The Thursday Three

I don't know what it is about winter and food. But when it's cold and gross outside, food takes on a whole new meaning. Comfort. And what's more comforting than pasta? But, like the basic black dress, it's all about what you do with it.


Favorite Pasta Sauces


I'm not sure you can do much wrong with pasta, but here are my favorites. I'm not mentioning marinara, my all time fave, because it's a little plain jane for T3. (Even though it's what I eat 95% of the time!)



#1. White clam. I love white clam sauce on linguini or fettucine. I used to have a really fast five minute clam and lemon sauce recipe that I loved, but it never really flew with the kids and got ditched as a result. I should really track it down because it was really easy and really good.



Like the good coastal raised girl I am, I have to mention that anything with clams is twice as good with scallops. In Kansas, however, I'll stick with clams. Canned.







#2. Puttanesca. How can you not love a sauce named for hookers? Really? This is a very spicy sauce, loaded with capers, olives, red pepper flakes and (don't gag) anchovies. For someone who is as squeamish about meat as I am, I have no rationale for why I love anchovies so much. Oh, well. Predictable is not my middle name.

















I almost never make this at home, but I do a down and dirty version without the anchovies. It's still pretty good. If I do say so myself.



#3. Mushroom. My mother's mushroom sauce. The one that I cannot seem to pull off. I've watched her a zillion times and still can't do it. I'm convinced that she sends me out of the room on a fool's errand and then throws in something bizarre like pineapple juice or ketchup behind my back.





















It looks simple. Melt some butter and olive oil together and throw in a bunch of garlic. Saute for a minute and toss in a huge pile of sliced button mushrooms. Cook 'em down for a sec and then add a bunch of broth and let it simmer. It's a really soupy sauce. Pour it into a bowl over some pasta. Grate some cheese on top and slurp it down. Let it settle for a few minutes and go back for seconds. It's that good.



Alright, I'm done. I'd like to hear about your favorites.


And I promise next week's list won't be about food.

built to last

Embarrassment and humiliation seem to be recurrent themes lately here in blogville. As I have cruised my usual haunts the last few days, it seems there are a lot of people pulling out their embarrassing stories for public consumption. And of course, being human, we all think our story is the most embarrassing and humiliating one in the world. We all have think we take the cake.


I usually don't toot my own horn, but I'm going to here. And that's because I know I have the most embarrassing and humiliating story in the history of the world. Which for some obscure reason I'm about to share. Why? I'm giving up self-esteem for Lent? No? I'll think of something. Just give me time.


My story takes place about twenty years ago when we had just gotten married and were living in a tiny little duplex. Now there are two important facts you need to know:


1. I absolutely, positively, without hesitation adore my in-laws. Always have. Even after this story.

2. I used to sleepwalk. I did it sometimes as a kid and still do it every now and then.



One night I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. The FG, who was in bed, came looking for me when it took me a long time to come back. As he walked into the utility room he saw me lift up the lid on the washer, hoik myself up on top of it and...


Do my business in the Maytag.


The next day he had a field day with my little somnolent faux pas. I had to admit that it was a little on the bizarre side, but, since no one but my husband knew about it, I was finally able to laugh at the absurdity of it. Besides which, isn't that why the drain cycle was invented? And bleach. Lots of bleach.


There was a big family get together on his side a few weeks later. I can't remember exactly what it was for but there were a ton of people there. Some I was meeting for the first time. The FG was videotaping it, so I was kind of on my own for a good part of it. Afterwards, a whole bunch of people got together at his folk's house to watch the videotape.


I was finally relaxed after a day of trying to make a decent impression on people I barely knew. I watched the tape, following along as my husband got in people's faces and shot them with their mouths full and caught fun little candid camera moments.


Until...


The camera panned to my mother in law, mid-sentence and in the middle of a bunch of people. And she was saying


and then she picked up the lid of the washing machine and...


You could have heard a pin drop as she told the story. My husband, camera in hand, was heard chortling in the background. And the living room audience was dead still. All except for me. I was making odd little noises as I tried to see if I could asphyxiate myself in a bowl of french onion dip. (Final verdict: No).


I don't remember another thing about that night, but my MIL and I have laughed about it for a long, long time. I can laugh at myself. Eventually. I don't think I was laughing that particular night, however.


I don't think I have any lasting effects from that little episode. But I don't buy Maytags, either.


Anyone else want to share?


Postscript: My husband has just read this and says I have it all wrong. He says it was a plastic five gallon bucket next to the washer, not the washer itself. And he says that the only reason he told anyone is because it was so "cute" when I refused to get off the bucket because I "wasn't done yet". And he says he ought to know since he was the one who was awake.

Whatever. It was still embarrassing as hell. Am I too late for the Bucket List?

ramblings and whatnot

Take a moment this Super Tuesday to thank your lucky stars that the under eighteen crowd won't be picking our next US President. If they were, their preferred platform could look something like this:




In other news, the (other) RC winner (by a whopping one vote margin) is Rented Cranium, submitted by Ciara at Ramblings and Whatnot. I would ask her to send me her address, but I already have it from when I never sent her the Play It Forward gift she won. Ha. Here's where I combine shipping!


Way to go, Ciara. A box full of Liberal Collegeville goodness will be arriving on your doorstep soon. (And this time I mean it!)


And here's the sickbed tally at chez RC. One kid stayed home sick, one kid got sick at school and had to come home early and one kid came home at the end of the school day sick.


Is it flu season or what?


On the subject of sickbeds, I had an interesting patient at work last week. In with (surprise!) the flu and dehydration was a 60ish year old mentally challenged man, accompanied by his caretaker. He gave me hell for everything I did in a crabby, little kid kind of way. Toward the end of his bag of IV fluids he sent his caretaker out for a fast food dinner for the two of them. As soon as she left he motioned me over to his bed.


"You have to be quick," he said. "She'll be back soon."


"Quick with what?" I asked, thinking he meant the fluids. "You still have a quarter of a bag left."


"That's not what I mean," he said peevishly. "You know you want me. Now's your chance. Just pull the curtains and hurry!"


I need a vacation.

Fun Monday

Our Fun Monday hostess this week is Tiggerlane and she's chosen to make us blog with our minds and not our cameras this week. (Thank goodness. I can find my mind).



She's asking us to write ( a la The Bucket List) about five things we want to do before we die. The wilder and crazier the better. Well, I don't know about wild and crazy, but here's my list.


#1. Live on the beach for a year. And by beach I mean ocean. And more than a year is okay, too. And I mean smack on the beach, as in walk across some sand and hit the waves. The kind of closeness to the water where you aren't sure if your plumbing is acting up or the tide is coming in. I'm not picky about where, although I'd prefer warm, swimmable water. I could possibly combine this with #3 and kick two buckets at once.



#2. Attend a Grand Slam tennis final. I've wanted this one for so long it's almost become a joke. That doesn't mean I don't still want it, however. I would be fine with either of the four (Australian, French, Wimbledon and the US Open), although if I had to really fess up the French would probably be my last choice. But...I do love clay court tennis, so maybe I have to take that back. The US Open has Super Saturday, which is the single best day of tennis all year, Wimbledon is...well, Wimbledon and the Australian is...well, in Australia. All my rationalizations are moot. I'd take whatever I could get.



#3. Live in another country for a year. Again, I'm pretty open minded about where. There are a lot of places I'd love to have the chance to really explore and very few locations that would automatically make me say no. My language skills are iffy, which would probably limit me. Nine years of French, travelers Spanish and the ability to cuss like a rabid sailor in Arabic probably wouldn't get me far. As long as it got me out of the country it would be far enough.



#4. Plant a really successful vegetable garden. I don't know why something so simple has such appeal to me, but this one just keeps eluding me. We had a few gardens when I was growing up and I remember how much I enjoyed the results. (Of course, I did none of the work). My grandparents in Alabama had a big garden and I was always lobbying for my favorites to be planted. But I've never had a real vegetable garden as an adult. Either my lots were too shady or I was away too much in the summer and couldn't keep it up or some other silly thing. The kids and I have been talking about trying one this summer. We'll see.



#5. See my kids fall passionately in love. With anything, not necessarily a person, although that would be okay, too. I want to be able to watch them when they discover what it is they want to do with their lives and be there when something grabs their attention so hard they don't ever want to let it go. (And video games don't count). I don't have the idea that all of my kids need to do amazing things with their lives. I just want them to be well-loved and happy. But I truly believe that if you're doing something with your life in a field you love you're generally going to be happier than the person who hates their job but needs the paycheck. I want my kids to find that field. And I want to be there to see it.

borderline

I'm behind on my next installment of RC/RN, so I thought I'd pull out a hospital story instead. This has been in my drafts for a while and I guess I had just forgotten about it. Oh well, better late than never.


Of all my strange nursing experiences, few stand out more than the patient who followed me to three different hospitals. She didn't do it on purpose, but nevertheless she popped up strategically at two different nursing school rotations and then again, for the last time, at my ICU job. Due to events that will unfold shortly, she won't be popping up anymore, if you get my drift, but she certainly made an impression in the time given.


The first time I met her was during my Psych rotation at the big, bad scary Psych hospital. This is surely a whole other post, but I think the way nursing students are thrown into Psych rotations needs some rethinking. We were supposed to meet our clients (the PC word for patients these days), get their history by talking to them, and then, once that was done, we could go and read their medical chart with their complete history.


The majority of patients (sorry, old habits die hard) in Psych hospitals are totally harmless to anyone (except possibly themselves). Most are completely non-violent. Most are not threatening in the least to green nursing students. But this was a state hospital that had a large population of the violent and criminal patients. More than once, if I had read the chart first I never would have gone into a room alone with them, guard right outside the door or not. (And in hindsight, that should have been a big red flag right there).


This gal had been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. You can follow the link, but without going into too much detail, in the psychiatric world this is the one you really don't want. It's virtually untreatable and typified by borderline psychosis (hence the name), shifting addictions, narcissistic behavior, self-mutilation and manipulation. (This is, by the way, what I'm absolutely convinced Britney Spears has. Have I mentioned I'm an armchair psychoanalyst?) The classic trait is "splitting", a process that is used to pit people, usually loved ones and health care workers, against each other. These patients are very hard on their caregivers. She was no exception.


When I interviewed her she circled me incessantly, occasionally reaching out and touching my hair. I wasn't thrilled by that, but was trying to be open and encouraging. She didn't talk much, although she answered my questions readily enough. None of the answers tied together, but that was beside the point. At one stage she told me how much she liked my hair and asked if I could do hers like mine. As I was trying to formulate a therapeutic answer she turned on a dime and started yelling at me to get out because she knew I was only there to steal her cigarettes. When I stood up she apologized profusely and told me that when her voices wanted a cigarette they were likely to say anything. In an flash she punched herself in the face (hard) and then looked at me in satisfaction, saying "That'll shut 'em up."


All righty then. I didn't remember another thing about the assignment, I didn't remember another thing about her behavior, but I sure did remember her.



Six months later I was doing one of my last rotations on a med-surg floor (in a town forty miles away from the big bad scary Pysch hospital) and who should be on the unit but my cigarette gal. She was not my patient, so I never knew the exact details (at least not then), but she had had some sort of abdominal surgery and was scheduled to go to a step-down psychiatric facility when she was discharged. She seemed to be improving, from a mental health status, but clearly didn't want to go to the new facility. Evidently she was quite comfortable in the hospital and wanted to stay right where she was. Her student nurse was one of the toughest members of our class. Great gal, but she had grown up hard and fast and I think you would have had to stick needles under her fingernails to make her cry. She had made it this far in nursing school without flinching once, even if the rest of us flinched on a regular basis. (I flinched through my entire Labor and Delivery rotation, as a matter of fact).


Our first clue that something was up was when the student nurse bolted out of cigarette gal's room so fast she nearly tripped and with her fist clenched to her mouth. Before anyone could say a word she ran, gagging, to the bathroom. When she came out (sweaty and flushed) she said


I just saw the grossest thing ever.


Now, of course we should have left it alone, but we just couldn't. We pestered her and whined until she broke down and told us. She was not exaggerating. Even today, with a lot of massive trauma experience under my belt, it still stands as one of the two most horrifying things I've seen or heard of firsthand. It took me a long time to get the image out of my head, but sometimes it still sneaks up on me and says


HEY!! Remember me??


Cut to my first real nursing job in the ICU that I've been droning on about. And damned if this chick doesn't show up again - about a year after the last time. Only this time she's gotten herself into a real mess. She's started swallowing things. (Turns out this was the cause of her earlier surgery). Bottle caps, razors, antifreeze, lots and lots of paper clips - things that aren't really intended to be swallowed. When she was brought in (handcuffed) by the police she grabbed (with her teeth) a pen that one of them had in his shirt pocket and swallowed it whole right in front of two cops. Legend had it that she had taken apart and eaten a medical device that was about eight inches square and made of very hard plastic all while being under constant observation at the big bad Psych hospital. She was clearly in need of some serious watching.



She had swallowed something so caustic that her airway was affected, so she was on a ventilator. She had two triple IV lines running (six continuous infusions of meds or fluids into central veins, like the internal jugular or the subclavian) and an arterial line, which is basically an IV that is in an artery instead of a vein. You don't run anything in through these lines - they are primarily used for monitoring blood pressure internally. Most people on vents have these lines, because in order to make sure the patient is oxygenating properly you have to draw blood fairly often from an artery to test. This hurts like a son of a bitch, so having an art line in place means that you can just take the blood from there instead of sticking them every time. The drawback to an art line is that...it's in an artery. If it comes out somehow you can bleed to death in minutes, especially if it's in a big artery, like the femoral. You can't have an art line on a regular unit. ICU or ER only.



So let's review. We knew that she needed some serious watching. She had a tube down her throat that was basically breathing for her, she had two IV lines in that were dispensing crucial meds and she had an arterial line that could cause her to bleed out if it became dislodged. A simple case if there ever was one.



Any guesses on who got assigned this patient that morning?



I did have a few things going in my favor, though. One was that she was, of course, on a monitor and if anything got out of place I'd see it reflected pretty quick in her vitals signs. She was also restrained. Her wrists were held by soft fabric restraints - one more thing to monitor. But the major thing going my way was that she was drugged to within an inch of her life. Most patients on vents are, since very few people could tolerate being awake with a tube down their throat. She had (in my opinion anyway) the most amazing drug imaginable (lovingly referred to as Milk of Amnesia) running in continuously and she was absolutely flat zonked. The politically correct term is unresponsive, but zonked is far more accurate..


One of my fellow nurses had helpfully collected a bunch of paper clips and other metal objects and put them into a plastic lab sample bag. She taped it to the glass door of the patient's room with a note that said In Case of Emergency - Swallow. (Our manager was unamused and we had to take it down. Some people...).


It was about mid-morning when I was walking to this gal's room from my other patient's room. As I approached the door she sat straight up in bed and, in one fluid movement, swung her legs off the side of the bed (over the guardrail) and whipped her head around trying to rip out her breathing tube. I yelled for help at the top of my lungs and people came running from all directions. (I had only had one self-extubation at that point and was not in the mood for another. I get serious hand cramps when I have to bag someone).


We got her settled back down and she stayed intubated but it wasn't easy. She tried to swallow the metal bell part of someone's stethoscope as they leaned over her. We had a heated discussion about her sedation level, but I'm telling you that woman's vital signs never changed. Her baseline sedation level was...zonked. It was like she did the whole thing in her sleep. I promised myself that this would be my last shift with her as a patient. And it was.


Amazingly enough, she survived. She went back to a medical psych unit and then to some other facility. It was at that facility that she drank a bottle of Drano in one fell swoop and died, pretty much on the spot, of a massive respiratory arrest. Very sad life and a very sad end.


I don't know why this patient has stayed with me, but she pops into my head at the strangest times. And I owe her. Whenever I get into one of those medical weirdo games of who has the grossest stories, she always gets me at least into the final round.

And then it takes me a week to forget it yet again.

and the winner is...

Rockin' Correspondent.


Submitted by....


The Film Geek


You like him! You really like him!


But so much for the prize goodie basket.


Here's what I'm going to do. I'm putting up a poll with every entry that got even a single vote. Pick one. And the winner of that will get the prize and be somehow worked into the blog. I'll leave the poll up through the weekend.


Two Random Comments:


If Republican Conservative wins I make no guarantees on how I will work it into the blog.


I do have a favorite, and I think it's absolutely perfect. We'll see how it does.

I lied. One more random comment. Since this isn't really a comment inducing post (and we all know how we Bloggers love our comments), I need a hook. So...

Describe yourself with RC. For example, Willowtree could be Reputed Curmudgeon. Laurie might be Regales Canines. And so on.

Bring 'em on.

the beginning

The last thing I remember was sitting in class taking notes.


I thought maybe I was clutching my pen too hard, because all the fingers on my right hand felt a little numb. I put the pen down and wiggled them around to get the blood flowing, but instead of helping the numbness crept up my arm. The right side of my face followed suit almost instantly. It was the weirdest thing. My heart, my reliably beating heart, was all of a sudden completely out of whack. It was pounding so hard I could feel it in my neck. Spots large enough to block out my vision floated in front of my eyes. I started breathing really fast, but couldn't get any air into my lungs.


It occurred to me that I was going to die. I knew it, but couldn't do anything about it. Was I having a stroke? A heart attack? How could one of those things happen to an eighteen year old? The room started to spin as it got harder and harder to catch my breath. I'm dying. Oh my god, I don't know what's going on. The room got dark as I realized that I had to get out, had to get away. I knew with grim certainty that if I didn't get out of that classroom immediately very bad things were going to happen. Gasping for breath I stood up, clutching the corner of my desk. By feel, I maneuvered around the seat and headed for the exit. Everyone in the room was staring at me oddly, but I was too focused on the door to care.


I made it to right in front of the professor's desk before I went down. The dark and spinning room was made of stronger stuff than I was. I fell about three feet from the door. So close.


The next thing I remember was being in the health office and having a doctor hanging over me with a stethoscope. I could feel my arm but not my face. I could see his lips move but couldn't make out what he was saying. My mouth opened but I couldn't talk. My entire body was still shaking. My hands were wet with sweat.


I had just had my first anxiety attack.


I would give almost anything if it had been my last.