Cleanliness is Next to Godliness

As soon as I published my blog yesterday, Dave looks over at me and says, "Hey do you want to go for a walk?" The funny thing was that he hadn't even read my blog yet. I was so happy he finally wanted to go outside I almost humped him, but then I decided against it for fear of overstimulating him and inducing one of his violent coughing spells. And really, I've just had enough of the whole coughing thing. (I know, I know, I am a mean, old, crotchety nurse.)

So we went for a walk by the river and the park, a route that I surely will miss when we leave here. The sun finally came out a little bit and was sparkling on the river as a group of rowers were out there practicing. It was picturesque to say the least.

We then made our way towards Charles St, where there is a cute strip of restaurants and shops. We crossed the footbridge over Storrow Drive, which is one of my favorite streets, since it runs right along the river.

Here is a picture of Storrow Drive. The river is just on the other side of those trees on the left.(And I would just like to point your attention to the street sign at the bottom right hand corner of the picture. If you can't read it, it says, "Beaver Pl. Pvt. Way." Those dirty, dirty Bostonians.)

After crossing Storrow, we stopped to have dinner at my favorite little cafe on Charles St. I got some carrot cake to save for a bedtime snack, and we were on our way.

I was feeling much more relaxed until we got home and everything felt so dirty and germy again. Thus started the cleaning binge of 2007. The bathroom was cleaned, the kitchen was cleaned, all handles of all cabinets, all the doorknobs, and all the faucet handles in the apartment were disinfected, all towels, sheets, blankets, the duvet cover, and the shams were washed, and the apartment was thoroughly vacuumed. Then and only then could I relax, shower, have a glass of wine, and eat my cake. And it was damn good cake.

Now I am sitting here in my nice, clean apartment, relaxing and waiting for someone to hurry up and wake up. I did an "Ln" this morning, as I woke up at 7:30 and have already been to the grocery store to buy breakfast food while waiting for sick boy to wake up. He's been snoozing for almost two hours now. I swear that boy can snooze longer than anyone I've ever met, even me! But I figure I'll cut him some slack because he's been sleeping horribly all week because of snot and coughing so much.

(He only gets a little slack though.)

Why I'm so perky this morning is beyond me, but I'm not going to complain. All I know is the forecast today is for a high of 50, and that's better than 45!

The Natives are Getting Restless

I am tired, grumpy, and irritable. Why you ask? Could be the weather. It's cloudy and 44 degrees out, it snowed again last night, and it's March for godsakes! I was really just kidding when I was hoping for snow in January. OK, we got some, and now I'm done. Couldn't we at least make it up to the fifties by now? Where the hell is my sunshine?! And there's this Toyota commercial that keeps playing on TV. The song goes: It's coming...Can you feel it?...It's spring... I think that commercial is just a cruel joke.

Spring fever is real. It happens to people, and it's happening to me right now. I am so tired of this stuffy old apartment. It doesn't help that Dave has been sick all week, so we haven't been able to go out and do anything fun this week or this weekend. Today is actually the first day that he has woken up without a fever of at least 101. But he still has a very persistent cough and I swear this place is crawling with germs. I seriously need some fresh air. Don't get me wrong. Of course I am glad that he is starting to shake whatever it is that has been plaguing him all week, but that bug of his needs to hurry up and get the hell on so we can get back to our lives again!

Yesterday I was cooped up in a classroom, listening to lectures about crap that I've already learned. Every two years I must endure one of those days so that I can get recertified on ACLS. This is the third time around, and it's getting old I tell you. I can resuscitate someone just fine. I do it all the time at work. Shouldn't that be enough?

Luckily the class got out an hour early, and since yesterday it was at least sunny and 45 degrees, I decided to get off at a subway station that was farther away than usual so that I could have a nice walk home by the park. Boy was I in for a surprise! I came up the stairs out of the station, and immediately found myself in the middle of this:

The sign reads: Stop the Biolab

The sign reads: Stop Iraq War/ No Iran War/ IMPEACH

The rainbow flag speaks for itself.

A view of the group in the Boston Common from afar, just to give you a little more perspective on the size.

So the best I could tell at the time, it was a pro-earth, anti-war/ anti-Bush, pro-gay rights demonstration. According to the news story, I guess it was mostly geared towards anti-war/ anti-Bush, but I guess the other groups just decided to jump on the bandwagon. Either way, it was pretty impressive to find myself in the middle of it. People were chanting and banging on drums all around me as they marched by. I've never experienced anything like it.

At this point it looks like that's going to be the highlight of the weekend. Maybe I'll feel better if I take another walk this afternoon. Sometimes you just have to get out.

Slacking

Well it must be a good night at work because here I am blogging again. Actually I have several things that I'm supposed to be doing right now, but seeing as how I am a professional procrastinator, I'll do that stuff later. I guess that's the reason why my taxes still are not done.

Anyway, I thought of something that might be funny to have as a running bit on my blog. It will be called "Overheard in ICU." I'm going to have to start writing down some of the weird, funny, and interesting things that come out of patients mouths while they are in the ICU. You see, many ICU patients are confused, demented, delirious, etc. They can say some wacky stuff. And it's not only the patients, but the doctors, the nurses, the family members, everyone. This is still in development since I just thought of it tonight so I haven't had much time for compiling, but here are just a few things I have overheard tonight:

Family member: Do you see that he has a fever again? Are you going to give him Tylenol?
Me, thinking to myself: Considering that the patient's temp is clearly labeled for me to see even from outside the room, and the fact that the patient's temp is the very reason that he is here, and the fact that I am the nurse taking care of this patient, don't you think that I have already noticed the temp of 99.8 (which isn't even that big of a deal)? And perhaps if you would hurry up and leave and quit asking me stupid questions, I could give it a little sooner.
What I really said: Don't worry, I'm about to give him some Tylenol soon.

Coming from the patient's room next door:
Nurse: dave....Dave....Dave!.....DAVE!......DAVE!!....DAVE!!!
There is no response from the patient
Me, thinking to myself: Hellooo, your patient is comatose, and hasn't responded any of the other 8 times you've tried to wake him up in the past two hours... get over it!

I go into my patient's room and he is wide awake, staring at the ceiling:
Me: Do you see something on the ceiling?
Patient: My wife and I have been married thirty years, and it's still not working out.
Me, to myself: Riiiight, OK I'm gonna go now.


That's all I got for now. And now, I really have to go and work too!

If Only I Had A Four-Leaf Clover

I swear I have some of the worst luck with work schedules. I only have to work every third weekend. But, of course, I was scheduled for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday this past weekend. And why am I so piffed about this? St. Patty's Day was March 17th! And since Boston has a huge Irish population, it was just like one big party everywhere this weekend. Everywhere, that is, except the Brigham, where I was forced to slave away against my will. (Feel sorry for me yet?) Anyway, here are a few bloggable moments/thoughts from the past couple of days:

• Thursday night I did manage to drag a few friends out so that I could at least have my own little St. Patty's Day celebration. We went to a few nearby pubs that had some pretty good cover bands playing, I wore green, and I drank plenty. All I remember is running up to the front of the stage, screaming/singing, and head-banging to some song at the end of the night. Good times.
• On the way to work Friday evening, I almost got swept away by a blizzard....for real! It was so f***ing cold, snow was everywhere, and the wind was blowing so hard, I was in full-on survival mode. I wore long john's with jeans and boots on the way to work because I knew my scrubs would not be warm enough and would be soaked by the time I got there. Even with my head bowed against the wind, and my hood cinched up, snow still managed to blow down my neck. Now that's what I call cold!
• The trek to work on Saturday evening was just as bad. It was still cold, but raining instead of snowing. After the four or five inches of snow from the previous day, the rain on top of it made for a huge slushy mess! Plus I left the apartment a few minutes late, so I had to run through all that crap, dodging drunk people that had been partying since that morning. Then, just as soon as I got into the train station, I heard my train pulling up, so I started run-walking even faster. As I started down the escalator at warp speed, my wet boot slid straight out in front of me on the first step. I threw my arms out and caught myself in mid-air before I totally busted my ass, and then ran the rest of the way down to jump on the train just in the nick of time. When my adrenaline quit pumping, I then felt super embarrassed at how dumb I must have just looked. And my left quad still hurts because I must have pulled it a little. Yeah, that sucked.
• Sunday morning I was oh-so-pleasantly surprised to see beer cans, liquor bottles, multiple patches of yellow snow, frozen vomit, and various green party debris littered all over the sidewalk on the way home from work. And most of it is still there, as it is frozen in place. I guess city life isn't always what it's cracked up to be.
• On top of the bad weather and missing the partying, work itself was also pretty crappy this weekend. The patient census was lower than usual, and since I wasn't needed to work on my regular unit, I was floated to other units to work. I don't mind having to float every so often, but by Sunday night, I was really feeling abused. Both Friday and Saturday nights, they floated me to work on one unit at 7pm, and then made me switch units at 11pm. This is really a pain because at 11pm, I would be on a completely different floor with a whole new patient assignment, and have to start all over again. So Sunday night, I simply told the charge nurse that if I was told to switch units at 11pm, I would just go home. And what do you know? I stayed on the same unit for the whole twelve hours and had a nice night. So here's to putting the smack down!
• Just when I thought my nursing duties were over for the weekend, my poor little favie needed his own private nurse. When I woke up this afternoon, I found him lying on the couch, looking like death itself. It turned out that he had a temp of 103.4!! I was trying to stay cool, but I blew it when I looked at the thermometer and exclaimed, "Oh Shit!!" Thanks to some good drugs and a little extra TLC, his temp finally came down to normal by bedtime, and he was feeling much better. Whew! I've never seen a temp that high on a conscious person! I'm so glad his brain didn't fry up, because I think I would've really missed it :)
• And last but not least, just when we thought the snow was over, it started snowing again this evening. See, I told you I wasn't getting my hopes up about spring!

Speaking of News for Sale...

Now that the cat's finally out of the bag about our next destination, we've started making plans for our move down south. This includes me trying to find a job that is close to David's new job. Me finding a job directly translates into where the available jobs actually are. And I don't know much about Greensboro, but I wasn't expecting to find a whole lot of availability because most of the travel nurse jobs are at the big teaching hospitals in big cities.

So at the beginning of last week, I told my recruiter that I wanted to find a job in Greensboro, NC. Upon the initial survey, my recruiter found several orders for jobs, but they were all in Raleigh, Durham, or Chapel Hill. Surprise, surprise: Duke medical school is in Durham and UNC's medical school is in Chapel Hill, so that's where the big hospitals and where all the jobs are. I was like "Well that's great and all, but I'm going to actually be living at least an hour away from there." And here we go again...

All the stress and worry about our previous move to Boston came rushing back as I remembered everything we went through to get up here in the first place. I wondered if I was going to have to go through all that crap again: not finding a job until the last minute, feeling pressured by my recruiter to take a job that wasn't really what I wanted, not knowing where I was going to be living until a week before the move-in date, etc. But I decided to just chill out, let all of that go, and have faith that somehow everything would work out.

And what do you know? Today I spoke with the ICU nurse manager at High Point Regional Hospital. High Point, NC is not only the next town over from Greensboro, but it is also the furniture capital of the world. So I can work and buy discount furniture in the same place... awesome! Although the commute time will still be longer than I would have preferred (probably about thirty minutes), it is at least doable, and everything else about this hospital sounds great. After an extremely pleasant, hour long conversation with the nurse manager this afternoon, the job was all mine!

So now that we can both check "job" off of our list, all we have to do is find an apartment. This could prove harder than we think, but I told myself that I wasn't going to stress. It can't be that hard to find a furnished apartment with a four month lease can it? I'm sure we'll figure something out. Until then I'll be looking forward to those balmy summer nights with all the crickets chirping and the fireflies sparkling in the trees.

Look out south.... here we come!

Getting Warmer

It's a miracle! The temperature actually made it up to 54 degrees yesterday! I definitely have no problem with that. Today it's supposed to get up to a high of 58! I'm not getting my hopes up though. The forecast for the end of this week is predicting highs back down to the 40's. Of course, it's still better than the 5 degree weather with the -8 wind chill that I endured last week.

My weekend, as usual, went by way too fast. Friday night we went to the Harpoon Brewery down by the waterfront. They were having an early St. Patrick's Day celebration, complete with plenty of great beer, about a million drunk people under a huge tent that I wished was even bigger than it was, and a great U2 cover band. Basically, we spent a $15 cover charge to get a plastic pint glass with the Harpoon logo on it, only to have to elbow our way through a huge crowd of people that had already been drinking for a few hours, only to have to pay $5 per pint of beer. Oh well, I guessed we should've pre-gamed that one. At least it's really good beer!

Afterwards, we almost froze to death, waiting in a 20-minute line to get into a crowded bar where some of our friends were hanging out. Somehow they had gotten completely wasted over the past two hours since we had seen them. Again, more alcohol was needed to make the situation tolerable. Luckily, the bartender was a quick worker, and soon we were on our way. Over the course of the night, we ended up fending off a guy for one of our friends, pretending that we hadn't seen her, and going home early because one of our other friends got sick at the bar. It was just like college times all over again!

Saturday morning we fought through our hangovers and woke up at 8 AM to pick up a rental car and make it to Manchester, NH by noon. My mom's sister and her family live there, and my mom's parents live about 45 minutes north, in Belmont. We had a nice little family get together with them, which included a homemade lunch and a rousing game of dominoes. It was kind of funny because I hadn't seen them in about seven years. In fact, that's usually about how often I see them. But I can definitely see where I get my competitive side from, the way they argued about the rules of dominoes. I mean really, it's just dominoes. It was all in good fun though.

That afternoon, we followed my grandparents to their home in Belmont. It wasn't long before my grandfather offered us a glass of wine (I think, more because he wanted one, since it was only three in the afternoon). We made some conversation for a little while, and then watched Waking Ned Devine. It was an enjoyable movie, but I couldn't help thinking to myself, "I haven't seen these people in several years, and they want to watch a movie?" I think they were just trying to entertain us, but I couldn't help but wonder if I thought it was rude or not. Anyway, after the movie, my grandpa played some music for us so he could show off his impressive stereo system. (Perhaps a little known fact about my grandpa is that he developed a certain speaker design in the 1970's that was once claimed by critics to be the "best loudspeakers in the world.") That night, they took us out for a nice Italian dinner. Just when it seemed like we were finally getting warmed up to each other, dinner was over, and it was time to part ways. All I can say is, I wish I was closer to that side of the family so that visits were not so few and far between. Most of all, I hope that's not the last time I see my grandparents before one of them passes away.

That night, we stayed in the cutest bed and breakfast that was owned by a really sweet couple. They started the Lighthouse Inn B & B after they both retired. If anyone is ever going through New Hampshire anytime soon, I highly recommend it. The place was immaculate, the bed was comfortable, the owners were friendly and attentive, and the breakfast the next morning was delicious. It's near Lake Winnipesaukee, the largest lake in New Hampshire, and, interestingly enough, the setting of What About Bob?

Sunday morning we had planned to ski at Gunstock ski area, about a fifteen minute drive from the B & B. Wouldn't you know it? We finally decided to try New England skiing, and it warmed up so much over the weekend that it actually rained that morning. I was prepared for disappointment, but by the time we made it over to the mountain, the rain had stopped, and all lifts were operational. We had an awesome day of spring skiing, as we went on practically every trail they had open.

By the time we got home Sunday night, we were both exhausted. I ended up doing my sleep marathon again, as I slept for a good twelve hours, waking up at 2pm yesterday. Since it's now 5:20AM, soon I'll go back to bed so I can sleep all day. Hopefully, I'll be able to at least experience a little bit of the heat wave before I have to go to work tonight. It's gonna be a scorcher out there!

You Know it's Cold When...

• You wake up wearing long sleeves and pajama pants, and the covers are still pulled up to your chin
• You tiptoe from the bedroom to the bathroom, not because you're trying to be quiet, but to limit the amount of bare skin touching the cold, hardwood floors
• You get dressed in the bathroom after showering because it's the only warm place in the apartment, even with the heat on
• You wear long john's under your scrubs, just so you can survive the eight minute walk to the subway station
• You wear the dorky Christmas socks with reindeer on them because you know they are thick enough to keep your feet warm
• The eight minute walk to the subway station becomes a five minute walk
• During the walk to the subway station, you may throw yourself in front of oncoming vehicles just to get there faster
• Also during the walk, you do not under any circumstances take your hands out of your pockets (even though you have gloves on), at risk of losing a digit
• You almost run an old couple off the sidewalk because they are walking way too slow
• You wear your ski jacket with the hood up, even though you already have a hat on, and you know you can't really see the oncoming traffic because you have no peripheral vision
• You don't care if you look like a crazy, fast-walking eskimo
• You keep your hat, gloves, and scarf on during the entire 25 minute ride to work, when you would normally take them off
• It's been 10 hours since you've been outside, and your hands are still cold
• For once, you are actually dreading leaving work in the morning

Better Late Than Never

I have been meaning to post about the weekend... However, now that it's Wednesday morning, and I have nothing better to do at work, I must not procrastinate any longer.

So we flew to Atlanta on Friday afternoon after I had worked Wednesday and Thursday nights. Our flight was delayed due to cold, rainy, slushy weather yet again, but we made it into town around 8pm. We then high-tailed it over to the Ten High for a fabulous Modern Skirts show. I was tired after getting limited sleep on Friday, but I'm really glad I went because three of my best buds came to the show too. It was great to catch up with them again. Plus, I loved hearing about how surprised the Skirt Boys were that my Favie showed up to play with them.

Friday was followed with a trip to good, old Athens, GA on Saturday afternoon. It's been five months since I've been there, so I was super happy to make the trip. I enjoyed another Modern Skirts show at the 40 Watt, and had even more time to catch up with my Skirts Crowd, including the other girls that "f**k the band." The 40 Watt show was even better than the Ten High show, and I think I was quoted as saying to John, in a drunken stupor, "That show was even better than Coldplay!"

Sunday we made it back to Marietta, where we went out for some decent Mexican food finally. (Mexicans don't live up here 'cause it's too damn cold.) The highlight of the evening was definitely watching Ln go from zero to wasted in around an hour, thanks to her 32 oz margarita.

Monday we flew back to the coldest place on Earth (it was 10 degrees yesterday when I went to work), but still managed to make it out of the apartment to grab some dinner and a couple of glasses of wine. I then proceeded to pass out at 2AM (early for me).

I guess I was more tired than I thought, because I pretty much slept until 4PM yesterday, when I finally crawled out of bed to go to work. And that brings us around to this morning. Now I must wake my poor patients up from their lovely sleepy time since it is 6AM, and it's time to give more meds.

The End.