IslandRoar

Let There Be Light

Sunrise? Sunset?

What is it with humans and light? We joke about bugs being drawn to any light source, but really, we're not that different.

I'm old enough to remember when Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) was first recognized as an actual condition, and I've known several people in my life who use a lamp in the winter to fight it.

There are whose who mock the whole thing, as though people who succumb to SAD are just a pansy-assed group of wimps.

But if we think about it honestly, I believe each of us find ourself seeking out light in our own life. And I'm not being metaphorical here. I mean actual light.

Light is a huge factor in painting, photography, all of the arts.

And scientifically speaking, we humans were not engineered to function very well in the dark. Sunlight brought clarity, warmth, and safety.

Night? Well, night is dark. And scary. Cold and long.

Even though I'm a night owl, I've been drawn to light my whole life. I can never stop myself from glancing in the windows of houses I drive by at night; they always seem so warm and inviting.

I'm infatuated with candles, and twinkling lights of any sort. I love driving toward a city at night, its skyline lit up with the possibility of what might be going on behind each one of those glowing windows.

As a child, my favorite part of driving home from my grandma's was the approach to the George Washington Bridge at night, its spectacularly shining arches spanning the Hudson as we headed back to New Jersey from the Bronx.

But I'm picky with my light. It can't be flashing like a strobe light, or too bright as in fluorescent. When energy-saving bulbs first appeared I balked at their abrasiveness and wouldn't use them in the parts of my house where I spent the most time. Fortunately, they've gotten better.

I need my light to be soft and inviting, to wrap itself gently about me, not knock me around the room with its harshness.

What I liked most about camping was always the campfire. And here on the Vineyard, my favorite part of a great beach party is, without a doubt, the bonfire at the end of the night.

Flames are mesmerizing. Light come to life.

Perhaps this is on my mind because the days are slowly getting longer. A little more light, a little more hope, each day.

How about you? Do you find yourself affected by light, or lack of it? Are you a moth, like me, or do you run for cover, a true creature of the night?

 

 

Keeping My Head Held High

It's been almost three weeks since I had surgery on my sinuses, and I'm not quite up to speed. Which is annoying the hell out of me.

Thus, I've been posting a bit less and have not been as present with my comments on all of your wonderful blogs. Hopefully, you'll indulge me for a couple more weeks as I attempt to recover my misplaced mojo.

During my surgery, the ENT actually inserted little balloons deep in my sinuses, pumping them up to enlarge the openings. If things go as planned, this should result in better drainage and fewer sinus infections.

He also determined my septum was severely out of whack and needed straightening.

Not my nose itself however, which was too bad. It isn't that I don't like my nose, but hey, if he had to crack open my face, the least he could've done while he was in there was lift my eyes, give me better cheek bones, or maybe some new, cute-as-a-button nose.

At my age, I would have taken whatever I could get.

But no, same old me. Same old nose. Let's just pray this improved one works better.

When they discharged me from the hospital, the nurses cautioned me not to sleep flat while I was healing, but to attempt to keep my head more upright.

Ha! They needn't have bothered. Due to years of sinus trouble and migraines, I've been sleeping nearly sitting  up since college.

Pillows are my friends. Lots of them.

My poor Ex. When we got married, he confessed he'd always envisioned his wife falling asleep with her head nestled snugly atop his chest. Not too much to ask, right?

But it was not to be. Alas, most nights he would look up at me, high above him on my mound of pillows, and holler, Good night up there!

Small wonder it didn't last, huh?

 

Patients I Can't Forget: Teddy

My first night on pediatrics, a 19 year-old boy coded and died. Unexpectedly and out of the blue.

I'd been a med/surg RN for a year, and because of this experience, I was transferred to Nights on peds after only a week of Day orientation.

One of my patients was a six week-old baby, in to rule-out meningitis. She was fine, to be discharged in the morning. There were no parents staying the night with her, unusual, but not unheard of. No meds, no IV's. Just feed her and change her.

Yet I was freaking out inside. "How often do  I feed her?" I asked the other nurses. I mean, what did I know about a newborn? I was 22.

"Do I wake her up or let her sleep? How do I know when she's eaten enough?"

They smiled reassuringly. "She'll let you know. You'll be fine."

The baby slept on and I tended to my other patients. The night was quiet.

Then Teddy coded.

He'd woken up to pee. But instead, his mother reported, he opened his mouth and out came the blood. For some reason she attempted to catch it in  cups. She thought we might want to test it later, see where it was from.

Teddy was not my patient, but I knew him from my week on day-shift, a fun, sarcastic, 19 year-old kid. He'd been diagnosed with leukemia at age 11, gone into remission, and been fine.

Then, the year before, he'd relapsed. And, although the chemo was helping, it had left him susceptible to a terrible fungal infection in his lungs.

Later, we would find out that the infection had eaten away at his pulmonary artery. Which picked that moment that he'd gotten up to pee to burst.

Because we didn't know this at the time, and didn't realize nothing we did was going to help, we worked on him for almost two hours. Pushing drugs, CPR, hanging blood.

His mother lost it when the nursing supervisor tried to pour the cups of blood down the sink. In her bathrobe, she got on the elevator and disappeared. The nursing supervisor went after her.

I ran to the blood bank, two, three times. Then hovered in the doorway, mostly watching the five, ten, it seemed like a hundred, people working on him.

Until, from somewhere down the long corridor, I heard my six week-old cry. I went to her and, without thinking, changed her diaper, popped open a bottle, and sat down in that dimly-lit room to feed her.

While I was rocking her back to sleep, her father appeared in the doorway. He looked exhausted. "I couldn't get back to sleep," he confessed. "I figured I might as well be here."

I handed her off and went back down the hall. The code was over, time-of-death recorded on the chart. Teddy's mother had reappeared with his father and sister, and they were saying goodbye.

The day nurses slowly drifted in. When my new head-nurse arrived, she put her hand on my shoulder and leaned down close to my ear.

"Welcome to peds," she said.

Working with sick children was like that. Most of them, like that baby, got better and went home. I see their smiling faces, their happy families, as one big blur.

Other kids, fewer, got sicker or died. And even these many years later, I remember every one.

 

Female Troubles

 

I was thinking today about how far we've come in terms of being open about women's health issues. Society, I mean.

When my ex mother-in-law was only a young mother in her 20's, she lost her own mother to cancer. To this day she has no idea what kind of cancer it was.

"Oh," she'll say dismissively, "nobody talked about such things."

Many health topics pertaining to women just weren't spoken of. My father took this to extremes. I remember him once mentioning a female business colleague at the dinner table, and how she was doing poorly.

Ever curious, I piped up, "What's the matter with her?"

As children were generally supposed to be "seen and not heard," he glowered at me before lowering his voice significantly to say, "I'm not sure...Female Troubles."

I had no idea what the hell those were.. But it sounded deep and dark, and clearly I understood I should inquire no further.

As I got older however, I enjoyed making waves.

When I came home during college I would challenge him. "Women's troubles, dad? What does that mean? Is it (and here I would whisper) down there?"

He would look to my mother for help, but, to her credit, she would be laughing too.

When I finally told First-Born Son he was to be a big brother, I made sure to explain that the baby was growing in my uterus, not my stomach. I was following parenting advice I'd read which warned that if I didn't make this clear, he might surmise I'd eaten the baby or some ridiculous crap like that.

The very next day after I'd told him the good news, my parents came over. First-Born Son, only three at the time, ran to greet them at the door.

"Poppy," he shrieked. "Mommy has a baby growing. In her uterus!"

I thought my father would pass out. I'm betting he could've gone his whole life without acknowledging that either of his daughters even had a uterus.

First-Born Son today is, of course, more modern and open about these things than my dad. But in our house with all its estrogen, the girls and I have been known to bring up certain subjects just to give him a hard time. Tough boy that he is, he rarely cringes. But that doesn't mean we won't stop trying.

As I head toward The Big Change, I can't help but try and think of yet another way to yank both his and my father's chains. I'm not yet peri-menopausal, but at 48, I anticipate the big arrival any second now.

I envision myself calling my parents and getting my poor father on the phone.

"Guess what, Dad? I just had my first hot flash!"

How do you think that would go over?

Or maybe, better yet, I could get First-Born Son to make the call and tell him for me.

 

Scent of a Woman

 

I once, for over a year, dated a guy who had no sense of smell.

There's an actual name for this, anosmia, and, unlike most people who get it, either from an illness or injury, he was born that way.

I know what you're thinking: free pass for the days when you skip a shower or those nights you have too much Mexican.

He too, seemed to be under the impression that the world was full of noxious odors like rotting fish or cat pee, and that he was much better off not smelling it. He  considered the ability to smell fairly useless.

I wasn't so sure. My sense of smell is extremely acute, and for that I'm generally very grateful. Life is filled with things that smell good: an herb garden, freshly baked cookies, lilacs......me.

Seriously, I happen to have it on very good authority. People lean in all the time and say, "Ooh, you smell really good." Could they all be lying? Possibly, I guess, but tell me, what would be the point?

This man had no idea that every person had their own unique scent. That rain smells different than snow, or that the scent of Halloween is different than that of Christmas.

How about the fact that our sense of smell evolved to protect us? What would've happened to all those cave men and women in the woods doing all that hunting and gathering if they couldn't smell fresh saber-toothed tiger poop? Or fire?

Think about the consequences today if you couldn't smell a gas leak, or that your dinner was burning. Or that your house was on fire.

This guy, ironically enough, wound up with a family of skunks wintering under his porch. Sure, it didn't bother him, but it was killing me. Okay, maybe I don't mean actual death, but the smell was giving me migraines which is pretty damned close to dying. Not to mention my kids started to complain that I came home reeking of Eau de Skunk.

I finally gave him an ultimatum: me or the skunks. He thought I was being dramatic. Nevertheless he set several traps and got out his gun.

Well, what did you expect? That some petting zoo flew on to the Vineyard and offered to capture them, surgically remove their scent glands, and then re-release them into the wild where, even today, they return to eat nuts from his hand and winter under his porch?

Come on people, this is Martha's Vineyard Real World, Off-Season Edition; there are probably as many guns here as there are skunks (and no, I don't own one).

But alas, even skunk-less, our relationship was not meant to be. That's okay. From now on I only date men who know what a good thing is when they smell it. And yes, I mean me.

 

The F-Word

Do you know what the F-word is?

Oh, you may think you do, but I'll bet you don't know what the F-word is in our house. 

It's Focus. As in: my 5 year-old/8 year-old/18 year-old son cannot, apparently, do it.

First-Born Son, also known as Mr. ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder for those few of you lucky enough to have no idea what I'm talking about), was not formally diagnosed until fifth grade. But of course by then I'd been dealing with it informally for years.

"I just start staring out the window while the teacher talks," he'd confess. "And the next thing you know, I'm thinking about Star Wars and Darth Vader and light-saber battles."

The irony was that at two or three he would sit in my lap for hours while I read to him. Book after book. On dinosaurs. Sharks. King Arthur. He could play Lego's or act out James Bond all afternoon.

But ask him to sit for a 20 minute lesson on fractions or write an essay on osmosis versus diffusion? Well, that was another story.

His incredible kindergarten teacher (who I believe was actually capable of walking on water) gave me the heads-up in my first Parent-Teacher conference. She never used the letters ADD, but she did use the F-word.

"He's a smart, wonderful little boy," she said, "who has trouble when it comes to being able to focus on things he'd rather not do."

"I want you to be prepared," she went on. "Some teachers will see this as a problem. You're going to hear this word again and again."

She was right. It became downright predictable.

The first time I came home from a conference and announced, "Your teacher used the F-word," he looked at me like I was insane.

His teacher? The F-word? No F-ing way! 

"Focus," I explained. "She needs you to focus."

And we both laughed our F-ing heads off.

It's not that we didn't take it seriously. Or that I wasn't constantly searching for new strategies to try and help him deal. 

"Look at me," I still say to him when I need him to pay attention. "What did I just say?" To this day I try not to give him more than three directions at a time. AND make him repeat them back to me.

Still, he'll wander in sheepishly 20 minutes later. "Okay, I fed the dog and vaccuumed the pool. What was that other thing again?"

And we laugh.

Because really, what are we going to do? Cry about a little trouble focusing?

Today First-Born Son goes to film school where he's learning the art of making movies. Movies that, one day, other young children will be thinking about, drowning out the words of their teachers, as they stare out the windows of their classrooms.

It's a lot to hope for.

His kindergarten teacher would be so F-ing proud.

 

The Middle Place

 

My parents, like a lot of people, have had a tough year.

My father, 78, has had one health problem after another. The last couple of months they've dealt with the removal of a rather deep melanoma (the most serious type of skin cancer) below his eye, then a complicated skin graft at this site.

It required three surgeries, drains, packing, multiple dressing changes for the large amounts of bleeding and drainage, and many different medications. My mother, never much of a nurse herself, has been the one to perform all these required tasks.

In addition, the hospital where the doctor practices and the surgeries were performed is over an hours drive from their Florida home. My mother hates to drive. My father has always done the driving for both of them. He even took her to the grocery store or the mall, and ran errands with her. Until now.

In reality, the past couple of years he'd also been there to offer her physical support. She suffered from polio as a teen, and these last years her muscles, never strong to begin with, have grown increasingly weak and, at times, downright unreliable.

I think my mother is upset that my dad, usually the strong one, has now put her in the unenviable position of caretaker. I don't blame her, but I also don't know if there's a solution.

It's been many years since they moved from New Jersey, where my sister and I still lived at the time. They hated the ice and snow. But originally New Yorkers, they were genuinely appalled when I moved my family to this "God-forsaken island."

My job and my younger daughter, as well as my finances, prevent me from hopping on a plane to buzz down there and help her out as I wish I could. Don't misunderstand; if my parents were very ill, or even required an extended hospital stay, I would find a way to be there.

But it's these smaller, ongoing, chronic if you will, episodes, so common as our parents grow older, that are the hardest to handle without family nearby.

I hope not to be in the same boat one day. But who knows?

"I should have had more children," my mother complained over the phone recently.

"But then they'd just be far away as well," I said (my sister now lives in Arizona).

"Maybe not," she argued. "Maybe they'd live close by and be here all the time."

"Yes," I agreed. "Our unborn children are always the most loyal, aren't they?"

Even she had to laugh.

Do you all live near enough to help out your folks if they need it? Or are you, like me, impossibly far away? I'm pretty sure both can be a blessing and a curse. But it'd be nice to know how other people are handling it...

 

A Little Sugar...

 

The South Dakota Cowgirl honored me with this blog award recently. If you don't know her, you definitely should. She lives on a huge ranch with her guy Zach, some cattle, and some of the prettiest horses I've ever seen. Her posts are fun and thoughtful, and I make sure to check in with her every day.

Before passing this award along, I''m supposed to share up to 10 fascinating things about myself. Which is pretty hard, because I think you all probably know everything there is to know about me already. Let's see...

-For a short time, around age 8, I wanted to be a nun (yeah, I know; tell me about it). My parents wisely humored me until the inclination passed.

-A couple of years ago I dated a guy, for over a year, who had no sense of smell (are you thinking Blog Post, because I certainly am).

-I have the tiniest wrists I've ever seen in an adult. Really, I'm 5'9" and I have these wrists smaller than most infants. I love bracelets, but finding ones small enough is a challenge.

-I've always been able to do a back-bend, and now that I'm fast approaching old age, I make sure to do one once a year, just to prove I still can. 

-I love long dangly earrings. Although again, as I get older, I have to choose ones that are more lightweight so my earlobes don't end up on my shoulders.

-At family gatherings when I was a kid, my parents had me do impressions for entertainment; I did a great Ed Sullivan and Richard Nixon (who didn't?), as well as two of Lily Tomlin's characters: her telephone operator ("One ringie-dingie"), and Edith Anne.

-I love my feet. Of course it's just my opinion, but I think they're really pretty.

-I had a dream when I was pregnant with all three of my kids that correctly predicted what sex they would be.

 

Okay that's only eight, but I think we can agree it's more than enough. I'd like to pass this award on to the following blogs:

1) Erin at The Locals Love It: She has some great posts about cool places by people who actually live there, as well as useful travel tips and her own very thoughtful reflections on life in general.

2) Lynn at For Love or Funny: She never fails to make me smile.

3) Jill at Stella's Roar: I've been following her for a while now, and she always posts photos of the most beautiful and interesting things, leaving me in a constant state of yearning.

Please take some time and go visit these lovely ladies. You'll be really glad you did.

I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving! I am going to take the next few days off and be back on Monday.

 

 

Wounds

One of my children has a friend who is a cutter.

She turns her anxiety and her anger and her pain on herself and leaves marks. On her arms, her legs.

She has a kit especially for this purpose. It contains what appear to be an exacto knife and several blades. I know this because she gave it to my kid once in a bout of optimism. She wasn't going to cut anymore. She was better, she was cured.

Except she wasn't. Within weeks the tide had turned and she was hurting herself once more. I guess she put together a new kit. It's easy enough when you stop to think about it. I look around my kitchen, my bathroom. If you're searching for weapons, there are plenty to be found.

I encouraged my child not to judge this friend too harshly. At some point in our lives we all turn on ourselves, inflicting damage in one way or another.

Many of us have issues with food. Some of us drink or take too much medication. Others seek out or continue relationships with people who abuse us. Emotionally. Psychologically. Physically.

Hopefully we recognize there are people to help us. Friends, professionals. Ourselves. Hopefully we get through it. Sometimes again and again. However many times it takes.

I've been very proud of my own kid for being there for this friend. For being brave enough to yell at her, and loyal enough to stand by her. For never taking on a burden that should only be borne by professionals. And for trusting me enough to keep me in the loop.

We all have scars. I've heard people say that the ones you cannot see are even worse than those you can. But I don't know.

Turning something sharp on your own skin, slicing it open and not understanding why seeing your own blood causes the pain in your heart to momentarily disappear? Then being forever left with a scar to remind you of what you are capable of doing to yourself?

I've seen her scars. They make me want to gather her in my arms and weep.

But she is getting help. Because she's smart and loved and incredibly brave. She will not give up on herself. And neither will we.

 

At A Loss (part two)

 

If you haven't read Part One of this post, you can find it here.

 

After she got her hearing aids, Daughter #2's speech grew by big fat leaps and bounds.

In those first few weeks, she would cock her head to the side, exclaiming, "I hear sum-tin!" Then run to the door or window to check out what it was. I couldn't believe how much she'd been missing.

I steered myself for the years to come, the negotiations I would need to engage in, and the accommodations that would be necessary for her in the school system. In life. The uphill battle certain things would be for her, things I had so taken for granted with my other kids.

Do you know some people treat children with hearing aids like they're mentally disabled or slow? Yeah, they do. And some people are uncomfortable at the mere site of a kid with hearing aids.

Fairly or not, I came to judge my older children's friends by how they handled D #2's disability.

"Is she retarded?" One little boy asked, sneering. As though she wasn't even in the room. STRIKE OUT.

"What's your sister got in her ears?" another asked.

"Those are her hearing aids." I could see First-Born Son almost holding his breath as he said this. "To help her hear."

"Oh." The boy shrugged. "Like bionic ears. Cool." HOME RUN.

I started saving for the tiny, but enormously expensive, hearing aids that would fit inside her ear and be practically invisible, the kind the audiologist assured me would be perfect for her as an adolescent.

Then, before she turned five, on a routine audiogram, her hearing tested almost normal. We'd been going every three or four months, to our same amazing audiologist, Ellen, each time.

Ellen didn't know what to make of it. Neither did the specialists she sent us to in Manhattan.

"I guess you might call it a miracle," one doctor said. "Except I don't believe in miracles."

The director of her school took me aside and quietly suggested that I not share what had happened with the other parents; she didn't want to encourage false hope.

Today, D #2 still has fluctuations in her hearing and does much better if she can look at someone as they speak, but she no longer wears hearing aids. She sits in the front of the class by choice, and she works really hard to overcome the learning difficulties she has as a result of those early years. Really hard.

And really successfully. She is driven in a way my two other children never had to be. She wants it. Bad.

This then, is my very un-scientific theory to explain what happened: I was so sick for that entire pregnancy. I only gained 13 pounds, and she was 7lbs, 14oz, with the biggest placenta the nurses had ever seen. Looking back, I think I may have had some viral infection that was passed on to her, affecting her hearing.

Unknowingly, I continued to pass on this virus to her through the next year and a half of nursing. Gradually, after she was weaned, the virus dissipated, leaving only residual damage, in the form of fluctuations in her hearing.

At least, that's my attempt at a logical explanation.

But as for what I really think happened?

Well, let's just say that, unlike that doctor, I do believe in miracles.

Wouldn't you?

At A Loss (part one)

The following story will be told over the next two posts.

 

Daughter #2 was born hearing impaired.

We had no idea of this at the time. All I knew was that her cry was the most high-pitched, piercing sound I had ever heard.  I was a pediatric nurse and she was my third child; I knew my newborn cries (I later learned this cry is common in newborns with hearing loss).

As she grew, we would lean in, cup our hand to her ear, and murmur, "Sssp-ssp-ssp," like we were telling her a secret. We called it the "Whisper Game," and I'd played it with all my kids. They loved it, and eventually, at about a year, leaned over to "whisper" a secret back to me.

D #2 did the same thing. Except she merely opened and closed her tiny lips, never uttering a sound. Foolishly, I found this quirky and adorable, not realizing she wasn't making the whisper sound because she couldn't hear it.

"That baby looks at your face so intently when you speak," my mother would say. Of course; she was trying to read our lips, attempting to make sense of the jumbled sounds she was able to hear.

I should've known. My two older children had spoken several words by the time they turned one and were chattering away by two.

There is a video of D #2 on Easter, only weeks before her second birthday. She picks up a candy egg and says "num-num." And I nearly erupt with joy. "Do you hear that? She said num-num," I inform the camera. "She means candy!"

That video will never be easy for me to watch.

Thinking maybe she just needed speech therapy like her cousins, I took her for an evaluation. Part of this was a routine audiological screening.

It was anything but routine. I held her while the audiologist directed sounds through speakers into our soundproof booth. As they grew higher in frequency, D #2 sat in my lap, thumb in her mouth, oblivious.

There was shock, guilt, sadness. Not necessarily in that order.

But other people took it harder than I did.  As an RN I knew what was out there: brain tumors, cancer, diabetes, cerebral palsy...

Hearing loss? We could do that.

I got her enrolled in a special school for kids with speech and hearing issues. I wove multi-colored friendship bracelets to clip her hearing aids onto the collar of her clothing with so they wouldn't get lost. I learned to use my stethoscope to test her aids and batteries each morning. Taught the babysitter, The Ex, and First-Born Son how to put them in and turn them on.

The first time she cupped her hand against my ear and "whispered"  to me with real "sssp-ssp-ssp" sounds, I nearly cried with relief. With her aids, her hearing was almost normal. Other kids at her school were not nearly so lucky.

My mother was appalled whenever I put her hair in ponytails. "But then everyone will see her hearing aids," she complained. "Don't you want to hide them?"

"She wears hearing aids," I said. "This is her life. If we don't accept it, how will she?"

More next post...

Death-Defining

For her Freshman Seminar at college, Daughter #1 is taking a class on death and dying. Because she is just that lighthearted, laugh-a-minute type of girl.

As an assignment, students had to interview a person who has dealt with death as part of their work. D #1 took the easy way out and chose me.

She called me late the other night and grilled me for a half hour about my experiences as an RN working with dying patients. I don't know how she felt about it afterward, since she's about as forthcoming as the CIA, but I found the experience enlightening.

One of the questions was did I feel that working with the dying had changed my attitude about death. I didn't really think I could answer that. See, I started working in a nursing home at 16, long before I'd thought much about death at all. I have to say I'd been pretty sheltered from death; I'd never even been to a funeral.

From that, I was thrust into this world where it was commonplace for at least a couple of patients to die each month, often when I was on duty, and frequently requiring me to do post-mortem care, which basically involves washing and wrapping the body before it's transported to the funeral parlor or morgue.

I continued to work with elderly patients through college and my early days as an RN. Then I moved to pediatrics, where I had to readjust my views toward death to include young people, even children and babies. It was difficult but I considered it a privilege to work with these patients and their families. A blessing even.

As hard as it is to conceive of, I came to believe some people can live a life filled with more purpose and meaning in 8 or 18 years than others might in well over 80. I'm not saying it ever got any easier to see kids die. But I did start to see age as only one factor (albeit a significant one) in the big picture of death.

Another question Daughter #1 had was whether I thought doctors and nurses viewed death differently.

"Like night and day," I told her.

Generally speaking, physicians have an adversarial relationship with death, even those working with the terminally ill. And that's probably as it should be. Most of us count on our doctors to help us fight like crazy to avoid death.

Nurses, on the other hand, are more often the ones present when death occurs. And while we rarely welcome it, we learn to accept it as an inevitability. Having seen enough of it, we realize it's not always fearsome. And in some cases, when we know it's coming, it can even be poignant and memorable.

Don't misunderstand me. I realize the gaping difference between dealing with death on a professional versus a personal level. For all the dying I've witnessed, I've still been incredibly sheltered from it in my own life so far.

And when that changes, as it obviously will, I can only hope some tiny bit of the strength and courage I have witnessed in those I've cared for might be found within myself.

Potluck Memories

 

We had a neighborhood potluck the other night. It was hosted at the home of my same friend and neighbor who threw my birthday surprise party three years ago, just to show you what kind of spectacular person she is.

Everyone showed up: the couple down the road who summer here and I invite down for drinks when my parents visit, because they're about the same age and my parents are happier when they have a playdate; the guy and his wife who live on the bend in the road, who magically showed up with a new baby, and most of us didn't even know they were pregnant (can't see a belly when you're waving car to car); the kids whom I no longer get to see every day at the bus stop since Daughter #2 started high school last year.

There was tons of awesome food and a bonfire for the kids to roast marshmallows. When it grew dark, we sat around the fire and told stories about our neighbor, Bo.

Bo always wore a cowboy hat and had a long white beard. He lived in a tiny cabin on our road with his beloved dog, Fraulein. We'd drive around the bend and see him playing with his remote control, battery-operated toy car, Fraulein chasing after it. He always tipped his hat in greeting, cigarette in hand.

Bo couldn't drive so he rode a moped, and when that broke, a bike. Or else he hitched. My kids were shocked the first time I picked him  up in our car.

"I thought you said never pick up hitchhikers," they protested.

"Yes, but it's only Bo," I explained. Everyone knew Bo.

We baked him cookies every Christmas.

When he got sick with lung cancer a couple of years ago, they didn't give him much time. But he was back on his bike before long.

Then he went into the hospital last spring and didn't come out. My neighbors brought Fraulein in to visit him every day. She was in bed with him when he died.

Then they convinced their friends to adopt Fraulein. And they arranged this potluck in his memory. We all got to talk to people we generally only wave at. And we got to share stories about Bo.

Our neighborhood is just that little bit different without him. Something missing.

I keep driving around the bend expecting to see him in the road, waiting for him to tip his hat one last time.

Spin Cycle: What Are YOU Good At?

 

For this week's Spin we're supposed to post about something we're good at.

Right away I thought of my writing and poetry. So please forgive me if I post a poem as my Spin. I wrote this about working nights as an RN on a pediatric unit, something I did for many years, something I also think I was pretty damned good at.

 

Nights on Pediatrics

One-year-olds with their knees
folded under their chests,
backsides high in metal cribs

shrouded in croup tents
hissing drops of mist.
Toddlers tossing with fever.

Adolescents clawing the sheet in search of
the next decent breath.
Kids with cancer swallow Tylenol

in their sleep while
fat drops of blood fall
from the bag through their veins.

The high-pitched screams of septic babies
blend with the deep-throated moans of sickle cell in
a young adult.

Nights on Peds.
We stroke their hair.
Tuck up covers.

Watch chests rise and fall with sleep,
brows wrinkled in dreams.
It’s all that we can do.

                                            *************************

Now you can go on over to Sprite's Keeper and check out what other bloggers have to say about the things they're good at.

 

 

Patients I Can't Forget

Nancy

Nancy arrived on our pediatric unit a shy, sullen, bone-thin 15 year-old. According to her parents, she'd been coming home from school and lying on the couch for months, saying she did not feel well, and complaining of vague aches and pains. They chalked it up to adolescent moodiness and tried to ignore her, hoping she'd snap out of it.

When that didn't happen, they brought her to the doctor, who ran some tests. The diagnosis was cancer, a tumor in her pelvis that had already metastasized into multiple nearby organs. She was given months, but she lasted almost two years.

Even though she was ill, in many ways Nancy remained a typical teenager. Some days she would hole up in her hospital room, the lights dimmed, buried in a mound of quilts and books, listening to her music and scribbling in her journal, offering only muttered responses to our questions.

Other days she'd "ride" her IV pole up the corridor like it was a skateboard, her head scarf off and bald scalp glowing. She'd visit the younger patients on the unit and talk our ears off as we tried to chart, then race back to her room and proceed with some redecorating project she'd just thought up that instant.

Her parents were older. She had siblings in their 20's. If only they'd taken her to the doctor sooner, some of the nurses whispered.

But I couldn't agree. How could they possibly have known? How often did teenage mood swings mask the symptoms  of cancer? If that were the case, every kid would spend their adolescent years being rushed to the doctor, going through test after test. For nothing.

I didn't have kids when Nancy died. But I've thought of her many times over the years. My kids have to complain an awful lot, and over time, for me to stop and say, okay, maybe there's something specific here we need to rule out or get checked out.

Nancy's cancer was so far along that the odds are it would have made little or no difference  had she been diagnosed a few months earlier . But I like to think knowing her helps me be a little more vigilant, always aware.

After she died, her parents found instructions she'd written in her journal for exactly how she wanted her funeral to be. She wanted certain music played and poems read. She wanted them to dress her in her white track suit, and to use her head scarf instead of her wig, so that she would look like her real self.

I didn't go to her service. But I heard they honored her every request.

Rising With The Sun

Are you a morning person or a night owl?

I have always wanted to be a morning person. The kind that springs out of bed at the crack of dawn, ready to take on the world. But God had other plans. And me being an early riser was not one of them.

Even as a young child I could easily sleep past ten o'clock. My mother was surprisingly tolerant of this, allowing me to skip summer day camp on occasion so I could sleep in, and screening my phone calls when I hit adolescence.

On the flip side, no matter what time I woke up, I was still wide awake and ready to go well past midnight. For years I worked 11pm to 7am at the hospital, suffering little of the well-documented effects of shift work.

I could clean the whole house after I put the kids to bed. And when we moved to the Vineyard, I spent many nights up till three or four o'clock, sorting through and packing up the fragments of our New Jersey life.

But I'd realized quickly, upon entering motherhood, that my night owl ways did not mix well in the real world. For one thing, unless you're in college or on a busy hospital unit, the world is a lonely place after 10pm. And children wake up at whatever time they wake up, irregardless of whether you went to bed at ten or two.

But lately my body is playing tricks on me. I will be 48 within the next month, so I suppose this may only be the beginning of an odyssey several years in length. I wake up frequently during the night and can no longer fall back asleep if it's past five or six o'clock. There aren't any night sweats of hot flashes (yet), but my mind starts to race, and I'm awake for the day.

As a result, I'm tired by ten at night and rarely make it past midnight, even on the weekends when I know I could sleep in, if only my body would allow it.

While I mourn the loss of late night TV (I miss you Conan and Dave!), I am trying to look at this as a positive thing. I plan on living a very long time. So I'm hoping when my body gets done readjusting itself, it will leave me literally a new woman: a morning person.

And I can spend the the second half of my life being one of those annoyingly chipper people, bursting with energy and ready, when I hop out of bed, to greet the day.

Toxic Tylenol?

Acetaminophen

Acetaminophen, or Tylenol, is getting a lot of press these days. The FDA is considering lowering the recommended dosage and putting warnings on the labels about the potential for liver damage.

All I can say is it's about time. As an RN I transferred to my hospital's pediatric unit back in 1984, and that was when I learned how toxic too much Tylenol could be. Almost every month we would admit an adolescent who came in after attempting suicide. They were rarely actually suicidal. Most were crying out for attention, trying to get someone to take them and their problems seriously.

So they would overdose on Tylenol, not realizing that they were doing far more damage than the kids who scraped their wrists with razor blades or needed their stomachs pumped clean of their parent's sleeping pills.

After all, their moms and dads had been feeding them Tylenol, for everything from fever to headache, since they were infants. How much harm could it do?

They and their parents were always shocked to discover how serious this particular overdose could be. "But it's just Tylenol," they would insist.

We'd have to treat quickly and aggressively to avoid permanent liver damage, and we never knew what their eventual outcome was at the time of their discharge.

Adolescents weren't the only ones. Every so often a toddler would get their hands on a bottle of acetaminophen infant drops and wind up on our unit in big trouble. The drops are concentrated so that babies only need to be given a tiny amount, but it's that concentration that is so very dangerous.

One couple rushed their 18 month old baby to us in the middle of the night after finding him asleep in his car seat with an empty bottle of the infant drops. They'd been on their way home from vacation, and he'd been crying in the backseat, bored from being strapped in so long. The next time they'd looked back in the darkness, he'd reached into the diaper bag and was holding the childproof bottle of acetaminophen drops.

"Then he fell asleep. We didn't think anything of it," the mom tearfully reported. "Till we got home and saw that empty bottle."

I felt for those parents But I learned from them too. I never left the diaper bag within my babies' reach. And I was paranoid about pushing Tylenol on them for every little ache and pain.

Not that they didn't want me to. My son, especially, loved the sugary taste. "Meanies," he'd say when he didn't feel well. We never figured out how "Tylenol" became "meanies," but he would have taken it every day if we'd offered it.

I remember friends confessing to dosing their babies every four hours around the clock when they were teething, or giving them the medicine because their kids were convinced it made them "all better."  They had no idea that after a few days of this, toxic levels in the liver were hard to flush out.

Parents want to make the best and safest decisions for their kids, but they can't do that without the correct information. So I'm glad the FDA might finally be about to put a warning on the acetaminophen label.

I repeat, it's about time.

Naked in Living Color

Skin Check

I'm doing this post late because I had to go to the dermatologist before work today.

I go every year. What can I say? I'm Irish, with red hair and freckles. My grandmother had a melanoma removed from her face in the 1960's. My dad's had three of them over the years, not to mention a variety of less serious types of skin cancer. I've already had a basal cell cancerous growth cut off of one shoulder, and a couple of pre-cancerous little blips on my face. They're hard to distinguish from the gobs and gobs of freckles.

It's no big deal. I just go every year and strip down for the dermatologist and let him have a look-see. Now, nobody likes getting naked for a doctor, but I've had three babies, and I'm a nurse after all. I think that's supposed to give me the go-ahead to tear off my clothes any time, any place, with wild abandon, so long as someone flashes a medical license.

But this doctor has to do a skincheck, which is an embarrassingly thorough examination of every bit of my epidermis (you know, all the parts of it that are showing). I'd like to flash him small portions at a time and keep the rest covered snugly under those lovely ass-peeping gowns they're kind enough to provide, but he'll have none of that.

He wants to see all of it at once. First front, then we flip to the back. So every year I peel off the gown. And every year he says, "Man, you're white!"

Now, normally I wouldn't bother to mention a person's race, but I think here it lends some context. See, this doc is African American, and when he stands there gaping at the paleness of my whiteness, I'm not sure how, exactly, I should respond.

He then asks me to turn over, which is bad enough on its own. But then he says it again. "God. You. Are. So. White."

Yeah, I think. Um-humm. Got it.

Really, what am I supposed to say? "Gee, thanks," or "I know, I'm so sorry."

He might as well be standing there laughing and pointing or whispering to his nurse. I mean, what would he say if I looked him square in the eye (or ass, as he is probably looking at my big, pale, white one that very moment), and said, "Yes dude, and you are so very black. What do you think we should do, write a song about it?"

Maybe this would've been the year I actually said it.

But this year, things would be different. The doctor was overbooked, and I was only too happy to schedule an appointment with his nurse practitioner, a woman.

I really didn't think it mattered if she was black, white, yellow, or polka dotted. I'd have bet anything she wouldn't stand there mocking my freckled, pale, Irish lack of pigmentation.

Women, I believe, are just more sensitive about these kinds of things (translation: she'd at least wait until I got my clothes back on, paid the bill, and walked out the door). At least that's what I was hoping. And I think that's what happened.

I didn't hear any whispering as I left the office. But you never know.