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it isn't the most realistic show when it comes to actual events, and frankly, it pisses me off that there are never nurse protagonists..the scenarios are outrageous; there's way too much soap opera too much focus on sexual relationships that really don't happen in everyday hospital world...
But what the show does do is to bring into the public consciousness many of the issues of the very weird world in which I live.
I've worked in critical care for more than a quarter century. I have taken care of end stage cardiac patients, I've watched patients bleed out from alcoholic cirrhosis, and had to soak my shoes and my scrubs in Clorox to get rid of the stains; taken care of the most horrendous traumas, loved people who are dying hard over months or more, stuck on all the mechanical modes of you can imagine, with all the possible complications. It's what I do, what I go to work 3 days a week to do, spend 12 or 16 or more hours until I leave. I can promise you that what I find as normal in my work world is totally bizarre in yours.
I spent the last couple days caring for a 9 year old girl who was brain dead when she came to us after a horrendous fire out in the west part of our state. We were required, by law, by standard practice, to treat her, to do all the most invasive procedures, make her body work against all odds. And I spent two long shifts with a devastated family, and trying all my best to keep this basically dead child alive until we could declare her legally dead. I fell in love with her family, I will carry them in my memory, as I will the sense of caring for her dead body.
It is weird. Everything I do in my work world is weird.
It is normal in my world.
It is bigger than fiction. And sometimes fictional events on tv give us a sense of what is really real.
You might have gleaned elsewhere, or might be surprised by, or might not even care about.
1. I was one of the first women ever admitted to a well known Ivy League college in 1972. It sucked being a "first".
2. Then I became a biker chick. The range of human activities that can be managed on a moving motorcycle is amazing.
3. I live a very rich inner life that only a few of you know about. On the surface, I am very quiet, unthreatening and Clark-Kent-like, mild and unassuming.
4. I make many of my own clothes. Alas, I have a penchant for upholstery fabrics, so sometimes I look like a very small, mobile couch.
5. I learned to sail very young, and could single hand a 28 foot sloop-rig boat by the time I was 8.
6. I hate team sports, and those involving small, rapidly moving balls, don't play any sort of card games. But I was a competitive skier for some years, can handle most sorts of boats, walk for miles at a steady 4mph, and can beat 95% of people at Scrabble.
7. I drink French roast coffee. Lots of it, preferably cafe au lait.
8. I learned to read before I can remember, and taught my brother to read when I was 3+ and he just a year old. If I don't have a chance to read during a day, I become unglued.
9. I have no sense of proportion in my enthusiasms. As a result, I know a lot of obscure and perhaps useless things: how to make cheese from scratch, or make milk paint, or grow orchids from seed; how to plan and grow an historically correct herb and vegetable garden from 1750-1900, how to build a chicken coop, and what sorts of chickens are best for any given purpose; the connections between Beowulf, Cervantes Don Quixote, Chretien de Troyes and Tolkien. (And I've read the manuscripts in old English, Francais ancien.) I'm learning Icelandic, just because.
Construction on the other end of the duplex...and these gorgeous pieces of concrete are all set to turn into giant garden sculpture. We're planning on a walking labyrinth to the right, behind the parking area.
I've spent a life time making do, recreating, reupholstering, revising, taking apart clothes and remaking them, refinishing furniture, moving walls, windows, doors, cabinets; reimagining new uses for odd items and cast offs. I love second hand stores and yard sales and flea markets, any place a bargain can be had, a cast-off recycled.
I think this needs a big windchime hanging in the middle...
It's 70's and 80's every day, and cool at night. The open areas are silver green and chartreuse, tender colors against the earth-reds and browns of the hills. It's all the more poignant because it's so brief: it won't rain again much until fall. The garden inside the fence is green, because I mulch and water a little it every morning before the sun comes up. I have lilies practically bursting out of the ground, a little farm of parsley growing from seeds of last year's plants that were eaten by rabbit hordes. It's never very lush here, and I am constantly aware of the juxtaposition of human life and an environment that is sometimes marginal; yet one in which people have lived, and thrived, for centuries at the very least, by paying attention to balance.
Work got really busy again this week, full of stupid tragedy. No matter how long I've done this stuff, child abuse still hits me like a sucker-punch. I can mouth all the words about how people who hurt children must have been abused themselves, and I know intellectually there is a thread of truth there; but when I am helping to care for a 4 week old who very probably was smothered because she cried for too long late at night, and may not live (or worse, will live with profound damage), compassion is a thing I have to work for. The one thing that makes it possible is the extraordinary people with whom I work. Every one of us has somehow come together because we are capable of dissociating in the moment, doing the things we must to save a life, putting emotion aside temporarily. It's only afterwards that we mourn, rage, intellectualize, listen to each other, and then go home; and each of us in our own separate way tries to find meaning when we've been confronted yet again with the fact that this civilization thing is a very thin skin, easily disrupted. And we all come back again the next day. I believe it's worth it, always have, not least because I know that not every one can do this; I can, therefore I do. It's that simple. It's what I do, the rent I pay.
I've been puzzled by all the bits of white scattered along the median of I25 as I drive to work the last few days. I thought at first that it was litter, bits of trash blown off the highway by the great gusts of April winds. This morning I realized that it's cactus flowers I'm seeing, paper white and fragile, blooming on spiny opuntias surviving somehow in the unwatered dirt between cars racing at 80 miles an hour to elsewhere. There's balance for you.
(I was reminded of this the other night in a conversation with a friend who is struggling with a relationship in which he is told daily that everything is just fine if only he would express himself differently, have different friends, change his habits and his desires and himself.)
LET me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O no! it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come: Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
These vivid images have rested with me since I first read this Seamus Heaney piece. Grauballe Man, Tollund Man and Strange Fruit are each reflections on the discovery of neolithic bodies discovered in the peatbogs of the north, all likely sacrificial deaths. I have a series of drawings that are still in the works, but will likely become sculptures instead.... Heaney won the 1995 Nobel Prize for poetry, writes of the particulars of northern Ireland, the archaeology, the people, the politics. He made an incredible translation of Beowulf a few years ago.
The Grauballe Man
As if he had been poured in tar, he lies on a pillow of turf and seems to weep
the black river of himself. The grain of his wrists is like bog oak, the ball of his heel
like a basalt egg. His instep has shrunk cold as a swan’s foot or a wet swamp root.
His hips are the ridge and purse of a mussel, his spine an eel arrested under a glisten of mud.
The head lifts, the chin is a visor raised above the vent of his slashed throat
that has tanned and toughened. The cured wound opens inwards to a dark elderberry place.
Who will say ‘corpse’ to his vivid cast? Who will say ‘body’ to his opaque repose?
And his rusted hair, a mat unlikely as a foetus’s. I first saw his twisted face
in a photograph, a head and shoulder out of the peat, bruised like a forceps baby,
but now he lies perfected in my memory, down to the red horn of his nails,
hung in the scales with beauty and atrocity: with the Dying Gaul too strictly compassed
on his shield, with the actual weight of each hooded victim, slashed and dumped.
In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for those who would climb through the hole in the sky.
My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens.
For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.
The map must be of sand and can’t be read by ordinary light. It must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.
In the legend are instructions on the language of the land, how it was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it.
Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the altars of money. They best describe the detour from grace.
Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; the fog steals our children while we sleep.
Flowers of rage spring up in the depression. Monsters are born there of nuclear anger.
Trees of ashes wave good-bye to good-bye and the map appears to disappear.
We no longer know the names of the birds here, how to speak to them by their personal names.
Once we knew everything in this lush promise.
What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the map. Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leav- ing a trail of paper diapers, needles, and wasted blood.
An imperfect map will have to do, little one.
The place of entry is the sea of your mother’s blood, your father’s small death as he longs to know himself in another.
There is no exit.
The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine—a spiral on the road of knowledge.
You will travel through the membrane of death, smell cooking from the encampment where our relatives make a feast of fresh deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way.
They have never left us; we abandoned them for science.
And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world there will be no X, no guidebook with words you can carry.
You will have to navigate by your mother’s voice, renew the song she is singing.
Fresh courage glimmers from planets.
And lights the map printed with the blood of history, a map you will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns.
When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers where they entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us.
You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder.
A white deer will greet you when the last human climbs from the destruction.
Remember the hole of shame marking the act of abandoning our tribal grounds.
We were never perfect.
Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.
We might make them again, she said.
Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.
I find unreasonable joy in the flicker of rainbows across the ceiling and far wall from the prisms i remembered to hang in the east kitchen window last summer. Now that the light is angled low through the Russian olive just the other side of the window, the colours dance in rhythm to the branches in the wind outside.
Yesterday a small patient finally smiled at me after days of screaming whenever I came near. Maybe it was the string of tiny Christmas lights I had around my neck, or maybe he just knew on some pre-cognitive level that he was about to go home. No matter: the gummy grin of a 6 month old is hard to resist. It elicits a spark of joy that makes the rest of the day just a little easier.
I woke this morning to a small black and white face, big brown eyes staring into mine. All he wanted was to go out, but as soon as I opened my eyes, the feathery tail began to wag the dog...I like to think my responding makes him doggishly happy, and the sight of both little four-leggeds dancing about in clockwise circles always makes me laugh.
Sometimes I worry that I am not sufficiently serious, that ostrich-like, I refuse to obsess about the very real catastrophe of a government run wild, or the growing disparities between rich and poor, the real injustices all around me. Perhaps I ought to be out demonstrating or battling. But I know how destructive to me are the ranting and the inchoate anger, and ultimately how very little I accomplish when I drop into despair.
Small joys, and particular, but I persist in believing that paying attention to the littlest things can make a difference, and that if I have those minor epiphanies, and share them, they then become available on a larger scale.
Breathe, damn it! This is not your time to forget how. You won’t? Stubborn child! Well then, let me chant the instructions, syncopated by hand-delivered sighs. Air goes in and out. That’s the first verse. Blood goes round and round. The second. Oxygen is good. Third. See? Skim milk blue changed to pink again, the flatline to wiggles then organized grouplets of electricity.
Breathe now! In and out, this ocean of air is your new home, and this your task. Breathe, and you, too, will find a song to sing in days to come.
To link to this blog from blog posts/comments, use [blog Satori54], from anywhere else use http://personals.browardpalmbeach.com/blog/Satori54,
and to read it remotely use the feed.
