Hark Hark...

The tornado sirens are going off. It is exactly noon in Paloma. The sirens are tested every Wednesday. At the same time, all dogs in the city lose their minds. Mine are no exception, they are howling and whimpering along with every other dog in the neighborhood.

I spent the morning staving off squalor. Lilly, on the way to school, said, "I was thinking--if we could just do the laundry and the dishes and keep the bathroom clean, the rest would probably take care of itself." A lightbulb went off. Cleaning is not something you do, clean is something you are. So I put in about 4 hours achieving laundry, dish, and bathroom stasis--picked up all the clothes in the house, sorted them, started churning them through the machine. Did the same with the dishes, scrubbed down the bathroom. And here I am. Now, though, I'm wondering it was all a way to avoid doing my classwork, which I am two days late with.

I got a pleasant email from the group leader with the subtext--"where the hell are you?"
I don't know...I'll pick up the threads today. Took 2 days off over the weekend--then came back Monday and discovered I was in charge. That keeps happening. Wiz has mysteriously called in for 4 days. "Family trouble." he said curtly. It's well established that whenever I charge, everything goes to hell. Not that I run things poorly (I'm not stellar, but I'm not awful, either) but if anything can go wrong it will. Arteries will start spurting blood, unannounced gunshot wounds will come rolling through the door. Staff will accidentally cut themselves with razors, codes right and left (one day we actually used up all the defibrillator pads on my shift). And everyone, but everyone will get diarrhea at the same time. And then there'll be the weird things that happen when I charge--for example, last week, the TV in room 3 just exploded--on its own. White burst of light, the sound of breaking glass and smoke. We had to move all the patients from that side to the other side--that sort of thing.

Clara, our week-day unit clerk rolled in, saw it was me charging, and sighed. "I'm going to call ahead of time, and if you're charging, I'm going to call in sick." It was 0730.

"That's not fair, Clara. Nothing's happened yet. It was a quiet night."

"I'm giving it 45 minutes before the shit hits the fan." She says pleasantly. Clara is paralyzed from the waist down, is chronically ill with CHF, and is a single mother. She has the most beautiful, soothing voice. She should be on the radio. And she has this sort of even calm--this way of fielding craziness--that is something to see. She also has this folksy way of stating even the most unpleasant contentious things that makes them sound perfectly reasonable. She's magic.

My pager goes off.

"I guess I meant seconds." She says, "Here we go."

She was right. GSW to the head. Suicide. We couldn't get the family to understand how serious it was.

"Is he very sick?" the mother asks Marcy, on the phone.

"He shot himself in the head and he has no responses."

"Well, does that mean he's sick?"

That's my 1/2 hour.