Little Birds

No one reads this blog but me. And I don't read it, at least not more than the sentence preceding the one I'm typing right now. There's something sort of lovely about this, but also something sort of lonely.

Talen is back from Brooklyn. I didn't ask him why... or what happened...he just gave me a hug and asked me "#3? With raisin toast?"

I didn't even know I missed him.

Wow, I'm lonely.

Today I got sent home on call (hooray). It's funny, you know, the hospital forgot to put my overtime in my last paycheck (nice) and that was a loss of something like $2500--and I am facing the last three days of the month with exactly 92 cents in my checking account--and $11.88 in outstanding checks--and I'd still rather have the time. Money be damned. You can never get a day back.

I'm worried about my patient, though. A little old lady. I've been taking care of her for the last month. Little old ladies always get under my skin. Farmer's lung. She has a year to live.
Husband's a trucker. He just loves her, loves her. She's tiny and funny and cranky. True what my grandmother said--no one loves you for being easy. She's getting stronger. I told them not to accept this prognosis--I think if she got home and got happy she might live a lot longer. I don't know how to be kind to people, really. I get so scared and stiff. How do you be as good to people as they deserve without visiting your own crap on them? Without your ego and your need for approval tainting your interactions?

No one will ever love me that way. I want it too much.

Wiz loves her, too. He's usually really hard assed with patients--good--but kind of hard. But he treats her like a little child. He picked her up in his arms to move her to the chair and called her 'pumpkin.' Sometimes, I really love Wiz. And sometimes he's just repulsive, like when he's walking around with shit on his scrubs and eating graham crackers off the ICU floor just to gross me out. "Ummm--nothing like the taste of acinetobacter in the morning...breakfast of champions..."

She apparently takes in strays--wild animals find their way to her door, her family tells me. I was running with Lilly in the cool spring twilight, thinking about this, when I noticed a bird sitting at the side of the road. It didn't fly off as we ran by it.
"Do you think it's sick?" Lilly asked.
It was a sparrow. A girl sparrow. I couldn't see anything wrong with her, but her head looked a little funny, and when I put my hand next to her, she hopped onto my finger. I cupped my hand around her and stood up. The sparrow remained on my finger, peeping and trembling.
We began to walk home. I felt strangely gifted, as if I were holding a star instead of a bird, or as if the trembling hand of an ancient god was holding mine, some rare faery spirit, reaching out from their world. Everything seemed to still and come into an almost painful focus, the way it does sometimes when you are making love with someone you really love. Lilly ran on ahead back to the house to get a box. I kept walking with the little bird cupped in my hand.
As I passed under my neighbor's big pine tree--funny how some trees somehow have their own little world around them, isn't it? I mean, I'm walking on the chattahoochee in my street, past the magnolias and crabapples and forsythia, and then I'm under this pine, and all the sudden, there's this green shadow and sense of the black forest, and I'm thinking--wow--six feet of a completely different planet under this tree--and the sparrow suddenly takes flight, as if she could do it all along, and flies up into the pine.
Thinking she might be sick and fall out of the tree, I stood there underneath it, looking up into the dense green branches for the bird. I could hear her, but I couldn't see her. Lilly found me this way, when she came running back with the shoebox.
"What are you doing?"
I told her, not taking me gaze from the tree, still looking up. "I'm just waiting to see if she's okay."
Then a big splat of bird poop hit me on the shoulder.
Deadpan, Lilly says:"I think she's probably okay."
"Right."
I can't believe how quickly things can go from the sublime to Three Stooges in this world.
I told my patient this story, thinking she'd laugh, but she just looked at me and started weeping inconsolably.
Then, after about 5 minutes, she held out her little club fingered hands and mimed squishing the bird. She shood a finger at me as if to say, "That's what you should have done."
There and back again.
That's my 1/2 hour.

Apples

Mondays.
I worked. 4th day in a row. The census was so low in November that I got no overtime (we get paid the month after)--but the good news is I'd been sticking a little extra in my mortgage account here and there--and actually ended up saving enough to skip my mortgage payment this month! I guess that's what they mean about not living paycheck to paycheck. What an interesting idea.
A storm was coming in, we went from room to room covering our patients with blankets and moving them away from the windows. The sky got dark and the air smelled heavy, like rain, even inside the unit and more than ever I had the sense that we were on a spaceship, our little twilight ship, steering it through. That's what I am...the captain of twilight. Storms get me a little agitated--I went through Hurricane Andrew. I read an article in the Miami Herald about a year after that describing post traumatic stress syndrome--it essentially said that the whole city was suffering from it. As if we needed to be any crazier down there! Both our attending and our fellow are combat vets--Viet Nam and the first Gulf War, and Johnson, that old dragon, was stalking around giving poor little Baggins hell. Humiliating him in front of the unit. I thought Baggins was going to cry. Something must be wrong somewhere else, because I've never seen him so upset. He was speaking in this very calm, quiet, fuzzy voice, as if he were choking.
We have a teenager in the unit--well, we have a lot of teens in the unit. Scares the hell out of me. And one of them is double vented and very touch and go and a bronchoscopy was scheduled for 1300, but RT didn't show up. Fat Alice was our respiratory tech and she must have been having troubles at home, too, because she screwed up all day--missed my OR transport, didn't respond to pages, forgot labs...and she never does this...so it was really her fault, but Johnson just went on and on...and Baggins is going all military, clasping his hands behind his back and standing there like a sailor, the wide white dented scar that cleaves his cropped head from crown to occiput looking even whiter, because he's turning red. So I just walked up in the middle of it and handed him an apple. (I always carry a bag of organic granny smith apples--do you know they are the only apples that don't feed yeast?).
Baggins looks at me like I'm nuts.
"An apple a day keeps the doctor away." I say. Then I go back into my patient's room.
The pod just dissolves in laughter.
Tirade over.
I mean really, Johnson can't do that to our Fellow, in front of staff and patient's families. It will destroy their sense of trust and it's completely inappropriate.
Apples have gotten me into a lot of trouble. I guess, if you subscribe to the Judeo-Christian world view, they've gotten us all into a lot of trouble.
One time, I threw one. And it changed my life.
I did this when I was a freshman at Dartmouth. But that's another story, and that's my 1/2 hour.