Seasonings

I began my countdown of the remainder of the semester about 5 weeks ago with the purchase of a 12-pack of Trader Joe's sponges. At the time, I conveniently noted to myself that if I changed the sponge every Friday, I could wash my way to the end of nursing school.

There are now 7 sponges left. I wore my purple scrubs for the last time EVER on Saturday. Want to give a person a great reason to enjoy taking off their clothes? Make them wear purple polyester scrubs for a year and see what happens. Celebrating the scrub shedding coincided with Kirsten's departure for flight attendant training in Orlando, Florida. Emily baked the incredible cheese-filled pumpkins shown above at bon voyage dinner so heavy that it threatened to keep her on the ground. I'm happy to report that Kirsten did make it there yesterday and she loves it so far. She informed me last night that the best part is her free hotel room, where she can spread out her toiletries ad lib.

It's pretty sad when an airport hotel room is more spacious than home, but I'm in the same boat. My place barely fits the two twin beds, let alone the two doubles in Kirsten's hotel room. And for that reason alone, I'm hoping the last seven sponges will disappear quickly, leaving me with bigger beds and better scrubs.

Won't You Be My Neighbor?

Ah, Mr. Rogers. Such sweet innocence. If only he could see my neighbors:



Tonight is the "last show" at CBGB's, but I can hardly believe the sea of cigarette butts and punk rock pants is over. What a strange sight to come home to. Without it though, I'm afraid the block will just be dirty.

Last Clinicals

Nine weeks left of classes. And clinicals. I don't think I will have to persuade anyone who has donned the purple scrubs and big white shoes to come to a scrub burning party on December 10th, but I have to admit, I've done some pretty good things in that blaspheme of a nursing outfit.

This semester, I have Saturday clinicals in a transplant center. Most of it has been spent in the ICU, with one patient assignment. Over and over, I am amazed at how it is possible to stay busier with one patient there than 3 or 4 patients out on the floor. The patients with new transplants have lists of medications that go on by the pages, many of which are entirely unfamiliar to me, so preparing and giving meds alone can take me a good part of the day. Vital signs are every two hours and nursing notes every hour, which adds up. Drainage tubes. The Jackson-Pratt, I love. It's like the turkey baster, the way you empty out the drainage and then squeeze it before reattaching so that it continues to suck out the...juices. I'm still a little frightened by T-tubes though. Two weeks ago one got detached and all the bile spilled on my patient's bed and gown and I thought she had exploded until I found the source of the brownish yellow liquid. Sutures and staples are not so scarey of anymore, which is good because the usual surgical procedure of a transplant is to cut in a pattern that looks like a giant Mercedes emblem without the circle around it. They even call it a Mercedes suture line. It must turn into a very impressive scar.

And that's the nice thing about the transplant ICU. Patients usually come in jaundiced and delerious and leave with a new liver and a cool scar. The outcome isn't always positive; sometimes an organ isn't available and they die waiting. It's really an amazing priviledge to work with several of the 6 ot 7 thousand yearly liver transplant patients in the U.S. And in purple scrubs too. I just looked it up, and there are roughly 18,000 people waiting for a liver transplant in the U.S. right now. Moral: hepatitis C is a big problem. And don't become an alcoholic either.

Sixes and Sevens

Today I rode the subway a lot. I usually like to maintain a question mark over my downtown reclusivity, and it had been awhile since I had left. I decided to get a job. Classes are pretty slow and I haven't been constructive enough with my free time to justify keeping all of it. I applied to four ads on the career website, and heard back from three. So I went to interview on the upper west side at a little pharmacy. I love pharmacies. The world has an order and a purpose inside the pharmacy. Then I left this orderly world and didn't realize I had left my i.d. with the pharmacist until I got home and needed it to get inside my dorm. What kind of order and purpose is there in that? On my way back uptown to retrieve it, two different egg-shaped women of probable midgit status fell over on me, one face first into my chest. Of course, that had to be the one that turned out to be angry at me instead of apologetic. Sometimes there is no way to hold yourself up and catch a humpty dumpty on the train.

Turnover

Does anyone else think of the beginning of the year as September instead of January? I always have. I used to attribute it to the school year starting in September, because when you're 8 or 13, the measurement of time or recalling the past seems to be by grade level. I mean, when I think of events like reading my first Salinger story, dying my hair dark, sneaking out of the house at night, singing a jazz choir solo...yeah I was a little lame...it was always in terms of 5th grade, 7th grade, 8th grade. Now I'm pretty sure I have reconfigured the calendar in my head because my birthday is at the end of August, which means I am just completely egocentric.

In any case, September is over, and for me that means that things are starting to move along from my imagined beginning point of an arbitrary parsing of time into years. Classes are all relaxed this term. Emily and I were reminiscing about classes at this time a year ago. Between our crazy Chinese professor of Fundamentals of Nursing, listing all the many ways we could fail, and our dominatrix Pathophysiology professor, belittling a student in front of the class for forgetting her pencil at an exam, we were quite scared. But they scared us for nothing. That was the worst of it. Now our main concern in school seems to be negotiating a better graduation party at the end of the term. And that's important. Fun is important. In fact, I think that will be my September New Year's resolution.