Category Archives: death is part of life

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Quota

Quota

honestly
I feel despair
when I try
to think about the new schedule

Twenty four slots
Of 20 minutes
See three people
For 40 minutes
Twenty on the schedule

Unanswered questions
Wake me on Sunday morning
If I am called to a labor patient
Must I make up that clinic face time?
What of holidays?
The clinic is closed.
Night call is nowhere addressed
Will they hire more and more
Who don’t take call
Until I am the last woman standing
Red rimmed eyes staring
Numb with fatigue

What of my nearly deaf patient
Who reads lips
May we take forty minutes?
All the fairly deaf elderly?
New parents, anxious
Questions pour out like
Coins from a jackpot win
What of the tearful brokenhearted
And anxious?
I shrink at the thought
Of crushing their hearts
Into twenty minutes

And what if I’m sick?
(sick leave & vacation all one)
It’s not a holiday if I’m on call
No make-up day off
If I cancel clinic
For illness
Do I make up those days
A quota of patient face days

I am in the factory
The mines
People are the shirts I must sew
The tons of coal I must load
I must meet a quota

Doctors die younger
Our life is measured out
In patients
I won’t let the quota
Kill my love

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Quimper Family Medicine contact information

Quimper Family Medicine is closed.

For Medical Records, here is contact information:

Spectrum Information Systems

PO Box 739

Enumclaw, WA 98022

phone 206-686-3821

fax 206 686 3840

The contact information for billing is by mail only:

Quimper Family Medicine

PO Box 1053

Port Townsend, WA 98368

I had the fax number set up to fax to the cloud, but Century Link botched it massively. I spent an hour on the phone with them a week ago Thursday and couldn’t fix it. Good it wasn’t in person, because I wanted to break things. They screwed up the change of address, didn’t send me a bill, didn’t sent me the email to activate the damn thing, then passed me off to someone else who hung up on me. My thoughts about Century Link currently are quite dark and not publishable on a family friendly blog.

Empty clinic right before closing.

I miss my peeps. You people, friends and patients.

empty waiting room and front door of a clinic
Empty clinic waiting room and front door.
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tracery

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: tracery.

This is the dream that wakes me this morning. Before I went to sleep last night I asked for a dream. It’s when I am writing the dream out this morning that I realize that it’s my sister’s birthday. She died of cancer in 2012. Memory and dreams as tracery.

I am in a group of people on a platform. It is dark around us. It reminds me of a platform from a ropes course. In the ropes course we had to balance it. A rectangular platform on a log roller, held somewhat at the corners to keep it from dumping us entirely. A group version of a balance board. The trick is really that everyone has to stand still and only one person moves, very small amounts, until it is balanced.

But we are dancing in the dream. We are dancing, but people are uncomfortable. I am not sure why. Perhaps because we were dancing all together but individually and now there is a couple dancing. I realize that people are halting, worried.

I want them to be comfortable. I gesture to an older man. He comes towards me. His wife is there. He and I start dancing but I realize right away that this doesn’t make people more comfortable. They are less comfortable and even the other couple dancing stops. We are lit from above with darkness all around. No spot light follows us, so we move in and out of the light.

As soon as I realize that nearly everyone is uncomfortable, I stop my partner. He is an excellent dancer but that is not what is important here. I move with him back towards his wife and I sit on the platform. They sit as well. The other people around us relax. That is what they want, to sit, to talk quietly, to listen. That is what will make everyone comfortable. The others are settling around us, relieved.

I wake up.

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sea gift

On Sunday I go on a long hike with my visiting son and daughter, out North Beach. We see three eagles in trees and then the reason. A dead octopus on the beach, large. A sea gift of protein. Four more eagles and other birds soared while people were close. Returning, this juvenile bald eagle is on the beach, happy with this meal. The speckled feathers changing from juvenile to adult are quite gorgeous. I want to go in the sea and meet our giant pacific octopus, too, some day.

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cracks

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: fault.

I realized last night that I had not put up the prompt, and got back up to do it. My daughter called while I was thinking and told me about segmentation faults. I wrote the poem this morning.

cracks

people talk about me

whisper gossip
social skills aren’t right

they only see now

I had to grow in cracks
hold on tightly
find nourishment where I could
not fall
survive

if they could see my roots
if they could see
where I had to grow
no choice

maybe they would be kinder

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all things

I went to a memorial last night, for a singer.

This photograph is from 2015, a memorial sing for my father, who sang in three or more choruses here from 1996 until 2013. Actually he was raised singing and with music. My sister and I were raised singing, too.

My father and the singer we were remembering performed folk songs locally.

We sang last night. I chose a round.

all things shall perish from under the sky
music alone shall live
music alone shall live
music alone shall live
never to die

Here is a version sung in three languages.

With each new loss we remember the old ones: I miss my mother, my father, my sister. The round comforts me: all things shall perish, yet music alone shall live, never to die.



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kitchen window with cat

In the early morning before dawn
the orchids keep me company
cat and computer as I sit and write

I tried a desk but the sky doesn’t lighten
windows on three sides, the orchids and I
await the sun, cat now on my lap

this table was my grandmother’s
my mother loved flowers
my daughter says “The laptop’s in the way.”

Thank you orchids, cat and table
Thank you laptop, teacup, dawn
Thank you grandmother, mother, daughter

kitchen window blessing


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reminder

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: timely.

My mother died in 2000 and my father in 2013 and my house is full of art. My mother was a prolific artist and I am working on placing, gifting, cataloging her art. There is rather more than I’d seen. Watercolors and etchings were her most loved, I think, though she did woodcuts, silk screen, oils, pottery and all sorts of crafts.

She did tiny etchings, often 2 by 2 or 2 by 3 inches of fantasy creatures.


Etching of Winged Hare, by Helen Ottaway
Winged Hare by H. Ottaway
etching: Dolphin, by Helen Ottaway
Dolphin, by H. Ottaway