First Day Off

3 weeks now of keeping Tonks quiet. 5 more to go. She can only go outside and walk around 3 times a day for ten minutes at a time. When she does walk, she walks sideways, like a crab. It takes her a few minutes to get her backside in line with her front. I try to carry her around the house as much as possible because she hates the cage so much, but sometimes, I have to put her back in it. They say that golden lhasas are reincarnated dalai lamas. Not a bad way to come back, I guess.

Yesterday was my overtime shift. They gave me a student midway through it. Dumber than a post.
"Could you please turn on the lights?" I asked her. We were doing a dressing change.
"I don't know where the switch is," she said. "Sorry." The lights stayed off. She stood by the sink with her hands clasped behind her back.
Okay.
Call me crazy, but we're all Americans, right? And all the light switches here in America look pretty much the same, and ICU rooms are pretty small--so how much mental acumen does it take to scan four walls looking for the light switch? Christ, what does this woman do in hotels, sit there in the dark? Maybe she just carries a flashlight with her everywhere.
My patients were easy, but busy. One of them had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Not really an ICU patient, but he had had some respiratory distress on the floor and so had been taken up here for observation.
"Am I going to die?" he asked me.
"Not imminently." I said, heartlessly.
"What does 'imminently' mean?" he asked.
Sometimes, blessedly, you get a second chance to be human.
I pulled up a chair. "It means that you are doing really well up here." He was. He would get teary and strange sometimes (well, who wouldn't?) but he had a really great attitude and was willing to try anything we asked of him.
But you know, these talkers...these die-ers....they take up all your fucking time.
I didn't get home til 10.
Taco Bell. If you cut a trauma nurse open, you will find beans and cheese.

This morning, there was no milk of course, so no cafe con leche. The house was in shambles (it was perfect Friday night) and I started sobbing in the kitchen. It's garbage day, there are clothes all over the bathroom floor. I know my kids have a hard life, but couldn't they do a dish? I yelled, took away tv, car, and church.
Which is funny. I guess that's good about my kids--taking away church is a punishment. Huh.

So that was a lovely way to start the morning. I went to Ernie's, hoping to run into Soupy, our ME, because I wanted to talk to him about the girl we coded, but he sort of avoided my gaze. I wonder what's up?

But Staci was at the counter. I change most of the names in this blog and alter identities enough to make them fiction, I hope, but I'm going to keep Staci Roberts real, because she deserves to be famous, and she wouldn't mind being written about.

Staci is the best musician I know. She brilliant. Voice like butter, songs so startling and true you can't believe you don't already know them. She's a little bleary, a lot lost. When I met her ten years ago, she was 17 and living on the street. It was winter and she was sitting on a bench downtown with Pedro. Pedro was playing the trumpet and she was singing this song about the street she wrote called Simple Life. She had her guitar case open and was collecting change. She's not really pretty, she looks a lot like me. People often think we're sisters. Our voices are a lot alike: we've recorded together a couple times and you can't tell who's singing. Her voice is a lot richer and truer than mine is, though. I really need the mike, she never does. I handed her my tape and put a dollar in the case--I had just moved back and was looking for people to play with. She called 3 months later.

So we caught up. She'd actually been in the ICU a few weeks ago, the weekend I was gone. I hadn't even known she was there. Drunken car wreck, she'd been a passenger. Intubated, plastic surgery, tried to punch the anesthesiologist. The usual. She looked good, though.
"I'm just glad you're okay," I said.
"You just don't know what to do with me, do you?"
"I have no idea."
"I lost my brother," she said, "in the ambulance." Staci carried the ashes of her dead brother in a jar around her neck.
"I'm so sorry--do you want me to talk to security? See if they have them?"
"yeah, sure."
Talen brings me breakfast, without me even ordering it. "Did you hear," he asks, "I'm leaving."
I can't believe it. Talen's been at Ernie's forever.
"Where are you going?"
"New York. Brooklyn." He smiles. He looks so happy. "I'm going to be 40 next month. I can't stay at Ernie's my whole life."
"Yeah...your tattoos would all scrunch up together...it would be sad to watch..."
Ah...changes. He puts my gum on the counter this morning. In front of me on top of my check.