Day 25: Someone Who Fascinates You And Why

I'm fascinated by Eva Markvoort, an online friend that I have known for a few years now. Eva is a lot of things I'm not: she's one of those expansive, almost grandiose people who make you understand where magical realism comes from. Eva is so outgoing and generous, and so brightly colored - most photos of her show her with crayon-red hair and lips. She also wanted to be a theatre makeup artist and practiced by doing face-painting for children when she worked as a summer camp leader. Eva is open in a way that I'm not, that most of us are not. Not only on her blog www.65redroses.livejournal.com, but on camera; there is a documentary about Eva called 65_RedRoses about her wait to get new lungs as her own began to fail because of her cystic fibrosis.

The other thing that Eva is, which I am not, is dead.

Eva died almost exactly one year ago, on March 27th 2010. I can't believe it's been that long already, and unsurprisingly, I'm crying again writing this.

The documentary about Eva's wait for new lungs ended with her getting them. She went on to get to do many of the things she'd always wanted to do - run, travel further than a short distance away from her doctors and hospitals, meet other friends with cystic fibrosis in person. She broke up with her first love and met her second. She continued to raise money for CF research, and awareness of it and of organ donation. And then her body rejected her new lungs, slowly and in stages. And Eva shared that with the world as well. She blogged from her hospital room, which got covered in cards and letters from around the world from people who had seen the documentary or read her blog. I sent her a letter on stationary covered with vintage sewing patterns. She posted videos of herself and her family from the hospital. She was as open with her death as she was with her life.

One year later, I'm still fascinated by Eva. And I still miss her.

This is an image from her celebration of life program, from her blog www.65redroses.livejournal.com. 65 Roses is Cystic Fibrosis, the way a lot of little kids say it. When I was a nanny, the kids would sometimes watch Mr. Polly do his nebulizer and ask about it, or ask why he coughed so much, and I would explain about the Cystic Fibrosis and how kids get to call it 65 Roses. Eva chose red roses, and they suit her so well. Eva is missed.

Tooth Detective

For the first time in years and years, I have dental insurance! I'm going to get xrays and a checkup and all that good stuff early next month, which is awesome. And likely to cut down on the amount of wine I drink, because I mainly only drink when my wisdom teeth are turning my mouth into a hellhole and my neck and shoulders into painfully knotted rubber bands dipped in acid.

Hooray!

The only problem with this is that when I originally tried to have my wisdom teeth removed, I had a bit of trouble. I was under IV sedation (having never had so much as a cavity filled, the dentist thought I should probably be unconscious for the procedure) and had an allergic reaction to the sedative. Blood pressure, heart rate, respiration all dropped rapidly and I began to turn blue. They stopped the IV drip immediately and started trying to wake me, which eventually worked. Then I went home and vomited uncontrollably for 2 days. This was after having gotten just the very first bit of sedation, before they had a chance to begin the procedure at all. I never went back after that.

Now I deal with pain from those effing teeth pretty often. But I don't know what it was that I was allergic to; I was only 18 or so at the time, and was also unconscious and then very sick, so I didn't pay very good attention. My Mom was there with me, and she apparently had a letter explaining it all and then accidentally shredded said letter? And she doesn't remember at all either.

My current family medicine Doctor's best guess is propofol which puts me in good company with Michael Jackson, I guess. Only in the last couple of years did I start wondering about this and wanting to find out so I could get my teeth taken care of, but by then the records had been destroyed. I've called the place where it was done a few times to try to find out with no luck, but did so again today and the woman I spoke to said that apparently there is someone who can access their old computer records that will call me back tomorrow. I'd love to find out before I go to my new dentist.

This is like the most boring Nancy Drew story in the world, isn't it? I should make up some parts about how I lost teeth biting a crazed lunatic and Ned Nickerson saw it all happen which is why Nancy is on the case. And George is in school to be a nurse anesthetist and Bess has a hopeless crush on the dreamy Dr. Toothworth.

Yeah, I read a lot of Nancy Drew as a kid.

Urban Dictionary has things besides Dirty Sanchez-esque terms on it?

A little meme I got from Word Lust and Frazzled_razzleRN (see them in my followers and read their blogs!):

1. Go to urbandictionary.com [check]
2. Type in *your name* in the look up any word spot. [check]
3. Read the definition of your name. [check]
4. Think it's cool. [double check]
5. Think I'm cool for telling you to do it. [triple check]

My name means: A generally nice person who has a hard time with confrontation. She tends to be sweet and generous to a fault. They are normally beautiful people and love the Beatles. They also make great friends because they are so loving and loyal. They often do not share their problems with others and sometimes this can overwhelm them.

Huh, that's pretty nice. I don't have a problem with confrontation though. I went to my facility's administrator today before work to let her know that my trainee getting injured last night isn't acceptable, nor is having ScaryLady try to beat us all up every single night without fail. She talked to our DON and charge nurse and they came up with a plan to mitigate this behavior and get some stronger meds ordered for ScaryLady. My forearms may be unbruised for the first time in months if this all works!!! Also, I like the Beatles okay but not as much as the Stones. Isn't that the question people always ask? Beatles or Stones, Coke or Pepsi, Elvis or... I forget what the alternative to Elvis is. Death. Just kidding.

As of 10pm tonight, it's my weekend. I am so freaking excited.

There's No Crying In Baseball

I'm in the process of training a new employee at my job right now, which has been pretty fun & made me look at the everyday grind with fresh eyes.

In Long Term Care, a lot of us have to toughen up in order to do this job. It's verydemanding work for very low pay and often very little appreciation. Working in dementia further adds to this because it's not uncommon to be trying tocare for people who will try their hardest to hurt you while you're helping them. Usually the good outweighs the bad and we retain our compassion and still give hugs and kisses to even those that had tried to hurt us.

Yesterday while training my new mentee, I almost cried out on the floor (ie in public areas not the breakroom) twice.

First was because one of my favorite residents is declining so fast. She has cancer & massive anxiety, and currently has the worst edema I've ever seen. It goes all the way up to her waist and she cannot even get shoes or slippers on anymore. The other night she kept asking me to kill her and swearing at me, which is the polar opposite from her normal personality. I knew she would freak out when we had to shower her, and she did. It's so awful to have a friend hating you screaming at you to kill her. I sent my trainee to take the then-calm resident to go get her hair done in our beauty parlor & I cleaned that shower for a long time so I could calm down. It really breaks my heart.

Then later I got upset for a nearly opposite reason; we had to put to bed a notoriously combative resident who usually leaves me black & blue whenever it's my turn to deal with her. She pinches, punches, kicks, grabs, shoves... you name it. And this is not a little old lady; she's taller than most of us & walks just fine. Right now I have a brace on my arm from straining it by lifting people. So ScaryLady zeroes in on that and grabs me there, trying to shake me by that arm. My poor trainee tries to intervene and ScaryLady digs her nails into my trainee hard enough to break her skin. Charge Nurses insist there is nothing they can do because ScaryLady's Doc refuses to order any effective behavioral meds for her. ScaryLady clearly needs a new Doc but that would require someone in ScaryLady's family to make it happen, which is unlikely at best. So we get beaten up every night and my brand new trainee got hurt. Those were tears of anger.

Sometimes I hate this system and these diseases.

Day 24: Favorite Movie

This is a hard one. My very favorite movie, that I could probably always stand to watch no matter what mood I'm in, though, is "Funny Face". Even though I do think that clearly Fred Astaire is too old for Audrey Hepburn, I love the songs and dance numbers in this movie. Think Pink? Her rebellious bohemian dance in the beatnik den? S'Wonderful? All guaranteed to make you happy.

I thought about pretending Shutter Island was my favorite movie, because one of my friends just reminded me about this:

After he told me what an "infograph" is I drew a small version of this, and he drew it on his blackboard wall gigantically! But Shutter Island is not my favorite movie. Not at all. I'm pretty pleased that my first infograph made it onto a wall though!

PS If you can't read it, it's a drawing I did of the island with little things saying what's wrong with each part of it; the rats in the cliff wall, the lack of surfers in the ocean, the sucky ferry boat, etc.

Day 23: Five Dudes

Today's topic is to find five pictures of handsome famous guys and post them. Done.

Day 22: How Have You Changed in the Past 2 Years?

Two years ago this time, I was working as a nanny for two different families; one part-time, one full-time. I commuted almost an hour each way to and from work. I lived in a large rental house, and was trying to get pregnant via sperm donor. My life was very different from what it is now.

Looking back, some things were easier; I made a lot more money back then, so that was much less of a concern. My jobs were really not physically demanding the way working as a nursing assistant is. I had more free time, and I used it to go take water-aerobics at the community center and to cook stuff from my farm-subscription box. Have you heard of those? It's called Community Supported Agriculture. You subscribe to a local farm and get a box of produce every week that's grown in your area. I used to go pick mine up at the community center but some places will bring them to your doorstep. It's pretty cool.

I'm a little wary to write much about my life as a nanny, because I still care about the families I worked for and would never want to say something online that they could find and be hurt by. But in retrospect, I took on a lot of emotional stress from that job, mainly because of a particular issue with one of the children, that I found really hard to deal with as someone that loved that little guy. And what happened to him was the reason I lost my second job with the second family, which was really sad to me, because I loved (still love) those kiddos too.

About two years ago, Mr. Polly and I uprooted ourselves and made big changes in our lives. We were living in a condo and about to close on it, and I assumed I'd stay a nanny for many years to come. Mr. P was teaching Special Ed. When we got the opportunity to move back to our college town and buy the comic book store, we pulled out of the condo right before closing (so sorry real estate agent! Truly!) and moved into a little apartment in a big historic house. I worked harder than I've ever worked, normally about 50-65 hours a week at 2 or 3 jobs at a time to keep us afloat while we tried (slowly) to close the deal on the store. I found out I'm stronger than I knew I was. I found out I'm great at interviewing for jobs, because I was offered most of the ones I applied for. I found out that change doesn't have to be that scary. And I found out that I want to be a nurse. I started out as an in-home caregiver as a supplement to my job at a daycare. And ended up as a CNA at a dementia facility, which I love.

I feel like I'm in the right place, professionally and in my life. My director of nursing pulled me aside last week to ask me if I'm interested in being trained and promoted to be a med tech (I am!!) if a slot becomes avaliable. And last night I started training a new employee for the first time, which means I'm eligible for the Mentor Program at work. I'm registered for fall quarter to start doing my nursing school prerequisites. I love living in the town we live in now. And I'm happy with Mr. Polly. We're not trying to have a baby anymore, but we'll probably start again within a year. And I think I'm under a lot less stress now than I was the first time around, which should hopefully be a good factor in making it happen.

So yep, the last 2 years have been good and hard and I think I'm better for them.