easier than you think

When I applied for my job in the ER, I wanted it with an intensity that you can only get from fantasizing about something so hard and for so long. And as I sat for my interview, I thought it was going really well, and had (finally) started to think this could actually happen, when my future boss asked me the question I was dreading.



"So, how are your IV skills?" she asked.


Lots of things went through my head. The fact that we almost never started IVs in the ICU, since virtually everyone had a central line. The fact that this woman was a riot and I adored her instantly and wanted desperately to work for her. The fact that any IV I had ever hit in my life thus far had been a matter of sheer luck, done with shaking hands. And that there hadn't been many of those. The fact that I was petrified of IVs and that no matter how hard I chanted my little "face your fears" mantra, I still ran the other way when anyone mentioned them. The fact that I really am a pretty honest person, which led me to admit,


"Not so hot, to tell the truth."


My heart sank. I could feel my dream sliding away. We talked about other things for quite a while and when she offered me the job (on the spot), she said


"Don't worry. We'll teach you IVs. You'll get plenty of practice."


And I have. After a learning curve full of fear and frustrated anger and more than my fair share of anxiety, I've looked the beast in the mouth and realized it isn't so scary after all. Even crazier, I've started to really like doing them, to the point that I sometimes run around at work volunteering to start other people's lines for them. And when my mentor, the nurse whom I followed around like a puppy coveting her IV skills, asked me to try recently when she had missed twice on someone, and I sauntered into the room and nailed it, I had a feeling that was really hard to pin down.


It was an incredible rush. I had faced down something that terrified me and realized it wasn't so bad. I had taken something that in my opinion was one of the worst things I could have to do and seen that it wasn't such a big deal after all. And I had come out of it confident and proud and excited about what might lie ahead. The beast only looked like it roared. All it took was the right mindset to realize that if you never give up, good things will happen.


Not a bad lesson for life in general.

Saturday Quickie

What do you think is your worst habit? And why?


Inquiring minds want to know.


I'll go first, since I kind of have to. That's one of the downsides of asking such a nosy question. My worst habit is biting my nails. I have other bad habits, I know, but I have a handle on most of them. The nails drive me nuts. I stop, I start, I stop, I start...and so on and so on. I've never been able to figure out a way to leave them at home and out of sight.


As of today, I've officially stopped again. Maybe not the best timing in the world, but it will appease my inner control freak. Not to mention the fact that there's almost nothing that makes me feel better about myself than fingernails. By June 1st I want to be have the needed nails to have the manicure I won't be able to afford.


Now it's your turn. Spill it.

ding ding ding

Round One went to Gumby. During a running through the house fight with Surfer Dude, he slammed the Dutch door between the dining room and the kitchen on SD's arm, catching it so completely that twenty four hours later SD's arm is still black and blue.


Round Two went to Surfer Dude. While outside at dusk playing a kind of makeshift baseball with a big stick and a tennis ball, he hit Gumby in the eye so hard with a line drive (forehand??) that Gumby came in the house with a swollen shut eye tearing copiously.


Round Three went to the school nurse who got to call me this morning and ask me if I'd noticed that Gumby's pupils were two completely different sizes, and if I didn't think, with all my ER experience, that a doctor's visit would be a good idea.


Round Four went to our doctor who kept us waiting an hour to see him.


Round Five went to the pharmacy, which screwed up his prescription for eye drops so badly that it took two pharmacies, six people and roughly twenty phone calls to straighten out.


The only conceivable winner in any of this was my mother, who avoided my waterworks dropping her off at the airport because I had a kid in the backseat that I had to race to a doctor's appointment. And I know she didn't win, because she had to then wait hours to find out that Gumby's problem was just a pupillary reaction to getting the hell banged out of his eye, and not a concussion or worse.


We really do keep our visitors entertained, as you can see. She had woken up that morning to the startling sound of a Surfer Dude fart so loud, so resounding, that one room over we both started laughing - from a dead sleep. When we say Technical Knock Out in my house, we aren't talking about boxing.

The Thursday Three

The subject today is Pie. Specifically

Favorite Pies

I’ve been wracking my brain all day for topic ideas and not having a lot of luck. I even dragged my mom into it on her last night here, bless her heart.

“What should I write about?”

“How about (this)?”

“No. Won’t work.”

“Okay. How about (this)?”

“No. That’s not good either.”

“Okay. How about you come up with your own stinkin’ idea?”

Where’s the maternal instinct when you need it?

Alright, back to pie.

As Surfer Dude loves to say (out of nowhere and with absolutely no context whatsoever), “I like pie.”

Especially…

#1. Pumpkin. Hands down, no contest, my favorite pie. These don’t last long in my family, believe me. Sweet potato works, too, but pumpkin is always numero uno. I like it best at room temperature with cold whipped cream, but if no one is looking I’ll eat it right out of the pan with my hands. Can’t do that with just any old pie.

#2. Coconut Cream. Any cream pie, to be perfectly honest, but coconut is my favorite. But banana is close. Very close. Wait a minute. I may need to rethink this.

#3. Strawberry. I’m not a huge fruit pie fan, strangely enough, but I love strawberry pie with a light glaze. Especially in the summer, with perfect, juicy strawberries. Frozen doesn’t really cut it.

Your turn.

(and does my font give any indication that my wireless is being weird again? sigh)

bowling for barack

We took the kids bowling at the lake, which is something we've promised them for quite a while, but never done. It was a small, but perfectly okay bowling alley, although it was (oddly) only open for a three hour window on a late Sunday afternoon. This area is Touristy with a capital T, and we're still a month and a half away from "the season", so I guess we should be grateful it was open at all.


There were a few other groups in there, whiling away rainy Sunday hours, but from the moment we walked in we stuck out like sore thumbs. First there's my mom, who carries her flower child aura with her to this day, accentuated by the constantly changing array of bold ethnic jewelry. Then there's Sasquatch with his halfway down his back mane of curly brown locks. My face was still in weird post-roadkill blotch, so I was drawing some attention of the unwanted sort. Surfer Dude and Gumby, being fairly typical ten and twelve year old boys (at least until they talk), were our saving grace. We all collected our shoes and our cokes and headed for our lane.


Now I feel qualified to say this next thing, based on the amount of time I spent in Alabama growing up, and I don't mean it badly. Really. But I always think of the lake, as much as I love it, as "Hold my beer and watch this" territory. The kind of place Jeff Foxworthy might go to research his new stand-up routine. A place where you still see Confederate flags hanging on porches. A place populated by locals who...were not like us. And certainly did not want to be.


We were doing fine until Sasquatch brought up the Barack Obama story from a couple of weeks ago where he went bowling on the campaign trail and bowled a 37. Thats 3-7. Not a real shining moment in the public eye. As Jimmy Kimmel says "I bowled a 37 when I was a baby. And I was drunk, by the way."


This came up because Gumby was having an off day. A really off day. By the fifth frame he was barely sitting at 30. The other three of us bowling (my mom played cheerleader) were doing much better. Sasquatch, trying in his own way to be encouraging (and deflect everyone's attention from the fact that I was kicking his butt), said "Cheer up, G. You only need 8 more points to beat Obama." Well, that was a challenge that Gumby felt he could take on, and when (in the seventh frame!) he hit 38 his brothers danced around him chanting "You beat Obama, you beat Obama..."


And as the rest of the bowlers pushed back their hats and put their beer down to take a gander in our direction, we figured it was high time to mosey on out of there.

homecoming queen

Always before, no matter how wonderful my vacation spot, there's been a part of me that couldn't wait to get home. I'm such a homebody - and a real affront to the stereotype of the "on the town Gemini" - that I've consistently had a strong pull to be back in my own space. I love traveling, and would happily go virtually anywhere, but at some point I just want to be home. The feeling of peace and comfort as soon as I walk in the door has always calmed my soul.


Not anymore.


We were scheduled to come home late Sunday so that on Monday the kids could go to school and I could go to work. But that morning, after a self-imposed moratorium on any kind of emotion whatsoever, I woke up weeping and couldn't seem to muster up the balls to stop. By the time I kind of pulled it together, I resembled something in the roadkill family and my inner control freak had gone MIA on me. For a woman who prides herself on iron fisted self control, it was a really ugly moment.


But, for the first time in a while, the mechanical gods were smiling on me. My mom's car had thrown a belt of some sort and the part the mechanics needed to fix it wouldn't arrive until sometime Monday morning. So with my family egging me on, I made another uncharacteristic move and called in for my Monday shift. There was certainly a huge element of truth in not leaving my mom in the middle of nowhere without a car, but we all knew that was only part of the equation. The thought of going home was literally making me sick. And if I could put it off for another 24 hours, so be it. (And on a preemptive note, my new therapist insists that putting on a neutral face for your kids isn't as good a solution as I want it to be. Guess we tested out that theory).



My living arrangement won't be changing until the beginning of June. We'll all be one big, happy family living under one roof until then. But a lot is going on with me personally, and even though it's all going to be good (in the end), at the moment I'm in the Mojave Desert in the Highway of Life. There are people reading this blog who shouldn't be (and who shouldn't want to either), so I'm going to leave it at that for the moment. There was a comment made on an earlier post that pretty much sums up my current position - "post what you're comfortable with and save the rest for the book."


I've never been a person who trusts easily to start with and it's terribly hard to realize that there really are people you can't trust with your emotions or feelings. And there are a lot of conflicting thoughts that come with that realization. One of them, strengthened by my refusal to drag my kids into this, is envy. I envy, almost more than I can say, people who have the freedom to say what they want to and just get it out. But I've decided that there are those who will no longer be burdened by my thought processes, and while for the most part I'm surprisingly comfortable with that, sometimes the urge to just let 'er rip is pretty tempting.


So when I got back home Monday afternoon and checked a few blogs, I was immediately struck by Irene's. She has called me her "sister in arms", and to tell the truth I've been worried about her while I was gone. I do not for a second envy a single thing she is going through and wish I could snap my fingers and wish it all away so she could be the happy woman she totally deserves to be. But as I was catching up on what is going on with her, I couldn't help feeling a little envy at the way she's working through it all. And the more I read, the more I thought


Damn. I couldn't have said it better myself.

the concession

I think I’ve finally hit critical mess. My wireless (to continue with this sad theme) is simply not working. To make it even more fun, the computer that is hard wired is having troubles too. So…

The kids and I are leaving this morning to spend five days at the lake with my mom. For all of you who are new to RC, my mom has a house on a lake about three hours from here that is a retreat like no other. I need a retreat like no other, and I’m not too proud to admit to it. So I’ll be taking a little blogging sabbatical until next Tuesday, at which point I’ll be back full force, even if I have to do what I’m doing now, which is writing in Word and cutting and pasting into Blogger, in the three point two seconds I have before it boots my butt off. (This whole blogging thing has done wonders for my computer skills, not to mention my invective level).

Obviously, I haven’t been able to do any blog reading, and I know I’m falling hopelessly behind. This isn’t by choice, believe me. I’ll get this figured out - and soon. In the meantime, have a great week and don’t forget about me, okay?

Is my insecurity showing through? No? Good. Yes? Damn. (One more bloody hit for the cuss-o-meter).

I hate that thing