use one to wash your car or change a baby's diaper. Guns are meant to kill, whether it's ducks or deer (oh God oh God I know I'll have to roast a duck at some point please don't make me clean it ew) or people. There has to be a limit, a boundary, to the amount of killing any one person can do at any one time.
So yeah, I'm all for renewing the ban on assault weapons. I want limits on high-capacity magazines, because for God's sake, who's going to hunt a fucking deer with a 36-shot clip? If the Tyrants of the Twenty-First Century come after us, they'll be armed with nervines and poison gas and nonlethal weapons that'll make Star Wars look like a children's cartoon. No assault weapon is worth its weight if you're vomiting and having uncontrolled diarrhea from sub-sonic vibrations.
I wish, at the end of the day, that I'd trusted Max more, that I hadn't felt the need to spend money and brain-time on something lethal. I had shatterproof glass and fireproof and kickproof doors and a big, handsome boy with huge teeth; what more did I need? I bought a gun because I felt weak and small and afraid.
And I wonder how many other people feel weak and small and afraid in the face of what life sends them, and compensate by getting an AR-15.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Sunday, January 13, 2013
This is what I've learned, in two-plus years of no palate. . .
I got to thinking about this the other night, as I was rinsing out the enormous (well, not enormous, but it feels enormous) hole that goes directly from my mouth to my right sinus:
1. Sinuses catch a lot of stuff.
Seriously. The crap I wash out of my sinuses every couple of days would make a strong man shudder and a scientist's eyes gleam with excitement.
2. You don't know how lucky you are to have a palate until you don't.
You normal people have NO IDEA how much snot you produce. Trust me on this one.
3. I can't eat flour tortillas under any circumstances, and should probably stay away from baked potatoes, Tater Tots, macaroni and cheese, and muffins.
Some things stick to my obturator with the tenacity of an angry giant squid. Other things work their way into my turbinates, to be sneezed out a few days or a week later, causing me great alarm.
4. I am so fucking lucky not to have had to have radiation.
I had a patient today who had radiation to his face and neck and who felt pain while eating a can of peaches. Just chewing had caused a pathological fracture. The surgical response was to remove half of his lower jaw. My pal Mary is dealing with a less-horrible, but still awful, sequel to radiation. I was very, very lucky.
5. When you have something that's considered rare, information and statistics and so on change in a matter of months.
When I started the journey with CANSUH, the stats were that three of every four patients that got what I have, polymorphic low-grade adenocarcinoma, were female. Now it's four men in every five patients. Smoking and drinking seem to have little to no bearing on whether or not you get it. Endogenous or exogenous estrogen no longer matters. Spicy food isn't considered a problem, unless you get some of that Thai long pepper up over your obturator. See comment on point #2.
When I started this whole thing, the assumption was that a complete cure could be had with aggressive surgical resection. Now the understanding is that PLGA can come back seven, ten, even twenty years after resection, and even if radiation was used as an adjunct.
When I started treatment, PET scans were considered the standard for monitoring. Now, given the indolence of the tumor, doctors are questioning how effective technology is. Apparently, a tumor can get to be quite a respectable size before it shows up on scans. Now, hands-on scoping and poking is the latest thing.
Essentially, I got told during my last ENT visit with Dr. Crane that the best I could do was NED--No Evidence of Disease--forever.
Well, shit.
In a way, it sucks to go from "we have a complete cure" to "you have to be careful." In another, it's nice to know where I stand. I never really trusted that "complete cure" thing anyhow. When you've had a piece of your body removed with a bone saw, you tend to get a little spooky about confident predictions.
All of this sounds, in the balance, negative.
However: I'm sitting here, more than two years after my surgery, blogging. I just scratched my own back and felt how incredibly dense and thick my back muscles are. I'm strong, I'm fat (which, if you're in my shoes, is not necessarily a bad thing), I'm back to lifting weights three times a week and running nine-minute miles. I can do yoga without falling over much. The Boy can understand me when I talk without my obturator in, and says it's getting easier to do so with every passing month. (He takes me the way I am; I am so incredibly lucky for that.) I have all but one of my teeth; two if you count the one that was never going to erupt, since it was lying horizontally under my cheekbone.
I look normal. That is such a huge, huge thing. I sound normal. That's even bigger. Two years ago, I wouldn't have believed you if you'd told me that I would *feel* normal with an obturator in--do you remember the struggles I had? I do.
The cancer might come back, or I might get some other type. I'm half-expecting to have to say, "Mother-FUCKER. AGAIN???" when I get my mammogram this year.
The difference between now and two years ago is this: Not only do I know I can survive all the stuff that happened, I know I can do well through and after it.
I can do anything, now. Just about damn near with very few exceptions anything.
1. Sinuses catch a lot of stuff.
Seriously. The crap I wash out of my sinuses every couple of days would make a strong man shudder and a scientist's eyes gleam with excitement.
2. You don't know how lucky you are to have a palate until you don't.
You normal people have NO IDEA how much snot you produce. Trust me on this one.
3. I can't eat flour tortillas under any circumstances, and should probably stay away from baked potatoes, Tater Tots, macaroni and cheese, and muffins.
Some things stick to my obturator with the tenacity of an angry giant squid. Other things work their way into my turbinates, to be sneezed out a few days or a week later, causing me great alarm.
4. I am so fucking lucky not to have had to have radiation.
I had a patient today who had radiation to his face and neck and who felt pain while eating a can of peaches. Just chewing had caused a pathological fracture. The surgical response was to remove half of his lower jaw. My pal Mary is dealing with a less-horrible, but still awful, sequel to radiation. I was very, very lucky.
5. When you have something that's considered rare, information and statistics and so on change in a matter of months.
When I started the journey with CANSUH, the stats were that three of every four patients that got what I have, polymorphic low-grade adenocarcinoma, were female. Now it's four men in every five patients. Smoking and drinking seem to have little to no bearing on whether or not you get it. Endogenous or exogenous estrogen no longer matters. Spicy food isn't considered a problem, unless you get some of that Thai long pepper up over your obturator. See comment on point #2.
When I started this whole thing, the assumption was that a complete cure could be had with aggressive surgical resection. Now the understanding is that PLGA can come back seven, ten, even twenty years after resection, and even if radiation was used as an adjunct.
When I started treatment, PET scans were considered the standard for monitoring. Now, given the indolence of the tumor, doctors are questioning how effective technology is. Apparently, a tumor can get to be quite a respectable size before it shows up on scans. Now, hands-on scoping and poking is the latest thing.
Essentially, I got told during my last ENT visit with Dr. Crane that the best I could do was NED--No Evidence of Disease--forever.
Well, shit.
In a way, it sucks to go from "we have a complete cure" to "you have to be careful." In another, it's nice to know where I stand. I never really trusted that "complete cure" thing anyhow. When you've had a piece of your body removed with a bone saw, you tend to get a little spooky about confident predictions.
All of this sounds, in the balance, negative.
However: I'm sitting here, more than two years after my surgery, blogging. I just scratched my own back and felt how incredibly dense and thick my back muscles are. I'm strong, I'm fat (which, if you're in my shoes, is not necessarily a bad thing), I'm back to lifting weights three times a week and running nine-minute miles. I can do yoga without falling over much. The Boy can understand me when I talk without my obturator in, and says it's getting easier to do so with every passing month. (He takes me the way I am; I am so incredibly lucky for that.) I have all but one of my teeth; two if you count the one that was never going to erupt, since it was lying horizontally under my cheekbone.
I look normal. That is such a huge, huge thing. I sound normal. That's even bigger. Two years ago, I wouldn't have believed you if you'd told me that I would *feel* normal with an obturator in--do you remember the struggles I had? I do.
The cancer might come back, or I might get some other type. I'm half-expecting to have to say, "Mother-FUCKER. AGAIN???" when I get my mammogram this year.
The difference between now and two years ago is this: Not only do I know I can survive all the stuff that happened, I know I can do well through and after it.
I can do anything, now. Just about damn near with very few exceptions anything.
Saturday, January 05, 2013
In the two days I've had off since the holidays. . .
. . .I've gotten into an Ancient Cookbook Frenzy.
One thing I can say for people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: they had one hell of a collective sweet tooth. Make a pie of artichoke bottoms? Strew it with sugar before you serve it to table. Boil a calve's chaldron (which I just found out is entrails) and spice it with mace and nutmeg and cinnamon? Sprinkle a little sugar over that mofo before you serve it up in a pasty. Roast a rooster? Sugar. Making a nice (meaning exacting) recipe for biskit? Sugar. Sheep's feet? Sugar.
When a recipe starts with "Take a pound of sugar, seirced, and lay it onto four pounds of butter, add enough flower to make a past with rosewater and fresh Milk," you know you're really on to something.
My goal is to find recipes that don't involve too much sugar, like roasted capon with a cream/anchovy/egg yolk sauce, and try to make them. The trick is deciding when "enough" is really enough, as most of the recipes say to bake, boil, or chafe something until it is enough or is meet.
The best instructions I've found so far are for Makeing a Caudle After the French Manner, in which you are directed to Seethe as much Milk as is fit on the Coals of the Fyre, and when little Pimples appear, you are to Take It Off and Coole It by the Fyre until it is Hardened, which, ew.
In that vein, I offer two recipes, primarily for Friend Penny The Lotion Slut, but also for anybody who needs soup. Non-vegetarian alternatives for the first are given in parenthesis.
Auntie Jo's Pseudo-Mexican Veggie and Corn (and Chicken) Soup:
In preparation:
Pour one box of vegetable stock (chicken stock)--Kitchen Basics makes an excellent one--into a very large pot
Set to seethe over a low fyre.
Meanwhile, chop one small or one-half of a large Onyon
Two Peppers, either Poblano or Bell, (but not green bell, because they suck)
And wilt (fry over very low heat) them in a little vegetable oil
Open three cans of beans: one white, one red, one black. Dump them into a colander and run water over them until those weird starchy white bubbles no longer form. This process will take out the fartification chemicals.
(If you want to make this with chicken, now is the time to add your preferred cut of said bird to the stock. When it's simmered enough that there's not actual blood coming out of the meat, you can pull out the meat and shred it, then return it to the stock.)
Add the onion/pepper mix to the stock.
Add one can of petite diced tomatoes with juice.
Pour in enough water that you've got a kind of watery thing going on. You're going to cook this for a good while, so don't be afraid to add plenty of H2O. I usually add about four cups.
Now add your beans. If you have a bag of frozen corn in the freezer, the cheap sort that is sold for fifty cents a bag, add that too. A can of shoepeg or regular corn, well-drained and rinsed, will do as well.
If you're doing this right, you should have about a gallon of very watery soup: enough to make you wonder if this was a good idea. You're doing fine, don't worry. (How I wish this reassurance came in 16th century recipes!)
Now for two spices: cumin and chili powder. You are a fool if you use hot chili powder for the majority of this, since you want to dump in at least a quarter-cup of each. Seriously: you want this sonofabitch to be a dark red color with a hit of cumin to your nose. If you want the heat, you can add a couple tablespoons of hot chili powder about midway through, but don't use all hot; you'll be sad.
Allow to come to a boil to kill off bacteria. Then simmer for several hours, or until it looks like supper. (For reference, I usually have at least an inch of soup-ring around the edge of the pot before I serve it.)
This makes a lot of soup. I freeze about three quarts every time I make it. Serve with shredded cheese and tortilla chips, either on the side or crumbled in. Do not sprinkle with sugar before taking to the table.
Auntie Jo's Weird Pseudo-Tabbouli Thing Made With Kale
I'm actually very proud of this. It keeps forever and tastes better the second, third, and fourth day.
Get you one bunch of kale. Curly or not, doesn't matter. It's cheap, so maybe you should get two.
Get you a bunch of parsley. The flat-leaf Eyetalian kind is best, but you can skate by with that curly stuff.
Get the other half of that onion out of the fridge.
Buy a long English cucumber, one red or yellow bell pepper, and three good tomatoes, if any are to be found in the winter.
Make sure you know where your salt, pepper, olive oil, and lemon juice are.
Be warned: this is a labor-intensive recipe.
Wash your kale in several changes of water. The easiest way to do this is to fill a really big container with cold water, plunge the vegetables in and swish them around, then yank them out. Empty the container and rinse and refill, then repeat. You can't be too careful with kale, as it tends to be sandy.
Do the same with the parsley.
Dry them both by shaking them out, then wrapping them in a dishtowel. Set that mess aside.
Peel and seed your cucumber, or don't peel it. Just seed it. Whatever. Chop it very, very finely.
Chop your tomatoes very, very finely. Save as much juice as you feel like.
Ditto your onion. Ditto your pepper, removing the seeds and weird white membrane first.
If you have garlic, mince a couple of cloves of that, too.
Set all of that aside. Now you're starting the really labor-intensive bit:
Stem the kale. This is most easily done by simply grabbing the leafy parts of the kale and ripping them off the stem. A little stem is okay, but not a lot, as kale stem is best digested if you have four stomachs.
Stem the parsley. You don't have to be as careful with this. As a matter of fact, I usually just cut off the top two-thirds of the bunch and save the rest for stock.
Chop the kale and the parsley together (you should have about equal amounts of each) very, very finely. No, finer. No, finer than *that*. You want the two to be indistinguishable on the cutting board. Seriously: chop it fine fine fine. Otherwise, the kale will be tough.
Mix the kale/parsley stuff with all your other veggies. Salt generously. Use some pepper. Squirt more lemon juice than you think is wise over it, then finish with a dollop of olive oil. Stir. Refrigerate. Eat entire bowlsful for lunch.
Sometimes I add quinoa to this to make it a main dish. Sometimes I just eat it straight out of the bowl, standing in front of the fridge, when I get home from work.
You could possibly use a food processor for the chopping, but only if you're better with a food processor than I am. I got kale and parsley pesto the first time I tried, and haven't gone back.
Do not Boyle with a Large Blade of Mace, or bruise with Sugar, or Bake in Coffin until Fit.
One thing I can say for people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: they had one hell of a collective sweet tooth. Make a pie of artichoke bottoms? Strew it with sugar before you serve it to table. Boil a calve's chaldron (which I just found out is entrails) and spice it with mace and nutmeg and cinnamon? Sprinkle a little sugar over that mofo before you serve it up in a pasty. Roast a rooster? Sugar. Making a nice (meaning exacting) recipe for biskit? Sugar. Sheep's feet? Sugar.
When a recipe starts with "Take a pound of sugar, seirced, and lay it onto four pounds of butter, add enough flower to make a past with rosewater and fresh Milk," you know you're really on to something.
My goal is to find recipes that don't involve too much sugar, like roasted capon with a cream/anchovy/egg yolk sauce, and try to make them. The trick is deciding when "enough" is really enough, as most of the recipes say to bake, boil, or chafe something until it is enough or is meet.
The best instructions I've found so far are for Makeing a Caudle After the French Manner, in which you are directed to Seethe as much Milk as is fit on the Coals of the Fyre, and when little Pimples appear, you are to Take It Off and Coole It by the Fyre until it is Hardened, which, ew.
In that vein, I offer two recipes, primarily for Friend Penny The Lotion Slut, but also for anybody who needs soup. Non-vegetarian alternatives for the first are given in parenthesis.
Auntie Jo's Pseudo-Mexican Veggie and Corn (and Chicken) Soup:
In preparation:
Pour one box of vegetable stock (chicken stock)--Kitchen Basics makes an excellent one--into a very large pot
Set to seethe over a low fyre.
Meanwhile, chop one small or one-half of a large Onyon
Two Peppers, either Poblano or Bell, (but not green bell, because they suck)
And wilt (fry over very low heat) them in a little vegetable oil
Open three cans of beans: one white, one red, one black. Dump them into a colander and run water over them until those weird starchy white bubbles no longer form. This process will take out the fartification chemicals.
(If you want to make this with chicken, now is the time to add your preferred cut of said bird to the stock. When it's simmered enough that there's not actual blood coming out of the meat, you can pull out the meat and shred it, then return it to the stock.)
Add the onion/pepper mix to the stock.
Add one can of petite diced tomatoes with juice.
Pour in enough water that you've got a kind of watery thing going on. You're going to cook this for a good while, so don't be afraid to add plenty of H2O. I usually add about four cups.
Now add your beans. If you have a bag of frozen corn in the freezer, the cheap sort that is sold for fifty cents a bag, add that too. A can of shoepeg or regular corn, well-drained and rinsed, will do as well.
If you're doing this right, you should have about a gallon of very watery soup: enough to make you wonder if this was a good idea. You're doing fine, don't worry. (How I wish this reassurance came in 16th century recipes!)
Now for two spices: cumin and chili powder. You are a fool if you use hot chili powder for the majority of this, since you want to dump in at least a quarter-cup of each. Seriously: you want this sonofabitch to be a dark red color with a hit of cumin to your nose. If you want the heat, you can add a couple tablespoons of hot chili powder about midway through, but don't use all hot; you'll be sad.
Allow to come to a boil to kill off bacteria. Then simmer for several hours, or until it looks like supper. (For reference, I usually have at least an inch of soup-ring around the edge of the pot before I serve it.)
This makes a lot of soup. I freeze about three quarts every time I make it. Serve with shredded cheese and tortilla chips, either on the side or crumbled in. Do not sprinkle with sugar before taking to the table.
Auntie Jo's Weird Pseudo-Tabbouli Thing Made With Kale
I'm actually very proud of this. It keeps forever and tastes better the second, third, and fourth day.
Get you one bunch of kale. Curly or not, doesn't matter. It's cheap, so maybe you should get two.
Get you a bunch of parsley. The flat-leaf Eyetalian kind is best, but you can skate by with that curly stuff.
Get the other half of that onion out of the fridge.
Buy a long English cucumber, one red or yellow bell pepper, and three good tomatoes, if any are to be found in the winter.
Make sure you know where your salt, pepper, olive oil, and lemon juice are.
Be warned: this is a labor-intensive recipe.
Wash your kale in several changes of water. The easiest way to do this is to fill a really big container with cold water, plunge the vegetables in and swish them around, then yank them out. Empty the container and rinse and refill, then repeat. You can't be too careful with kale, as it tends to be sandy.
Do the same with the parsley.
Dry them both by shaking them out, then wrapping them in a dishtowel. Set that mess aside.
Peel and seed your cucumber, or don't peel it. Just seed it. Whatever. Chop it very, very finely.
Chop your tomatoes very, very finely. Save as much juice as you feel like.
Ditto your onion. Ditto your pepper, removing the seeds and weird white membrane first.
If you have garlic, mince a couple of cloves of that, too.
Set all of that aside. Now you're starting the really labor-intensive bit:
Stem the kale. This is most easily done by simply grabbing the leafy parts of the kale and ripping them off the stem. A little stem is okay, but not a lot, as kale stem is best digested if you have four stomachs.
Stem the parsley. You don't have to be as careful with this. As a matter of fact, I usually just cut off the top two-thirds of the bunch and save the rest for stock.
Chop the kale and the parsley together (you should have about equal amounts of each) very, very finely. No, finer. No, finer than *that*. You want the two to be indistinguishable on the cutting board. Seriously: chop it fine fine fine. Otherwise, the kale will be tough.
Mix the kale/parsley stuff with all your other veggies. Salt generously. Use some pepper. Squirt more lemon juice than you think is wise over it, then finish with a dollop of olive oil. Stir. Refrigerate. Eat entire bowlsful for lunch.
Sometimes I add quinoa to this to make it a main dish. Sometimes I just eat it straight out of the bowl, standing in front of the fridge, when I get home from work.
You could possibly use a food processor for the chopping, but only if you're better with a food processor than I am. I got kale and parsley pesto the first time I tried, and haven't gone back.
Do not Boyle with a Large Blade of Mace, or bruise with Sugar, or Bake in Coffin until Fit.
Thursday, December 27, 2012
I missed Christmas Day, but. . .
May you all have the Humor of Donna
The Heart of Rose
The Patience of Rory
The Balls of Amy
The Bravery of Martha
The Belief of River
The Courage of Clara
And the Love of Tashi
To welcome in this new year.
The Heart of Rose
The Patience of Rory
The Balls of Amy
The Bravery of Martha
The Belief of River
The Courage of Clara
And the Love of Tashi
To welcome in this new year.
Sunday, December 09, 2012
"But you. . .
. . .you were fantastic."
Arizona north of Phoenix is, as Beloved Pens says, fucking lousy with vistas. Coming up over a series of hills you weren't aware you were climbing, the whole earth opens up to reveal hills the size of small mountains, creekbeds that probably haven't had water in them in years, and is that a mesa out there in the distance?
I trundled along in my speed-governed econo-box, and my mouth dropped open as I topped that last hill on 17. All I could think to say was "Holy. Shit."
Arizona is a weird place. I hadn't been through there in years--the last time was in 1996 or so, and we bypassed Phoenix for Flagstaff--and I had forgotten how you see places in the desert.
The first way is in the details: the grinding sameness of saguaro cactus, which at first is incredible and then just blends in to the sagegrass and the sand. The second way is in a car, where everything moves fast enough that you're taken by surprise by the whole picture when a vista opens right up in front of you. The third way is from a plane. Nothing's human-scale any more; it's a glorious, perspective-less panorama of mountains and dry washes. You wonder, looking at it from the air, if anybody who'd settled the area would've kept going if they'd known what was ahead of them.
I wondered that same thing about Tashi before Kevin's memorial service this weekend. If she'd known what was going to happen, what she'd have to go through, would she have stuck with him? The grinding sameness of the day-to-day chores of dealing with somebody whose brain is altered, when vistas don't open up with the regularity that they do on the highway; what would she have done?
The answer came when Tashi said this: "Even though I only knew him for about a year before the cancer started changing him, he was so amazing that the love he gave me made it worthwhile to stick around."
And, "The cancer never got *him.* He was never his cancer. He was always himself."
Speaking literally, Kevin lost. He died of brain cancer. It won.
Speaking in every way that matters, he won. He owned that cancer, and beat the hell out of it. The proof is in how all of his friends remembered him: a silly, loving, incredible, creative, goofy, loyal man who cared more about other people than he did himself, and loved everybody. Those things that made Kevin Kevin didn't change just because he had a tumor.
I've never laughed so hard at a party in my life, even one where the guest of honor wasn't dead.
Kevin's friends told stories and provided details. Tashi told us what it was like to take care of him when he was sick. The two combined opened up a big, detailed portrait of a person I wish desperately that I'd known. I was honored and lucky to hear all about him, though, and for that I'm grateful.
Tashi said at one point that Kevin was the kind of guy who made other people want to be better people. I had been thinking that exact same thing just seconds before.
Thank you, Tashi, for introducing me to Kevin. He was fantastic.
Arizona north of Phoenix is, as Beloved Pens says, fucking lousy with vistas. Coming up over a series of hills you weren't aware you were climbing, the whole earth opens up to reveal hills the size of small mountains, creekbeds that probably haven't had water in them in years, and is that a mesa out there in the distance?
I trundled along in my speed-governed econo-box, and my mouth dropped open as I topped that last hill on 17. All I could think to say was "Holy. Shit."
Arizona is a weird place. I hadn't been through there in years--the last time was in 1996 or so, and we bypassed Phoenix for Flagstaff--and I had forgotten how you see places in the desert.
The first way is in the details: the grinding sameness of saguaro cactus, which at first is incredible and then just blends in to the sagegrass and the sand. The second way is in a car, where everything moves fast enough that you're taken by surprise by the whole picture when a vista opens right up in front of you. The third way is from a plane. Nothing's human-scale any more; it's a glorious, perspective-less panorama of mountains and dry washes. You wonder, looking at it from the air, if anybody who'd settled the area would've kept going if they'd known what was ahead of them.
I wondered that same thing about Tashi before Kevin's memorial service this weekend. If she'd known what was going to happen, what she'd have to go through, would she have stuck with him? The grinding sameness of the day-to-day chores of dealing with somebody whose brain is altered, when vistas don't open up with the regularity that they do on the highway; what would she have done?
The answer came when Tashi said this: "Even though I only knew him for about a year before the cancer started changing him, he was so amazing that the love he gave me made it worthwhile to stick around."
And, "The cancer never got *him.* He was never his cancer. He was always himself."
Speaking literally, Kevin lost. He died of brain cancer. It won.
Speaking in every way that matters, he won. He owned that cancer, and beat the hell out of it. The proof is in how all of his friends remembered him: a silly, loving, incredible, creative, goofy, loyal man who cared more about other people than he did himself, and loved everybody. Those things that made Kevin Kevin didn't change just because he had a tumor.
I've never laughed so hard at a party in my life, even one where the guest of honor wasn't dead.
Kevin's friends told stories and provided details. Tashi told us what it was like to take care of him when he was sick. The two combined opened up a big, detailed portrait of a person I wish desperately that I'd known. I was honored and lucky to hear all about him, though, and for that I'm grateful.
Tashi said at one point that Kevin was the kind of guy who made other people want to be better people. I had been thinking that exact same thing just seconds before.
Thank you, Tashi, for introducing me to Kevin. He was fantastic.
Monday, December 03, 2012
RAAAAAAAAAN-dom
I just painted my fingernails a dark, elegant grey. My toenails are a sparkly dark red, except for the nail on the fourth toe on my right foot, which is grey. Tomorrow, when the polish is totally dry, I will decorate the nail on my left fourth finger with bright pink stripes.
This is all for Kevin's memorial service, which is Saturday in Arizona. I will be wearing, per his wishes, bright-colored comfortable clothing (ink blue baggy pants, grape-purple artist's smock with a green t-shirt underneath, Converse and a saffron-dyed scarf from India). There will be, if my Interwebs research is correct, pie available at the service. I am all about pie. Hence the baggy pants.
*** *** *** *** ***
The Boy and I are texting. I say he should check out Baker Seeds; he says I should check out Forestry Supply. Little does he know that I already have a wishlist from FS that's as long as your arm.
*** *** *** *** ***
Best salad ever: greens, including baby kale (NOM), bell peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, corn, black-eyed peas, cheese, FRIED OKRA, little bits of carrot and olive. I'm kind of on a kale kick at the moment, which is good, as the hippies across the street have approximately eight gazillion tons of the stuff to give away. They're desperate. I eat the teeny new kale plants in salad, since it doesn't have to be cooked or massaged or whatever, and the older leaves chopped up for tabbouli.
The folks at Baker Seeds say that kale will grow whenever there's even a hint of warmth in the air or soil. That doesn't really express how kale will take over your garden, your yard, your life, if the air temperature isn't below thirty degrees. It was eighty degrees here today (what the fuck global warming stop it STOP IT) and, sure enough, there were bitty kale sprouts coming up from the ground.
Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. I say the world will end in kale and cucumber vines.
*** *** *** *** ***
Speaking of cucumber vines, have I told you guys the story of Mom's killer melons and pumpkins?
*** *** *** *** ***
Or the time she planted luffa gourds and zucchini in the same garden, and they cross-polinated? I noticed that nine of ten blurbs for luffa gourds I saw in gardening catalogs this year noted that they would not cross-pollinate with other squashes. Technology: saving us from weird stir-fried squash.
*** *** *** *** ***
Don't tell The Boy, but I'm thinking of redecorating the bedroom, to make it more Boy-friendly.
*** *** *** *** ***
Attila made me do some weird new back exercise today. Given that I dealt with hemiparetic and tetraplegic patients last week, all weighing over three hundred pounds, I am sore as hell this evening.
*** *** *** *** ***
And that is all for this evening. I'm off to make stripes of Scotch tape and pink nail polish.
This is all for Kevin's memorial service, which is Saturday in Arizona. I will be wearing, per his wishes, bright-colored comfortable clothing (ink blue baggy pants, grape-purple artist's smock with a green t-shirt underneath, Converse and a saffron-dyed scarf from India). There will be, if my Interwebs research is correct, pie available at the service. I am all about pie. Hence the baggy pants.
*** *** *** *** ***
The Boy and I are texting. I say he should check out Baker Seeds; he says I should check out Forestry Supply. Little does he know that I already have a wishlist from FS that's as long as your arm.
*** *** *** *** ***
Best salad ever: greens, including baby kale (NOM), bell peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, corn, black-eyed peas, cheese, FRIED OKRA, little bits of carrot and olive. I'm kind of on a kale kick at the moment, which is good, as the hippies across the street have approximately eight gazillion tons of the stuff to give away. They're desperate. I eat the teeny new kale plants in salad, since it doesn't have to be cooked or massaged or whatever, and the older leaves chopped up for tabbouli.
The folks at Baker Seeds say that kale will grow whenever there's even a hint of warmth in the air or soil. That doesn't really express how kale will take over your garden, your yard, your life, if the air temperature isn't below thirty degrees. It was eighty degrees here today (what the fuck global warming stop it STOP IT) and, sure enough, there were bitty kale sprouts coming up from the ground.
Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. I say the world will end in kale and cucumber vines.
*** *** *** *** ***
Speaking of cucumber vines, have I told you guys the story of Mom's killer melons and pumpkins?
*** *** *** *** ***
Or the time she planted luffa gourds and zucchini in the same garden, and they cross-polinated? I noticed that nine of ten blurbs for luffa gourds I saw in gardening catalogs this year noted that they would not cross-pollinate with other squashes. Technology: saving us from weird stir-fried squash.
*** *** *** *** ***
Don't tell The Boy, but I'm thinking of redecorating the bedroom, to make it more Boy-friendly.
*** *** *** *** ***
Attila made me do some weird new back exercise today. Given that I dealt with hemiparetic and tetraplegic patients last week, all weighing over three hundred pounds, I am sore as hell this evening.
*** *** *** *** ***
And that is all for this evening. I'm off to make stripes of Scotch tape and pink nail polish.
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
So we have this new computer system.
The whole damn thing's been reworked, top to bottom, and it's rumored to be the best, most efficient, most amazing computer system in the history of EVAH. Lab tests and MD notes and medication administration and tiny bits of lint from the dryer are all linked together; all that's linked to some magical whoozit that records when a nurse enters a room, what equipment s/he uses while there, and when s/he leaves. It's rumored, in short, to be the best. damn. thing. since SLICED FUCKING BREAD, MAAAN.
Except, well, it doesn't work.
And I mean, all joking and superlatives aside, it doesn't work.
For instance: let's say you have a patient who wants only one Lortab, rather than the two that were ordered. Instead of pulling two out and wasting one, or just doing an RN override on the Diebold that holds the meds, you have to now call the doctor and get an order for only one Lortab. And then wait for that to be entered and linked and so on.
Yeah.
Let's say you have to waste a partial dose of a medication, like when a patient gets two milligrams of morphine but the morphine comes in four-milligram ampules. The old way to do it was pull, waste at the machine, chart. The new way is pull, have two people scan the med at the bedside, waste at the bedside, do an override to administer 2mg of an ordered medication, then go back and enter the waste at the machine.
And, because everything is now coordinated, Les Machines keep track of how long it takes you to get *back* to the Diebold and waste. If it's more than about a half hour, your administration will get flagged for investigation, because you might be huffing morphine. Which is fine and dandy unless you have five (or six, or eight) patients to deal with. Nurses with huge patient loads often waste everything at the end of the shift.
Let's say you have a person on a heparin drip. Even if you only want to enter the same drip rate hour after hour after hour, you still have to scan the person's armband, scan the bag, and get a witness. This is the new rule for every titrate-able drip in the system. For us, it's not a big deal: we might have one or two drips running in the NCCU on a person. In the med-surg CCU or in the neurosurgical CCU, though, it's a big deal: imagine having to scan-scan-witness-verify for eight drips on each of two patients. Every hour. On the hour.
And, finally, let's say you go into a room that holds a person who's been admitted for a TIA. They're neurologically intact, fine and dandy, and on only aspirin and an antacid. If you leave the room before a certain number of minutes have elapsed when you're giving those meds, you get flagged for not doing sufficient patient teaching on the Tums and Bayer you just administered. If you take too long--that is, if your patient is on six different meds, five of which are new, and the person has questions--you get flagged for inefficiency.
THIS IS WHERE I GET ALL CAPSLOCKY. The trouble with setting up difficult failsafes in a time-crunch-prone profession like nursing is this: once the new checks are set up, all the older ones get scrapped. We no longer have the pop-up windows on our med records that alert us to possible double-dosing. Instead, we have a huge, long, convoluted process to go through that guarantees nothing, as most of our peers are too time-crunched to double-check us.
We learned, less than four hours after the system was implemented, how to get around it. By the end of day shift on Monday, most nurses had copied the scan-codes from med labels and stuck them to the back of their ID cards. We'd also figured out how to copy the med-admin codes from the patients' armbands and stick them to the charts. We worked around the new, cumbersome failsafes. . . .
. . .but we didn't have any other checks or warnings to alert us when we'd fucked up. In other words, our system now has only one point of warning for each patient, and that point has already been sabotaged in the name of saving time.
So we have this new computer system. It reminds me a lot of a story I heard from one of my colleagues. He and his wife bought a gorgeous, brand-new house where everything, from the computer to the thermostat to the hot-water heater, was controlled through the Internet. Their online service provider suffered an outage that lasted three days (he's in the boondocks). During that time, they had no heat. Or hot water. Or air-conditioning. Or TV, phone, Internet, or burglar alarm service. Reprogramming things manually wasn't an option. Why should it be, with this shiny new system?
No system should ever have only one point of failure. Even muskrats and beavers have a back door out of their homes. Manglement's reduced a perfectly workable checks-and-balances system to something with one point of failure, in the name of Patient Safety, and we've already figured out workarounds.
In other news, the hospital-wide campaign to leave our badges in the bathrooms for extended periods of time seems to be working. Manglement might be monitoring our pee-breaks, but we'll work around that, too. (I wonder what they'll say when they see that four of us were in the public men's restroom on the ground floor for six hours on Tuesday?)
Except, well, it doesn't work.
And I mean, all joking and superlatives aside, it doesn't work.
For instance: let's say you have a patient who wants only one Lortab, rather than the two that were ordered. Instead of pulling two out and wasting one, or just doing an RN override on the Diebold that holds the meds, you have to now call the doctor and get an order for only one Lortab. And then wait for that to be entered and linked and so on.
Yeah.
Let's say you have to waste a partial dose of a medication, like when a patient gets two milligrams of morphine but the morphine comes in four-milligram ampules. The old way to do it was pull, waste at the machine, chart. The new way is pull, have two people scan the med at the bedside, waste at the bedside, do an override to administer 2mg of an ordered medication, then go back and enter the waste at the machine.
And, because everything is now coordinated, Les Machines keep track of how long it takes you to get *back* to the Diebold and waste. If it's more than about a half hour, your administration will get flagged for investigation, because you might be huffing morphine. Which is fine and dandy unless you have five (or six, or eight) patients to deal with. Nurses with huge patient loads often waste everything at the end of the shift.
Let's say you have a person on a heparin drip. Even if you only want to enter the same drip rate hour after hour after hour, you still have to scan the person's armband, scan the bag, and get a witness. This is the new rule for every titrate-able drip in the system. For us, it's not a big deal: we might have one or two drips running in the NCCU on a person. In the med-surg CCU or in the neurosurgical CCU, though, it's a big deal: imagine having to scan-scan-witness-verify for eight drips on each of two patients. Every hour. On the hour.
And, finally, let's say you go into a room that holds a person who's been admitted for a TIA. They're neurologically intact, fine and dandy, and on only aspirin and an antacid. If you leave the room before a certain number of minutes have elapsed when you're giving those meds, you get flagged for not doing sufficient patient teaching on the Tums and Bayer you just administered. If you take too long--that is, if your patient is on six different meds, five of which are new, and the person has questions--you get flagged for inefficiency.
THIS IS WHERE I GET ALL CAPSLOCKY. The trouble with setting up difficult failsafes in a time-crunch-prone profession like nursing is this: once the new checks are set up, all the older ones get scrapped. We no longer have the pop-up windows on our med records that alert us to possible double-dosing. Instead, we have a huge, long, convoluted process to go through that guarantees nothing, as most of our peers are too time-crunched to double-check us.
We learned, less than four hours after the system was implemented, how to get around it. By the end of day shift on Monday, most nurses had copied the scan-codes from med labels and stuck them to the back of their ID cards. We'd also figured out how to copy the med-admin codes from the patients' armbands and stick them to the charts. We worked around the new, cumbersome failsafes. . . .
. . .but we didn't have any other checks or warnings to alert us when we'd fucked up. In other words, our system now has only one point of warning for each patient, and that point has already been sabotaged in the name of saving time.
So we have this new computer system. It reminds me a lot of a story I heard from one of my colleagues. He and his wife bought a gorgeous, brand-new house where everything, from the computer to the thermostat to the hot-water heater, was controlled through the Internet. Their online service provider suffered an outage that lasted three days (he's in the boondocks). During that time, they had no heat. Or hot water. Or air-conditioning. Or TV, phone, Internet, or burglar alarm service. Reprogramming things manually wasn't an option. Why should it be, with this shiny new system?
No system should ever have only one point of failure. Even muskrats and beavers have a back door out of their homes. Manglement's reduced a perfectly workable checks-and-balances system to something with one point of failure, in the name of Patient Safety, and we've already figured out workarounds.
In other news, the hospital-wide campaign to leave our badges in the bathrooms for extended periods of time seems to be working. Manglement might be monitoring our pee-breaks, but we'll work around that, too. (I wonder what they'll say when they see that four of us were in the public men's restroom on the ground floor for six hours on Tuesday?)
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Tips for Everybody:
There's nothing like coming in to work, feelin' all efficient and enthusiastic, to find that you're two nurses short in a three-nurse unit. Unless it's finding out that a different department expects your unit to staff theirs for some undetermined amount of time in the morning and again in the afternoon.
Dear Doctors: Please don't wear your ID tags on your belts. Especially please don't do this if you're an observant Muslim, a conservative Coptic Christian, or a member of some other staunchly upright religious group. See, if you've got both a name with eighteen syllables and a strong moral sense, it's gonna be embarassing for both of us if it looks like I'm starin' at your junk while trying to read your ID.
Tip for myself: Next time it seems like a patient is globally aphasic, shaking her head and smiling gently whenever you try to get her to do something, make sure it's not because she speaks only Romanian.
A gentle note to Manglement: top-down initiatives, like locator chips in ID cards, timers in employee bathrooms, and noise-and-motion sensors in nurses' stations and common areas, can and will be hacked.
Many, many thanks to the elevator inspector who sang loudly in the elevator shaft as he was doing a routine inspection of that elevator's braking system.
Also many thanks to whoever it was that joked up a pile of mattresses sitting in a storage room by sticking a can of peas in there, so it peeked out one side.
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Best Line of the Night
We've been having some trouble with our sheets lately. We get one size of sheet, but have three sizes of bed. In the past, the sheets fit the largest beds but were a little loose on the other two types. Recently, Manglement decided that knit sheets were better than woven, and so dumped sheets on us that, until they're washed the second or third time, fit every bed beautifully. After the second or third washing, though, you'll hurt yourself trying to get them on to the bed. (I wish I were exaggerating, but one of my coworkers is out with a torn rotator cuff right now. It went when she was trying to change a bed.)
Anyway, Deepa and I were changing a bed under one of our patients, a guy whose stroke had left him both paralyzed on one side and unable to speak easily. Deepa, struggling with the corner of the sheet and unwilling to lift the mattress to force the sheet on to it, exclaimed, "It is so small that we can't get it on!"
Our hemiparetic, expressively-aphasic patient said, clear as a bell:
"That's what *she* said."
Anyway, Deepa and I were changing a bed under one of our patients, a guy whose stroke had left him both paralyzed on one side and unable to speak easily. Deepa, struggling with the corner of the sheet and unwilling to lift the mattress to force the sheet on to it, exclaimed, "It is so small that we can't get it on!"
Our hemiparetic, expressively-aphasic patient said, clear as a bell:
"That's what *she* said."
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Y'all, I am blessed in friends.
Tashi just emailed me. She's starting her own fundraising efforts for Mary.
Tashi.
Who, by all rights, should be allowed to recover and rest and be quiet for a year or more, is fundraising for Mary.
Which proves again what I already knew: I have the best friends ever, and Tashi is the most amazing one of the bunch.
Tashi.
Who, by all rights, should be allowed to recover and rest and be quiet for a year or more, is fundraising for Mary.
Which proves again what I already knew: I have the best friends ever, and Tashi is the most amazing one of the bunch.
Peeps, we got a job to do here.
Some of you know Mary Osheskie, or read her blog The Bright Optimist.
Mary was one of the first people to contact me privately after I got my cancer diagnosis. She was also the only other oral cancer patient who was a woman and about my age. Her story makes mine look like a walk in the proverbial park:
Mary's a lifelong nonsmoker and nondrinker, so when she was diagnosed with stage III squamous cell carcinoma of her tongue (at an age about forty years younger than is typical, no less) it was a huge shock. She had a partial glossectomy--in other words, the docs took out half her tongue and replaced it with muscle from her arm.
Then she had head-and-neck radiation. Y'all remember how scared I was of radiation. Everything that terrified me, from a tracheostomy to losing every tooth and a bunch of bone, happened to Mary. All of her teeth are gone, her jawbone is jacked beyond recognition in several places, and--as if all that weren't enough--she had a recurrance of the cancer recently and had to have *more* tongue cut out. Luckily, she's fine now, but she still ain't got no teeth.
Now, for your average toothless person, that isn't a problem. You go to the dentist or prosthodontist, you get some implants or some dentures, and you're back to eating apples in a couple of weeks.
Mary's got a different set of troubles. She's got to have posts put into her jaw to hold specially-made dentures in place, because her jawbone alone won't take the stress of the dentures. Plus, most of the bone that's left (after surgeries to remove the dead stuff) is really, really freaking fragile. And of course, after radiation, she's not capable of healing as well as somebody who hasn't been fried.
In short, she has to have an oral surgeon do both the preliminary post-setting and the molding of the dentures, as well as follow her afterwards to make sure there's not further tissue death or infection. It's a big fucking deal.
It's such a big fucking deal that the surgery alone was going to cost $45,000 (US) and not be covered by Medicaid. Mary's on Medicaid because, after having a feeding tube and a trach and a zillion rounds of radiation and hyperbaric dives, she was indigent and disabled.
BUT!! Mary got the news today that her state Medicaid board is going to cover her surgery. She's going to be able to get the posts put in and things ready for a set of dentures. They're even going to cover anesthetic--which, if you read her blog, was not the case for having ALL OF HER TEETH EXTRACTED HOLY SHIT.
So Mary's getting her bone spicules filed down and her posts put in. But she still needs dentures.
She's a thirty-something woman with no teeth right now, and I'd like to help her make that not be the case.
Let me remind you of what you've done in the past: You gave more than eight hundred dollars to the Oral Cancer Foundation, which is run out of the founder's living room, for research and awareness. You gave Tashi Pratt-King a thousand bucks when it looked like she and Kevin (Wash) would lose their home--you guys got her over the hump, and allowed her to keep taking care of Wash until his death this past September. You also bought two Therabites for people with oral cancer who couldn't have afforded them on their own--devices that allowed people to regain the ability to open their mouths more than a few millimeters. Those Therabites, by the way, are still being sanitized and passed around.
And you made me very, very proud and grateful in the process.
Mary needs twenty thousand dollars for dentures. Medicaid won't cover them. Let's do this thing.
Let's commence Operation: Choppers.
Give Forward Fundraiser
Indiegogo Fundraiser
There is also a PayPal link on Mary's blog, linked above.
Thank you, guys.
Mary was one of the first people to contact me privately after I got my cancer diagnosis. She was also the only other oral cancer patient who was a woman and about my age. Her story makes mine look like a walk in the proverbial park:
Mary's a lifelong nonsmoker and nondrinker, so when she was diagnosed with stage III squamous cell carcinoma of her tongue (at an age about forty years younger than is typical, no less) it was a huge shock. She had a partial glossectomy--in other words, the docs took out half her tongue and replaced it with muscle from her arm.
Then she had head-and-neck radiation. Y'all remember how scared I was of radiation. Everything that terrified me, from a tracheostomy to losing every tooth and a bunch of bone, happened to Mary. All of her teeth are gone, her jawbone is jacked beyond recognition in several places, and--as if all that weren't enough--she had a recurrance of the cancer recently and had to have *more* tongue cut out. Luckily, she's fine now, but she still ain't got no teeth.
Now, for your average toothless person, that isn't a problem. You go to the dentist or prosthodontist, you get some implants or some dentures, and you're back to eating apples in a couple of weeks.
Mary's got a different set of troubles. She's got to have posts put into her jaw to hold specially-made dentures in place, because her jawbone alone won't take the stress of the dentures. Plus, most of the bone that's left (after surgeries to remove the dead stuff) is really, really freaking fragile. And of course, after radiation, she's not capable of healing as well as somebody who hasn't been fried.
In short, she has to have an oral surgeon do both the preliminary post-setting and the molding of the dentures, as well as follow her afterwards to make sure there's not further tissue death or infection. It's a big fucking deal.
It's such a big fucking deal that the surgery alone was going to cost $45,000 (US) and not be covered by Medicaid. Mary's on Medicaid because, after having a feeding tube and a trach and a zillion rounds of radiation and hyperbaric dives, she was indigent and disabled.
BUT!! Mary got the news today that her state Medicaid board is going to cover her surgery. She's going to be able to get the posts put in and things ready for a set of dentures. They're even going to cover anesthetic--which, if you read her blog, was not the case for having ALL OF HER TEETH EXTRACTED HOLY SHIT.
So Mary's getting her bone spicules filed down and her posts put in. But she still needs dentures.
She's a thirty-something woman with no teeth right now, and I'd like to help her make that not be the case.
Let me remind you of what you've done in the past: You gave more than eight hundred dollars to the Oral Cancer Foundation, which is run out of the founder's living room, for research and awareness. You gave Tashi Pratt-King a thousand bucks when it looked like she and Kevin (Wash) would lose their home--you guys got her over the hump, and allowed her to keep taking care of Wash until his death this past September. You also bought two Therabites for people with oral cancer who couldn't have afforded them on their own--devices that allowed people to regain the ability to open their mouths more than a few millimeters. Those Therabites, by the way, are still being sanitized and passed around.
And you made me very, very proud and grateful in the process.
Mary needs twenty thousand dollars for dentures. Medicaid won't cover them. Let's do this thing.
Let's commence Operation: Choppers.
Give Forward Fundraiser
Indiegogo Fundraiser
There is also a PayPal link on Mary's blog, linked above.
Thank you, guys.
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Happy Coming-Out Day!
I had this whole long post about little old men going septic in my head, but then I just lost the will to type it all out. Instead, let me leave you with a Wayback Machine comparison of what things were like when I was sixteen, versus now, twenty-five years later (as a starting point). . . .
*woo-woo sounds of a time machine ramping up*
Twenty-five years ago, WHAM! put out a video that implied that George Michael was straight. Come to think of it, they also released a single ("Work") that pretty much declared right out that he was straight. (George, George, how little we teenaged girls knew ye.)
This year, a tweener pop star with a devastating hook ("Call Me Maybe") produced a video in which it became apparent that the boy she liked was gay, and the joke was on her.
Twenty-five years ago, I was two years away from making about a dozen friends in Chicago, all of them gay men.
This year, I have one close gay male friend who survived the AIDS epidemic. One.
Twenty-five years ago, as a matter of fact, "AIDS" came into being as a name. The other candidates were LAV and HTLV-III. The name(s) replaced what it had been called, either GRID (gay-related immune disorder) or "gay cancer."
This year, the majority of HIV positive people will be straight women of color, although the rate of HIV infection is again increasing in young gay men, who now see the disease as a manageable chronic condition, rather than the nine-month diagnosis-to-death thing it was in 1986.
Twenty-five years ago, my oldest friend was raped by some guys in our high school. He was targeted because he was gay.
This year, there was a special flag team composed of GLTBQ high-school students in a gay-pride parade in Bigton.
Twenty-three years ago, I saw posters in the windows of restaurants and bars in Chicago that showed the photographs of men suspected of having AIDS. They were put up as a public service to other gay men, so they knew who to avoid. The practice started in San Francisco in the early 1980's, when there was no test for HIV, and people's first symptoms were either Kaposi's sarcoma or PCP pneumonia.
Last week I had to explain Kaposi's sarcoma to a much-younger nurse who'd never heard of it, and who'd never realized that the AIDS epidemic was a big thing.
Fifteen years ago, Ellen DeGeneres came out on television, on the Oprah Winfrey show. That led some obnoxious so-called Christian minister to refer to her as "Ellen Degenerate." (Her response? "I heard that one in the fourth grade.")
Six years ago, Neil Patrick Harris coming out prompted a collective yawn from the public and, as far as I can tell, failed to incense any obnoxious so-called Christians.
Twenty-five years ago, I knew no gay people who were married. This year my friends Joe and George will get married. Deena and Deb have been married for five years and have a second baby on the way, and Sid and Sam are celebrating their tenth anniversary.
Happy CODay to all my gay and genderqueer buddies. Even though all of you are so far out that the closet's now lost beyond the curve of the earth, you all had tough times. Here's to real equality, the valuation of all people on the strength of their character, and the freedom to love whomever you love. Let's work to make it happen in a fraction of the time it took us to get this far.
*woo-woo sounds of a time machine ramping up*
Twenty-five years ago, WHAM! put out a video that implied that George Michael was straight. Come to think of it, they also released a single ("Work") that pretty much declared right out that he was straight. (George, George, how little we teenaged girls knew ye.)
This year, a tweener pop star with a devastating hook ("Call Me Maybe") produced a video in which it became apparent that the boy she liked was gay, and the joke was on her.
Twenty-five years ago, I was two years away from making about a dozen friends in Chicago, all of them gay men.
This year, I have one close gay male friend who survived the AIDS epidemic. One.
Twenty-five years ago, as a matter of fact, "AIDS" came into being as a name. The other candidates were LAV and HTLV-III. The name(s) replaced what it had been called, either GRID (gay-related immune disorder) or "gay cancer."
This year, the majority of HIV positive people will be straight women of color, although the rate of HIV infection is again increasing in young gay men, who now see the disease as a manageable chronic condition, rather than the nine-month diagnosis-to-death thing it was in 1986.
Twenty-five years ago, my oldest friend was raped by some guys in our high school. He was targeted because he was gay.
This year, there was a special flag team composed of GLTBQ high-school students in a gay-pride parade in Bigton.
Twenty-three years ago, I saw posters in the windows of restaurants and bars in Chicago that showed the photographs of men suspected of having AIDS. They were put up as a public service to other gay men, so they knew who to avoid. The practice started in San Francisco in the early 1980's, when there was no test for HIV, and people's first symptoms were either Kaposi's sarcoma or PCP pneumonia.
Last week I had to explain Kaposi's sarcoma to a much-younger nurse who'd never heard of it, and who'd never realized that the AIDS epidemic was a big thing.
Fifteen years ago, Ellen DeGeneres came out on television, on the Oprah Winfrey show. That led some obnoxious so-called Christian minister to refer to her as "Ellen Degenerate." (Her response? "I heard that one in the fourth grade.")
Six years ago, Neil Patrick Harris coming out prompted a collective yawn from the public and, as far as I can tell, failed to incense any obnoxious so-called Christians.
Twenty-five years ago, I knew no gay people who were married. This year my friends Joe and George will get married. Deena and Deb have been married for five years and have a second baby on the way, and Sid and Sam are celebrating their tenth anniversary.
Happy CODay to all my gay and genderqueer buddies. Even though all of you are so far out that the closet's now lost beyond the curve of the earth, you all had tough times. Here's to real equality, the valuation of all people on the strength of their character, and the freedom to love whomever you love. Let's work to make it happen in a fraction of the time it took us to get this far.
Wednesday, October 03, 2012
I need laundry advice.
I can get anything except benzoin stains out of scrubs, but I need help on a non-stain-related issue.
Recently, I got four sets of Wink scrubs. They fit better than Urbane, though they're cut along the same lines: Wink seems to be made with women with hips in mind, while Urbane assumes you're young and athletic and built like The Mankiller, who looks like a boy with boobs.
Anyway, these scrubs. 65% polyester, 35% cotton, tons of pockets. Love 'em.
But even after two wash/dry cycles on Boil and Broil, they are stiff and rustly, and they still have the creases from packaging. How do I get those out?
Do not say "fabric softener." That shit is of the devil and gives me rashes.
Ideas?
Recently, I got four sets of Wink scrubs. They fit better than Urbane, though they're cut along the same lines: Wink seems to be made with women with hips in mind, while Urbane assumes you're young and athletic and built like The Mankiller, who looks like a boy with boobs.
Anyway, these scrubs. 65% polyester, 35% cotton, tons of pockets. Love 'em.
But even after two wash/dry cycles on Boil and Broil, they are stiff and rustly, and they still have the creases from packaging. How do I get those out?
Do not say "fabric softener." That shit is of the devil and gives me rashes.
Ideas?
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Culture clashes and advice for Yankees
For those of you wondering about Tashi, she's doing as well as can be expected. She has good moments and bad ones, but that's par for the course.
We've had an influx of Northerners this summer, so I feel like I can share a little advice with them:
This is central Texas. Things move much more slowly here. Nevertheless, we have been known, while driving, to pass on the right.
Speaking of driving: going the speed limit, unless you're near a known speed-trap, is Not Done here. We have places to be and miles to go, so we generally drive like bats out of hell. Just keep up with traffic and you'll be fine. Don't go the speed limit in the passing lane; you'll likely get killed or yelled at.
I understand that things work differently in Chicago or New York or wherever it is you're from, but here you *can't* be abrasive and expect to get things done. If the movers tell you they'll be there between twelve and three, but you need them to be there right at twelve because you've got the freight elevator reserved from two to four, explain that. Don't, as I heard one person say, snap back, "You will not be there between twelve and three! You'll be there at twelve!" She later wondered why the movers came late and moved slowly. Just be polite. It costs nothing and greases the wheels.
If you have to ask how to "style" "cowboy boots" (they're called just "boots") then you probably shouldn't be wearing them. As Lyle says, buy your jeans a little longer.
The heaviness of the accent does not always indicate the education level, general intelligence, or personal wealth of the speaker.
Women of a certain age are always referred to with "Miz" preceding their first names, and only then if you've been invited to call them by their Christian name. This holds true in most small towns (it does in mine) and some large cities. In fact, it's best not to call anyone by their first name unless you're sure it's okay.
"Ma'am," "Sir," "Please," and "Thank You" are not optional. And don't, unless you want a reputation for being difficult, walk straight up to somebody and tell 'em to do something without first asking how they are and being pleasant.
Bless their hearts, they don't know any better.
Speaking of culture clashes, I was listening to an NPR interview a few weeks ago with a guy who says that culture influences perception of color; in other words, the context in which you're raised determines to a large extent how many colors you see and what you call them. He said, for instance, that the ancient Greeks had so few delineations between colors that they essentially saw in black, white, and bronze.
I snorted mentally at that until the other day, when Friend Deepa, who can't believe my hair, was touching it gently and cooing, "Golden hair, golden hair." Now, my hurr is red--at the most, it could be called strawberry-blonde when I've been out in the sun. When I corrected her, she said positively, "No, your hair is golden." I said, No, my hair is red.
She then pushed back her own hair to show me the earrings that she wears which, like those of most of the Indian women here, are twenty-four carat gold, so pure it's brassy. "Your hair," she pointed out, "is the same color as my earrings. So it's golden."
Point to Deepa. I stand corrected.
We've had an influx of Northerners this summer, so I feel like I can share a little advice with them:
This is central Texas. Things move much more slowly here. Nevertheless, we have been known, while driving, to pass on the right.
Speaking of driving: going the speed limit, unless you're near a known speed-trap, is Not Done here. We have places to be and miles to go, so we generally drive like bats out of hell. Just keep up with traffic and you'll be fine. Don't go the speed limit in the passing lane; you'll likely get killed or yelled at.
I understand that things work differently in Chicago or New York or wherever it is you're from, but here you *can't* be abrasive and expect to get things done. If the movers tell you they'll be there between twelve and three, but you need them to be there right at twelve because you've got the freight elevator reserved from two to four, explain that. Don't, as I heard one person say, snap back, "You will not be there between twelve and three! You'll be there at twelve!" She later wondered why the movers came late and moved slowly. Just be polite. It costs nothing and greases the wheels.
If you have to ask how to "style" "cowboy boots" (they're called just "boots") then you probably shouldn't be wearing them. As Lyle says, buy your jeans a little longer.
The heaviness of the accent does not always indicate the education level, general intelligence, or personal wealth of the speaker.
Women of a certain age are always referred to with "Miz" preceding their first names, and only then if you've been invited to call them by their Christian name. This holds true in most small towns (it does in mine) and some large cities. In fact, it's best not to call anyone by their first name unless you're sure it's okay.
"Ma'am," "Sir," "Please," and "Thank You" are not optional. And don't, unless you want a reputation for being difficult, walk straight up to somebody and tell 'em to do something without first asking how they are and being pleasant.
Bless their hearts, they don't know any better.
Speaking of culture clashes, I was listening to an NPR interview a few weeks ago with a guy who says that culture influences perception of color; in other words, the context in which you're raised determines to a large extent how many colors you see and what you call them. He said, for instance, that the ancient Greeks had so few delineations between colors that they essentially saw in black, white, and bronze.
I snorted mentally at that until the other day, when Friend Deepa, who can't believe my hair, was touching it gently and cooing, "Golden hair, golden hair." Now, my hurr is red--at the most, it could be called strawberry-blonde when I've been out in the sun. When I corrected her, she said positively, "No, your hair is golden." I said, No, my hair is red.
She then pushed back her own hair to show me the earrings that she wears which, like those of most of the Indian women here, are twenty-four carat gold, so pure it's brassy. "Your hair," she pointed out, "is the same color as my earrings. So it's golden."
Point to Deepa. I stand corrected.
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
GERONIMO!!
Tashi brought Wash's ashes home today in his Tardis urn. This completes this stage of his journey. Next stop: Wherever, Whenever.
Regularly scheduled blogging will resume whenever this localized weather system gets off my face.
Regularly scheduled blogging will resume whenever this localized weather system gets off my face.
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Prayers for Tashi and Wash, please. . .
Wash is in Hospice right now. He told Tashi on Sunday that he thought he was about to die, watched an episode of Dr. Who, and was unconscious before the end of it.
Please keep them both in your thoughts, but especially Tashi. She proved every day what love is.
Thank you.
Please keep them both in your thoughts, but especially Tashi. She proved every day what love is.
Thank you.
Friday, September 07, 2012
In which Jo gets a little pissy about language.
Gifting.
Gifted (passive voice).
Skirting.
When did "gift" become a verb? When did it become acceptable to say that your mother-in-law gifted you with a Precious Moments figurine? How is it okay to say that something is good for gifting or is giftable?
And when did skirting start describing pieces of fabric with buttons at the top? Skirting is either something one does around an issue, or vinyl sold by the linear (not lineal) foot at the mobile-home dealership. One buys a skirt. One does not purchase skirting to wear on one's body, unless one is suiting up for a particularly bizarre costume party. (Halloween costumation ideas, right here on Headly Nursingtons!)
A million years ago, my parents would sit around the breakfast table in their bathrobes, reading out loud from the Wretched-Comical, our local newspaper. Dad went into fits one day over the headline "GIFTABLE SWEATERING," then read the accompanying ad copy out loud with hoots and snorts. I think it might've been 1980 or thereabouts; my sister was home for Christmas break from college. She, being the English major in the house, had lots to say about giftable sweatering.
Then, about a month ago, somebody on my beloved Hairpin used the term "for gifting." The somebody in question was an actual contributor, not a commenter, and nobody called her out on it. Nobody. "Gifting" was okay.
I felt a little like I'd been dropped into a reality I wasn't familliar with. With which I wasn't familliar; whatever. I'm not opposed to splitting the infinitive if it makes reading easier.
I am, however, opposed to gifting and skirting.
(Before anybody asks, yes, I'm poncy about "nursing" as a job description as well. "Nursing" feels like it ought to be limited to breasts and babies. "Being a Nurse is My Bag" doesn't flow, though, and looks crappy on a reusable grocery sack. Yeah, I'm weird.
At least I'll never turn "surgeon" or "patient care aide" into verbs. That's my promisation.)
Gifted (passive voice).
Skirting.
When did "gift" become a verb? When did it become acceptable to say that your mother-in-law gifted you with a Precious Moments figurine? How is it okay to say that something is good for gifting or is giftable?
And when did skirting start describing pieces of fabric with buttons at the top? Skirting is either something one does around an issue, or vinyl sold by the linear (not lineal) foot at the mobile-home dealership. One buys a skirt. One does not purchase skirting to wear on one's body, unless one is suiting up for a particularly bizarre costume party. (Halloween costumation ideas, right here on Headly Nursingtons!)
A million years ago, my parents would sit around the breakfast table in their bathrobes, reading out loud from the Wretched-Comical, our local newspaper. Dad went into fits one day over the headline "GIFTABLE SWEATERING," then read the accompanying ad copy out loud with hoots and snorts. I think it might've been 1980 or thereabouts; my sister was home for Christmas break from college. She, being the English major in the house, had lots to say about giftable sweatering.
Then, about a month ago, somebody on my beloved Hairpin used the term "for gifting." The somebody in question was an actual contributor, not a commenter, and nobody called her out on it. Nobody. "Gifting" was okay.
I felt a little like I'd been dropped into a reality I wasn't familliar with. With which I wasn't familliar; whatever. I'm not opposed to splitting the infinitive if it makes reading easier.
I am, however, opposed to gifting and skirting.
(Before anybody asks, yes, I'm poncy about "nursing" as a job description as well. "Nursing" feels like it ought to be limited to breasts and babies. "Being a Nurse is My Bag" doesn't flow, though, and looks crappy on a reusable grocery sack. Yeah, I'm weird.
At least I'll never turn "surgeon" or "patient care aide" into verbs. That's my promisation.)
Monday, September 03, 2012
Well, *that's* never happened before.
Friends and neighbors, I got my ass kicked on Monday.
And when I say I got my ass kicked, I mean I got my ass kicked.
Let me explain: there are a number of unfortunate things that can happen to make a normally nice, cheerful person batshit insane. Things like drug abuse, encephalopathy, encephalitis, vasculits, meningitis, strokes in unusual places, tumors--you get the idea. There's a lot of stuff out there that can hit your brain in such a way that your personality does a one-eighty, but most of those things are very, very rare indeed.
When they hit you, though. . .wow.
Granddaddy came in with a few personality changes and some increased sleepiness (note for new neuro people: your A-number-one sign that there's a problem is irritability and decreased consciousness in tandem) and steadily got worse. He was transferred to us with a Posey vest on, keeping him in his wheelchair as he cussed and ranted.
At some point in the proceedings, he tried to stand up and tip the wheelchair over backwards in order to get out of it. Gweneth, the steadiest and most sensible of patient care aides, was there in a second, keeping Granddaddy from overbalancing, and Stoya went around to his front to see if she could calm him down. I was close behind her. Too close, as it turned out.
Granddaddy threw a punch. Stoya did some sort of Matrix move to avoid it (thank goodness, as it would've messed up her face), and the punch landed squarely in my solar plexus.
Well! I wasn't expecting that at all.
I made a noise like a duck and went down. I'm not ashamed to admit it: have you ever been punched in the gut? I hadn't. I've been hit in the face, which only makes me angry. I've been whacked about the head and shoulders, which is disorienting and painful, but not too handicapping. Being hit in the stomach, though, right in the breadbasket, so hard that the breath gets knocked out of you? You fold up like a sack of potatoes, which I did.
Unfortunately, I folded up right where Granddaddy, still Posey'd in to his chair, could get to me with both fists and feet.
In retrospect, it's funny. It must've looked like something out of a comedy film, or that clip on YouTube where the dude in the Darth Vader costume gets attacked by a playful dog. At the time, though, all I knew was that I was getting wailed on by an angry person with what felt like superhuman strength. Oh, and I couldn't breathe.
Gweneth managed somehow to get the wheelchair unlocked in the middle of all of this and get Granddad out of range. Stoya got his arms, I got the Haldol, and things quickly got better from there.
Y'know, IV Haldol is strongly not recommended, because it tends to cause heart arrhythmias, but at that point, we didn't care. In a few minutes, things calmed down to the point that Grandpa could go back to bed.
The bruises are fading now. He didn't actually hurt me, but he sure woke me up. This is not something you think about when you're taking the NCLEX.
And when I say I got my ass kicked, I mean I got my ass kicked.
Let me explain: there are a number of unfortunate things that can happen to make a normally nice, cheerful person batshit insane. Things like drug abuse, encephalopathy, encephalitis, vasculits, meningitis, strokes in unusual places, tumors--you get the idea. There's a lot of stuff out there that can hit your brain in such a way that your personality does a one-eighty, but most of those things are very, very rare indeed.
When they hit you, though. . .wow.
Granddaddy came in with a few personality changes and some increased sleepiness (note for new neuro people: your A-number-one sign that there's a problem is irritability and decreased consciousness in tandem) and steadily got worse. He was transferred to us with a Posey vest on, keeping him in his wheelchair as he cussed and ranted.
At some point in the proceedings, he tried to stand up and tip the wheelchair over backwards in order to get out of it. Gweneth, the steadiest and most sensible of patient care aides, was there in a second, keeping Granddaddy from overbalancing, and Stoya went around to his front to see if she could calm him down. I was close behind her. Too close, as it turned out.
Granddaddy threw a punch. Stoya did some sort of Matrix move to avoid it (thank goodness, as it would've messed up her face), and the punch landed squarely in my solar plexus.
Well! I wasn't expecting that at all.
I made a noise like a duck and went down. I'm not ashamed to admit it: have you ever been punched in the gut? I hadn't. I've been hit in the face, which only makes me angry. I've been whacked about the head and shoulders, which is disorienting and painful, but not too handicapping. Being hit in the stomach, though, right in the breadbasket, so hard that the breath gets knocked out of you? You fold up like a sack of potatoes, which I did.
Unfortunately, I folded up right where Granddaddy, still Posey'd in to his chair, could get to me with both fists and feet.
In retrospect, it's funny. It must've looked like something out of a comedy film, or that clip on YouTube where the dude in the Darth Vader costume gets attacked by a playful dog. At the time, though, all I knew was that I was getting wailed on by an angry person with what felt like superhuman strength. Oh, and I couldn't breathe.
Gweneth managed somehow to get the wheelchair unlocked in the middle of all of this and get Granddad out of range. Stoya got his arms, I got the Haldol, and things quickly got better from there.
Y'know, IV Haldol is strongly not recommended, because it tends to cause heart arrhythmias, but at that point, we didn't care. In a few minutes, things calmed down to the point that Grandpa could go back to bed.
The bruises are fading now. He didn't actually hurt me, but he sure woke me up. This is not something you think about when you're taking the NCLEX.
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
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