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I didn't know until nursing school that urine is filtered out of the blood.  It still seems slightly counterintuitive to me.  When you drink all that water or beer or whatever and have to keep heading to the bathroom, it makes more sense that the excess fluid just goes from your stomach right to your bladder.  seems inefficient for it to get added to the blood only to be filtered out.  But that's indeed what happens.  It can be easy to slip into thinking of the body as a really complex machine when you work at this job, which in some sense it is.  Some nights i feel like i'm a plumber, or an engineer at a boiler plant, because all i seem to be doing is managing fluid and pressure levels.  You really begin to appreciate what an amazing degree of self regulation our bodies are doing all the time when you try to regulate the system of someone where things aren't working like they should.  My patient the last couple nights has kept swinging between having too much fluid on board and not having enough and it's a bitch to find the right balance, because there are all these other factors that go into it, like where the fluids are going and what solids they are taking with them. 

Hospitals in the middle of the night have this reputation as being strange creepy places, which indeed they are, but when you work here it mostly becomes just the place you work.  Little things make it weird, like having VH1 classics on with the sound off and looking up while you are doing your job seeing these images that remind you of highschool and how removed that reality was from what you are doing now.  In this quiet room with a somnolent sick person who you may only see for a few days of their life but you have this intimate relationship with.  More intimate for the patient in the sense that they are the one exposed, but in a weird way i feel exposed as well.  I'm the one in there remembering my past, associating in my head, while the person in the bed shares the space with me.  At three oclock in the morning daydreams become nightdreams even if we're not sleeping, and there is a fundamental difference.  I remember going through a phase in my early twenties where i would stay up all night simply because, as henry rollins once said, "sleep deprivation makes everything really neat."  And staying awake would be this activity in itself.  Then there were the all nighters when i was working in video production where you'd get so fucking bleary eyed from sitting in front of the video monitor and all you could think of was bed and wanting the fucking project to be over.  Now it's just part of my job, and i don't give it much thought, unless i haven't been able to sleep during the day for some reason and then i dread having to stay up, but pretty much the same way i'd dread going into work in the morning if i hadn't slept the night before.  I can only hope i retain my ability to shift back and forth between days and nights, because when i'm not working i'm usually in bed pretty early and my son has me up sometime around dawn so it's a total reversal.  I've read that you are supposed to figure out whether you are an owl or a lark and then you can organize your life to take advantage of your natural proclivity.  I don't know if i have a natural proclivity anymore.  Last night on my break I'd settled in and was in the drifting off phase when there was this noise like a sheet of plastic being slapped against the side of my car.  At first i thought someone had thrown something, then when it happened again i realized it must be the the sound of the water from the sprinklers splashing against my windows.  It stopped after maybe five or six times and i started drifting again when i heard a whole lot of voices nearby.  No big deal, even at four in the morning revelers occasionally walk by my car, i do work at a university hospital after all.  Only this time they decided that rather than going home they'd move the party to the sidewalk.  They proceeded to stay there shouting their enjoyment at one another for about a half an hour.  Did i mention they were speaking Farsi?  I never did get to sleep, just lay there still while revelry went on around me in a foreign toungue.  And you know, it wasn't so bad.  I couldn't understand them so I didn't have to follow their conversation, and I found myself grateful to be quiet in my car and not out their making noise with those guys.  Go figure. 

Trying not to overthink things here, just snatch what chunks of time i can manage and type away.  Someone at work was describing the new hospital a few days ago as totally patient centered.  Which sounds like a good thing and to a certain extent it is, except when it excludes the staff.  i guess the new business model for hospitals is to treat them like businesses with customers, and cater to them in that way.  Again, that's great up to a point and the new hospital is so much nicer for the pateints and their families.  Visiting hours are 24 hours a day and every room is a single and has a flat screen TV and reclining chairs that lay out so family members can stay with their loved ones.  that's all well and good. . . except when you can't do your job because there are always people around the bedside or the families spend their time at the bedside fighting with each other and stressing the patient out.  It's easy to forget that some of these people may not want their families around.  Which we respect if they are able to tell us that but sometimes they aren't.  There are definitely times where it makes my job easier having family around in the middle of the night because they are able to calm patient's down when they get squirrley and start hallucinating that they are up in a tree collecting nuts and they need to scamper around to new branches. 

All this stuff would be no big deal if it didn't seem like they'd forgotten to ask any nurses what they needed in a workspace.  Like equipment designed in such a way that it wasn't a total pain in the ass to use and get to and navigate.  I know there's going to be kinks to work out in any new environment but there are so many problems here that could have been avoided. 

Ugh, this is turning into one of those posts where work gets bitched about isn't it?  That's pretty damn boring.  So how about i talk about something they got right, which is finally getting more than three cable channels, unlike the old hospital.  I mean, you're stuck in bed sick, what the hell else are you supposed to do.  It's like the only time where you can watch television all day and not feel guilty about it.  And I have to say if my patient is not conscious i like being able to have VH1 classics playing in the room when i go in there.  Does subjecting sick people to eighties music make me a bad person?  Probably.  But it can get awfully boring when you have a bunch of mundane tasks to do like changing IV tubing, and it's nice to have a little entertainment in the background.  I don't listen to eighties music in general and I don't have cable at home, but i did watch a sick amount of MTV back in the day so there is a certain pleasant nostalgia to some of these videos.  Let's go crazy was on just a minute ago when i went in there and earlier they played Strength by the alarm, which definitely took me back.  Man, that was one earnest band.  Whcih appealed to me mightily at the time. 

Not much time before i head off to my car for my early morning slumber.  First I set my cellphone alarm for five minutes before i have to be back to work, then i take my shoes off.  One blanket gets tucked up under my feet and pulled up over my legs.  Then i've got one blanked i've folded into a long narrow strip that i wrap around my head and over my eyes, the back tucks nicely between my neck and the space underneath the headrest.  Depending on the temperature, a final blanket might get put over my head.  If i'm lucky i've got a good book on tape to listen to, but at the moment i don't, so it's either NPR or sports talk radio, if NPR is too depressing.  I usually listen for five or ten minutes before using my toe to turn the radio off and hopefully off i drift.  I read an article about the land between sleep and waking tonight that i liked.  I thought i'd saved it, but i didn't, anyway it was in the latest london review of books.  There's something a bit masochistic reading about sleep at two oclock in the morning in a hospital, but i couldn't help myself.  Each time i spend the day sleeping after work, the day's sleep seems to take on its own personality.  Last week was on the cranky side.  It seems like every three or four months i have a few days where my body is like "what the fuck, why am i being forced to stay up at night and sleep during the day?"  My body then decides to encourage me to sleep at the proper time by not allowing me to sleep during the day, or at least not very well.  I wake up at least once an hour, and never really get all the way back to sleep, i just lay there in a semi delirium, but not delirous enough to be fun, just enough to keep me awake.  Today was better than a couple days ago, even though I left the phone in the room and it woke me up at noon, then the fire alarm went off at 2 because K was drying off the cast iron pan on the stove and it had the head under it a little too long.  I've done the same thing way too many times myself.  Anyway, i figured i wouldn't be able to get back to sleep after two but lo and behold i did, and the experience was so pleasant, like sliding slowly down a gentle incline into the water.  It felt like it took a long time, long enough that i was surprised at how rested i felt when the alarm woke me up around 4.  OK, it's a good thing my break is almost here because i can't stop yawning.  Sorry if i'm having the same effect on you, dear reader.  That's all i've got tonight. 

No real idea of where to begin tonight but i've managed to carve a half hour or so out of a busy evening at work so I'll try to fill it up as best i can.  Felt good to post again a couple days ago, i like walking around knowing its up there whether anyone reads it or not.  Surprised i managed to make it here tonight, I thought i would end up running all night.  Before we start our shift we sit around the break room and chitchat, (well, i've usually got my nose in a book) until the charge nurse from the day shift comes in and does what they call the huddle where we get updated on anything we need to know about that happened during the day or might be happening that night; super sick patient, someone coming back from surgery, that sort of thing.  Then they post a little sheet with our assignment for that evening, which is always a crapshoot.  Unless, that is, you worked the night before, then you can be reasonable assured to get the same patient back again.  It looked like i was going to have a plum assignment tonight, this guy is on continuous dialysis which is why he's 1:1 (one patient, one nurse) but i've had him before and he's relatively easy.  Thought i might be able to do a long posting or at least catch up on my usual surfing.  Then this new guy walked up to the charge nurse and said he'd had my patient the night before so i got switched to his assignment (2 patients) and he got mine.  This guy is a travelling nurse, meaning he's only here for a three month assignment from someplace else then he's on his way.  We never used them on our unit at the old hospital, but the new place has a lot more beds so they've hired a few on.  They get paid more than us, and don't know the patients as well, so their can be a bit of resentment towards them, depending on the person.  They tend to get the tougher assignments, and while this guy was totally within his rights to ask for his patient back, I couldn't help but be a little annoyed.  He's only been here two days and already he has demands?  Seems like a nice guy, and i got over it, but if it was me, i would have kept my mouth shut and gone where they told me to go.  I'm just saying. 

Anyway, I've been busy enough that the night has gone by pretty quick and i haven't been running my ass off or anything and i'm managing to get a few sentences down here, so no harm i guess.  I did get a chance to go to powell's.com and check out a review of a book called "only love can break your heart" which is a bunch of essays and sounds good but the essay that sounded most interesting to me was one about where they did underground nuclear tests in the nevada desert.  They call doing underground tests "caging the dragon", which is a great phrase.  When i looked it up on google most of the articles that came up were about competition with china, which cracks me up.  Does everyone over 30 have a fascination with nuclear weapons?  More specifically, it's the manhattan project era up through the 50's that i find endlessly intriguing.  It all seems so unreal somehow, All these guys in suits standing around machines that looked like Jack kirby designed them.  Oppenheimer's quote about shiva the destroyer of worlds, the unearthly beauty of the mushroom cloud itself, unfolding gently up into the stratosphere.  The fact that they were unleashing the fundamental energies of the universe in the same state as las vegas, and that it was supposed to all be top secret.  The race to the hydrogen bomb, the fact that not only the city itself but it's whole history was obliterated when fat man detonated over hiroshima, it's name suddenly synonomous with unbridled destruction.  I remember reading the book hiroshima when i was in junior freaking high, and not being able to put it down even as i felt like i'd been ambushed, that it didn't seem like the sort of thing that should be stuck in the end of the little survey of literature we were reading in english class that semester. 

That's all i've got tonight, not sure there's any special significance to it, like i said, i feel like of course i'm enthralled by this stuff, isn't everyone of a certain age? 

A friend I hadn't talked to in nearly 20 years tracked me down through the magic of the web recently and it has gotten me to thinking about friendship and how we change and don't change and how i might express succinctly who I am now compared to who I was then.  Then Angela posted a comment on here, the first i've gotten since I went dark a few months ago and that was enough to get me back writing again, so thanks, A.  It seems like forever since i've posted, though it hasn't been that long, but there was a break before this break so it all runs together in my head.  In many ways i feel like i've finally been exhaling these last few months, after the two year lawsuit.  Stopped by the place the lawsuit was about a couple weeks ago and the former co owners had finally left, which warmed the cockles of my heart.  Of course they managed to convince the new owner to let them stay on in their unit of the duplex a couple months after the place was sold because they are cockroaches and just when you think you've stamped them out they flip over and scurry to their den.  But no, this time they were really gone, i know because the new owner walked up just as i was checking out the place and told me. 

Anyway, I'm still not ready to get into the whole lawsuit yet, I'll have to warm up to that one, but it does feel like there is some closure on the situation.  Which gets me back to how and if we change over the years.  I mean, these people were my wife's friends when she bought the place with them but they turned out to be anything but.  For awhile it seemed like they were changing before our eyes, but in hindsight it turns out they were the same people they'd always been, it's just that the relationship had changed.  My wife hadn't known them more than a year or two before they bought the property together and during that time she was helping them out a lot, with babysitting and such, because she liked them and they needed the help.  And these people were wonderful friends as long as you were doing what they wanted you to do.  But as soon as my wife started trying to change the dynamic and move on to a new phase in the relationship, the trouble started right away.  They quickly morphed from good friends into the most insidious manipulative fuckers who would do and say anything to get what they wanted.  What made their endles browbeating and guilt tripping even more gross was the fact that they always couched their demands in terms of how great it would be for YOU if you did what they wanted. 

I wasn't going to start into the lawsuit rant but it's hard to stop once i get started.  Anyway, my point is that what looked like a change in them was in fact just the unearthing of something that was there all along, waiting for the right conditions to begin festering. 

What has really struck me in my short correspondence with my long lost friend, H, is how much he sounds exactly like the dude he was twenty years ago.  No, that's not it, it's not like he still seems like a 19 year old in arrested development, if anything it sounds like he's gone through some serious shit and grown immensely from the experience.  But the voice that comes through in his writing, the sense of humor, the stuff that made him so uniquely him, is all still right there.  Maybe i shouldn't be surprised, i'd probably see the same things in most of my friends under the same circumstances.  But it's been SO long since were last in touch it's all in such bright relief.  It feels like the last twenty years have changed me quite a bit, but i imagine i still sound like me to the people who knew me back then.  i'll have to ask him.  Maybe i have a little different perspective on it because I've always been a bit of a chameleon, picking up mannaerisms from the people around me that i think i've gone through a lot of shifts in that time.  Well, i don't do that so much anymore, but it used to be a big part of me.  As a sometime actor, the idea of identity has always fascinated and puzzled me.  I guess it fascinates a lot of non actor types too, but I guess i've always felt a little shaky about my identity.  Though thinking about it now, i feel on more solid ground than i ever have before in terms of who i am.  Still, there is always that sneaking suspicion that the ground beneath my feet might not be as solid as it seems.  And I think everyone wonders how they would react in extreme circumstances when we hear stories about people in extraordinary circumstances.  My job allows me to observe how people (including myself) behave in really high stress situations, like when you are trying to keep a patient from dying.  And i wonder how much that tells you about what kind of person they are the rest of the time. 

Part of my reasoning behind being less than forthcoming about my personal life in this forum has been because of the lawsuit I've been involved in for the last couple years.  I'm sure i'll write about it at length in the future, but the short version is that my wife bought a duplex with some friends of hers about nine years ago and they turned out to be not so much friends as greedy, conniving cockroaches.  We've spent the last two years or so trying to get them to agree to sell the place (which we'd left two years ago because they'd made the living situation unlivable).  They did everything they could think of (including lying through their teeth repeatedly) to make it cost so much to put the property on the market that we would eventually cave and just sell to them.  This continued a pattern they'd established while we lived there of resorting to any means necessary to get what they wanted and just wearing you down until finally you would give in just to shut them the fuck up.  Well, we stuck it out, and while my wife's choice of business partners wasn't so hot, her eye for property was spot on.  In spite of having to read about the housing market crashing around our ears for the last year or so, the place sold for a pretty penny.  A good portion of which went to our attorney, but we still managed to come out ahead.  I can't begin to express my relief. 

Dillard also points to the current fad for "detoxing" the body by regularly getting high colonics as an obsessively unhealthy one. "This is a manifestation that a part of you is dirty," he says. "The colon has been around million of years and the wisdom of the colon predates us. This notion that we can somehow always intervene in some way so we can be intellectually or psychically or physiologically superior to this part of the body is kind of foolish."

Pulled this quote from an article on salon http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/03/12/poo/ about the latest health obsession/craze: poop.  That's right folks, seems doctor whatshisname on oprah did a show about it and there is some bestselling book out and now everyone who's anyone is peering into the toilet bowl to see what their butthole hath wrought.  Now nobody loves settling down on the porcelain with a good comic book and unwinding,  Those touting the benefits of shit staring, extoll it as a tool to let us know we need to be eating more fiber.  Well no shit (sorry about that one).  Seems to me that information is fairly available and has been for some time.  It just seems like one more thing for people to stress about, which is not going to help the quality of their bowel movements.  I know there is a long tradition in many cultures of using the stool to diagnose what's ailing people, but this is like a joke:  We are so self obsessed and scared of the world that we would rather look at our own excrement than look around us. 

Anyway, there were a couple things i liked about the above quotation.  I like that it slams colonics, which may not be a big deal everywhere, but let me tell you, they are a big deal in LA.  As someone who deals with people's digestive systems and their products as a regular part of his job, i am most appreciative to have a relatively well functioning gut.  I'm not at all freaked out by enemas, I just find the idea of them as some sort of panacea that's going to "clean out your system" absurd.  If your constipated and need a one time fix, fine, god bless. 

Just read a post on the novelist robin hobb's website about how having a blog is like attaching yourself to a vampire because instead of writing you blog and read blogs and write to people and read what they write to you and write them back instead of working on your real writing.  Good thing for me I don't do any real writing so i don't have to feel quilty about blogging.  Hopefully one day I'll have something to feel guilty about.  And I do try to not just write about what i had for dinner last night and my friends are saying about my other friends.  It may not be any less boring to read ancient stories or musings on history or philosophy or whatever else i write about on here.  But i do like to believe that it helps keep the writer wheels in my head a little more greased, makes me work just a bit harder to put something down.  My job is also one that provides me ample material besides the usual cubicle chatter, and I often required to go through some serious circumlocutions to write about what happens here in a way that respects people's privacy, which is also good practice, i hope. 

Speaking of which, when I got report on my two patients tonight i was told that they were both kept up all night last night because they said it was too loud.  Which is certainly possible, though i doubt that the one patient actually saw a doctor with no legs and one eye racing around in a wheelchair with a syringe in his hand.  I can't totally rule it out of course, since i wasn't here, but i've never seen anyone fitting that description in this hospital.  Still, hospitals are weird places, so you never know. . . Anyway, that patient transferred out and the other one has been sleeping for a couple hours and it's still early in the shift.  I'm standing guard trying to enforce quiet time.  I think i talked a few posts ago about how in the new hospital we aren't going to have the same camaraderie because we won't all be in the same central room with just curtains separating the patients, but I'm definitely glad for the patients.  I'm guessing our patients will do a lot less hallucinating and a lot more sleeping, at least i hope so. 

I suppose it's about time i added to the list of eulogies sprouting up on the web for the dear departed Gary Gygax.  Well, not a eulogy so much, never having met the man, but a reminiscence of the many hours spent in basements pretending to be wizards and warriors and thieves in the world he bequeathed to us in Dungeons and Dragons. 

I must have been only eight or nine when my uncle showed me the the small stapled rule books for the original dungeons and dragons.  I can still see the illustration of a beholder on the cover: a scaly globe with a fanged mouth and enormous eye in its center.  multiple small stalks with more eyes emanated from the top of  the creature.  Seems like it might be scary stuff to most 8 year olds but i remember being immediately captivated.  There were three little books with minimal illustrations, and i devoured them, already imagining myself as a theif sneaking around the fortress in the adventure described in the dungeon masters book.  My uncle passed the books on to me pretty quickly, he was ten years older than me and by that point, in spite of being a nerd, had the distractions of girls, cars and drugs filling up his free time.  It's funny to think of how young me and my friends got hooked.  A lot of the stuff i've read on the internet, most guys (and it was almost always guys) started playing in junior high at the earliest, but I can remember getting together with my friends as early as 4th or 5th grade at the local public library to start exploring dungeons. 

There is an algorithm chart in the latest NYTimes about D&D geekdom and where it led you depending on what conditions were met.  I'd link to it but i'm not that motivated or netsavvy.  Which is a division that showed up early, those of us gamers who were drawn to computers and those that weren't.  In the 90's i remember regretting i hadn't been more motivated in the computer programming class i took the summer before 8th grade.  It seemed like if i had just stuck with it i would have ended up a millionaire before 30.  I spent plenty of time at the library or in my room reading, but I also loved to get out in the woods with my dog and run around and pretend to be a ranger, and have stick fights with my friends.  I was just never that into technology, which is one of the reasons i dug the medieval setting of D&D, though i loved star wars as much as the next nerd. 

I started down the D&D road in grade school but it was in junior high that i really sunk into that world.  Tom and I went to grade school together and were the only real hardcore D&D players there, but in Junior high we met chris and had the minimum number of players neccessary to really have fun and establish some continuity.  That was also when i met scott, though he went to a different junior high.  There was a local hobby shop (does such a thing even exist anymore) that sold everything from model airplanes to games to i don't even remember what the hell else they sold.  it was called HisnHers Hobbies, and the owners were this sallow looking couple that i remember always sniping at one another.  i think the shop closed when they got a divorce.  But up until then they let us set up a table in the back where we could game and meet other like minded dorks and of course we bought the latest module for D&D at their store so i guess it was worthwile to them, though now that i think about it, they must have lost as much business as they gained just from the odor emanating from that table of unwashed 13 year olds in the back.  The shop was next to the local hot dog joint and right across from the local park where we would take our hot dogs and fries (when i could scam enough money to afford them) to the park for a much needed fresh air break after hours spent with pencils and dice and graph paper imagining ourselves traipsing through trap and monster laden dungeons.   Graph paper was the best for character sheets because you could organize things into different columns more easily to keep track of spells, magic items, bonuses, etc.  Man, i remember arguing with one another over who would get to buy the latest adventure, or "module" that came into the store.  Not that we had much money, but you always seemed to be able to scrape five or ten bucks together from somewhere.  i think it was easier in the summer when there were lawns to mow.  Chris, Tom and i were all aspiring fantasy artists and we worshipped the guys who illustrated the modules and the dragon magazine.  We each picked our favorite, mine being Bill Willingham, who incidentally has gone on to be a kick ass writer and illustrator in other genres.  I used to draw on everything, warriors, swords, dragons.  Gems.  We went through a period where we drew god knows how many gem encrused weapons on any square peice of blank page.  Not the thing to do if you are looking to avoid being harrassed by the other kids in school, incidentally. 

Dungeon Master was by far the hardest and most important job in any gaming group, and none of us wanted to do it for an extended period of time, it was too much work, and playing was too much fun.  So it rotated, and we were always envious of those groups we'd read about with a dedicated DM and campaigns that went on for years with the same characters in the same world.  We switched characters around a lot, and we were usually too impatient to start at first level like you were supposed to.  We depended on the modules to provide us new adventures rather than creating them ourselves, though we would embellish.  And i remember devouring those modules like novels, imagining what i would do in them as a player, what i might say, how i would solve puzzles.  The window of D&D was pretty small, like ten or fifteen years before computer games mostly took over, but i feel like it really stimulated my imagination and gave us not popular guys something to do together and obsess on that didn't involve sports. 

Freshman year in highschool we joined the wargamers club and met Seth and Jim, who expanded our little gaming group.  Which was good, since i got into a fight with scott and Tom had really started irritating the rest of us.  Seth, who ended up being a writer, was actually interested in being a DM, and he was good at it, though it took him a few years to really grow into the role.  There were a lot more girls to talk about and observe from afar in highschool, and sometime in sophomore year I decided i liked hanging with the burnouts but we still spent a lot of time in Chris' basement rolling dice, drinking pepsi and eating pizza.  By the time junior year rolled around I'd actually started talking to a few girls, and fully embraced the burnout lifestyle, which didn't leave a lot of time for gaming.  Senior year I'd mostly left drugs behind but I was trying to get my shit together to graduate and playing in a band.  The year after highschool was probably the most fun I had gaming.  We'd discovered a new game, Palladium, which was the same thing, but with better rules, and our folks didn't hassle us if we wanted to stay up until five in the morning playing it.  Chris and I didn't go away to college and seth was a year behind us so he was a senior in highschool.  He'd become confindent as a DM, and we had a good run there with the same sustained characters in the same world and there was a richness, almost like adding layers to a good story.  My character was a mind mage, someone with psychic powers, which was a blast to play and allowed for a lot of creativity, since he wasn't an offensive juggernaut, you had to be a little more clever in the way you dealt with situations.  My proudest moment was at the end of a long and challenging adventure when i was able to escape certain dismemberment by a demon through employing illusions to trick him into thinking he was getting the better end of a bargain with me and making my escape. 

Then, college, thanks to Seth cluing me into a scholarship opportunity, and my gaming career was more or less over.  Chris still plays, and I still quite enjoy borrowing the latest stuff from him when i visit where i grew up.  He plays the computer versions of role playing games too, but still digs the old school pen and paper versions, which i appreciate.  Much has been said on the net already about how without D&D you wouldn't have had the computer gaming industry exploding like it did, since it influenced pretty much all the people who created computer games.  The idea of open ended role playing was really something quite revolutionary in its way.  Not new under the sun certainly, but the incarnation gary gygax and pals came up with was.  You could argue that our time would have been better spent out actually doing things rather than pretending to do them, and there is maybe some validity to that.  But the fact is, we did do things, and it wasn't like if D&D wasn't around we would have been out socializing.  that wasn't going to happen, regardless.  i'd like to think it helped us excersise our brains and imagine ourselves as capable of great feats and sly cons.  And damn, it could really be fun. 

So rest in peace, Gary Gygax, I wouldn't be the person I am today without your creation. 

My jaw hurts.  I've been struggling to stop surfing and start writing and that seems as good a place as any to begin.  I'm in our four bed ancillary unit tonight and my patient, who is right behind me, is making noises like a zombie out of a george romero movie.  He's breathing through a tracheostomy and there is an air leak and it's not worth going into a more detailed explanation except to say that it doesn't affect his breathing, it just makes him sound like a zombie who is going to rise up and stagger toward me while i sit here blithely blogging away.  Otherwise, there's not much going on here tonight.  I have a suspicion that my sore jaw has to do with a filling I got a few weeks ago.  i think it's thrown of my bite, which is a little bit wopperjawed to begin with.  it's been going on for a couple weeks now on and off.  I'm hoping it's just stress and i don't have to go in and get my jaw wired shut or some such.  Maybe a few nights up here where it's quiet will improve my condition, my last couple shifts at work i left feeling like i'd just finished fifteen rounds in the ring.  One night, i did actually get kicked by a patient.  He'd been getting progressively more agitated and combative as the night went on, and around six in the morning he kicked me in the chest from his bed.  It didn't hurt, really, but i wasn't happy about it either.  As I was explaining to him that it was not OK to kick me, he tried to kick me again and I was able to intercept his foot and put his leg back in the bed.  I was pretty hot by that point, especially after dealing with this guy all night, but i was proud of myself for maintaining my self control, even as my reflexes took over.  The charge nurse raced over and talked to the patient and told me to walk away, which i did.  Later on, she told when she saw the look on my face when he kicked me the second time she thought i was going to break his leg.  it's weird to have moments like that at your job, especially when your job ostensibly inovles helping to heal people.  Now, it helps to know that our patients are going through all kinds of messed up brain chemistry stuff between the lack of sleep and various medications and their medical conditions, but it still wears on you to get abused for twelve hours.  Fortunately, i don't have many nights like that, but I do feel like keeping my cool is part of my job, and something i can do to help my patients.  The next night i got a transfer in from another hospital who was really sick, and that was an exhausting night in a very different way, so I'm glad to have a little peace and quiet, even if it is interrupted by zombielike grunts and the fear that a creature of the nght might be shambling up behind me to eat my brain. 

Just finished a most kick ass book, Dragons of Babel.  It's down there in my books section.  it's the kind of book i'd like to write, which is quite inspiring.  I've read lots of books i liked, but not that many where I read them and thought, yeah, this is the sort of thing that not only would like to do, but I feel like i could do.  I guess it's a combination of feeling like i share something of the author's vision and that the world they've created inspires a desire in me to take a crack at telling some stories that take place there.  It's hard to describe the world of Dragons of Babel in a way that does it justice.  It's a world where magic and technology operate side by side, with figures of legend and literature populating it.  What's cool is there is nothing gimmicky about the way the author presents things, which could easily happen.  A local ward boss, who also happens to be a haint (a sort of ghost) seems just as real as an alderman you might see on The Wire.  The spiritual, carnal and banal all exist side by side, just like in the real world, and i laughed out loud more than once when a centaur or a dwarf made some crass comment that brought a fantastic situation right back down to earth.  I think that's enough gushing, I just hope i can file away the inspiration and make some use of it one of these days soon.