I made it to Brigham City last night. That was a long driving day, 503 miles. I tried to stop in Snowville, but the motel would not take cats.
The only weather resembling a deluge so far was from Seattle until I crossed Snoqualmie Pass. It rained and rained, sometimes heavily. Once over the pass, the rain disappeared and we lost the ocean smell again. Dry and more trees and desert and wheat. I counted mountain passes, six so far that listed the top altitude. Some had smaller passes between, three more. The first one yesterday had ice patches so I stayed in the right lane with the trucks. Less ice.
This is the sunset yesterday as I arrive in Pendleton, Oregon to stay the night. The first stage of the journey done. Sol Duc is ok with the car as long as it is not moving. When it moved, she objected, for much of the first hour. She stops when I sing to her, so I worked my way through many of the old folk songs that I learned as a child.
And today, dust and ashes with the news.
We will go on, though. Even as discrimination worsens.
Sunday a friend and I hike in the Colorado National Monument again. I have not run out of trails at all! Two trails. Up the Devil’s Kitchen shorter trail, which requires some clambering. Fabulous rocks and fabulous views!
Next the No Thoroughfare Canyon Trail. It has falls and a pool: here is the pool.
It is a bit dry at this time of year. We did not do the entire canyon: we’re both traveling this coming weekend, so we needed time to get ready. Packing and cleaning.
It’s hard to see the scale in photographs. The rocks on the ground are as tall as I am. And that is the trail, winding through those rocks. Did the rocks wash down from further up? They do not look like the surrounding hills. Those are some serious boulders for a seasonal stream to carry.
Got sick in clinic yesterday, about 20 minutes after eating lunch. Abdominal cramping and lost lunch and lay down until I could drive home. Went to sleep for another four hours. I got up to hydrate slowly, some water with a little sugar, every 15 minutes. Taking it slowly is gentler on the stomach. I went back to sleep.
I got up at 11 pm and had a few crackers. This morning I am tolerating tea, but my body feels rather like it’s been beaten up. No clinic today, but I think tomorrow would be ok. We shall see.
I am not sure of the cause. I was given some gluten free donuts and wonder if one had gluten. Food poisoning is not very common in the places I have lived. We are seeing some people with Covid who have abdominal symptoms rather than upper respiratory, so I am debating whether I should home test.
It’s been a strenuous twenty four hours!
The photograph is from the Fruita Fair a few weekends ago. I really wanted to do this with the kids. Today even looking at the picture makes me slightly nauseated! Whew! They were in climbing harnesses and then attached to giant rubber bands and bouncing. Some were able to do flips, too. Not me, not today!
The Ragtag Daily Prompt today is identity. Yesterday I went to work an hour early so I could attend the Friday morning Continuing Medical Education. It was about adult ADHD and the positives and negatives.
I do not have a diagnosis of ADHD. I have one friend who insists that I have it, but I don’t much care. However, the speaker started talking about masks and authenticity. She said that we are told to be authentic at work, but that people with ADHD often find that their authentic self is not welcomed and they learn to mask.
I asked, doesn’t everyone mask somewhat at work? She said, “Good point, and yes, people do.” It got me thinking about identity and masks. I pretty much clammed up in Kindergarten because I was too much of an outlier and culturally wrong. We did not have a television and television was pretty much what the other children talked about. I knew songs and poems but these did not interest my peers. I was interested in science, too, but that was also not popular. I think I was a geek before it was named and as soon as I learned to read, I became a bookworm. I am not sure if having a television would have made any difference, either.
Fast forward to after high school. I went to Denmark as an exchange student my senior year and then needed to make up credits to graduate. Another high school student was in my Community College classes. After a bit, she said, “I thought you were shy in high school.” I said, “No, I just didn’t talk.”
Currently I am more authentic in the room with patients than with the rest of the staff. Corporations are very weird hierarchical places. My authentic self always questions authority but I am trying not to do it all the time. At least, not out loud. The patients seem to be fine with it. I had a very difficult conversation with an elderly couple this week about memory and planning, now, before they can’t. I got hugs at the end of the visit even though we’d gone into frightening and difficult territory. They did very well. Yesterday was my last day at that clinic and next week I am in another one. Even after just four months in this clinic, I will miss many of the patients and hope they do well.
Yesterday I really did Urgent Care. My schedule only had a few people and then six more sick ones were added on. We had to call an ambulance for one, the first time I’ve had to do that here.
What is authenticity and what is our identity? Is the work mask less real than the self in our minds?
I took the photograph at a small hot springs resort. A friend that I’ve known since high school and I met there. I love the bookworm rabbit. I think she represents the happy bookworm part of me. I read about 7 novels a month, haunting the library here. Maybe I will get to know some more people over the next 6 months.
I am having nightmares. About clinic. Yesterday I bolstered my courage and sat down to write my dream out. What are my dreams trying to tell me? Should I extend my contract or not?
I dream that in clinic I have a male patient with his wife in the room. He is very dramatic, saying, “I am so ill, help me, help me.” He says, “I am on quercetin. You have to help me.”
He won’t tell me what his symptoms are, so I respond to what he says: “Who prescribed quercetin? What is your diagnosis?”
“Oh, you don’t want to help me,” he says. His wife just watches.
“Do you have pain somewhere? Any chest pain? Any abdominal pain? Any pain anywhere?”
“No, no, you don’t understand!” he says, “You aren’t listening!”
“I am trying to help you,” I say. “Can we reschedule you for a longer visit?” This is one of the impossible 20 minute ones. Honestly, he doesn’t look like he’s in pain. I do a quick listen to heart and lungs and feel his abdomen.
“No, I need to be in the hospital, I can’t go home!”
“I can’t put you in the hospital without a diagnosis, but we can move you to the emergency room.” Of course, the ER won’t be happy about this.
I leave the room and call the ER. The ER doctor is understandably grumpy, since I have no idea what this is about and am suspecting a psychiatric cause. “Urine drug screen,” I say. “He doesn’t smell drunk. I do not think it’s meth withdrawal.” “Make sure you do a note,” snarls the ER doctor. Good luck, since he won’t answer any questions. “How behind am I?” I ask the nurse. She just rolls her eyes. I probably have at least four or five more on the schedule. I come back to the room. Now two preteens are in the room, looking in the drawers and taking things out. Their parents do nothing to stop them.
“Please sit down now!” I say. “Put that down!”
The teens sullenly comply. The father is moaning. He has the prescriber on his cell phone. He hands it to me. I introduce myself. “What is your diagnosis?” I say. “Why is he on quercetin?” The person at the other end mumbles. “Excuse me, what did you say?” He’s gone. I say to the mother, “Please take the children to the waiting room. Sir, are you requesting that we call 911?” It would be a call saying man moaning, no idea what he’s on about. Vitals are normal, he denies chest pressure or pain, he doesn’t have an acute abdomen, his oxygen level is fine, no fast heart rate, no fever. Drama.
I wake up, thinking that I may have to call 911 to get the wife and kids out and I have to have someone monitor him while I see other patients and we just don’t have enough staff and I am ready to just cancel the rest of the afternoon. If I were in a hospital, I could call security, but we are a satellite small clinic.
So… what the heck is THIS dream about? And do we really get patients like this? Yes, but not often and I haven’t had any like this here. I think it’s funny that this dream has so much detail, down to the supplement that the man is taking as well as the clinic room. I usually work in room 1 and 2, but this was in room 5.
“Are you free?” Dispatch always sounds so disinterested.
“Yes, I’m free.” I try not to sound annoyed. I am too good at my job. I’ve given up on dating. This frees me up for the Agency.
“Room two.”
Room two has a woman who looks frozen. I introduce myself, a stranger, her previous person left.
“Are you sleeping?”
“No. Well, I fall asleep but then I wake up. Nightmares and my heart beats so fast. Then I can’t go back to sleep.”
“Did something happen?”
Her face tightens all over. She wants to tell me but not let the emotions out. “A scam!” Now the dam is cracking and falling apart. The story comes out bit by bit. “They opened an account in my name! Took out a loan! I am so scared. And ashamed. We could lose the house.” Not many tears. She won’t let them.
“Ok, I think this is a PTSD reaction. The not sleeping is really common. Can you talk to your husband?”
“I’ve snapped at him! We never fight! Forty two years!”
The monsters are visible now. Clinging to her, but some are coming to cling to me. Fear, shame, grief, anxiety, fatigue. They aren’t really that big, because she has been a careful person, a wise person. But this has cracked her open because she never expected it.
“Have you contacted the authorities?” We talk about what she has done, the practical bits. She has already made wise moves. It’s the feelings that are upsetting her.
We pick something for sleep, a low dose, not one of the newer addictive ones. An antidepressant that will hopefully make her sleepy. Close follow up is even more important, to be sure that she is starting to comfort the monsters. Many of the monsters are crying for her. I think they will be ok.
She is more comfortable before she leaves. She brought the feelings out and I was not horrified and I did not shame her. They weren’t so bad after all, when she brought them out in the light of day. It’s when they are fighting to be felt and heard that they feel so dark and dangerous and frightening.
I leave the room. She will be back in a week, sooner if she needs to. One of her monsters smiles at me tremulously as it clings to her. I smile back and nod. I think they will be ok.
I’ve chosen incomparable for today’s Ragtag Daily Prompt. Yesterday I posted one version of the song Waterbound. Rhiannon Giddens does the traditional version, but then I come across this song. Wow. And yes, such courage in people enslaved and there is still slavery in the world.
Human behavior doesn’t surprise me, really. Sometimes it disappoints, depresses, demeans, dispirits and demoralizes. And it’s not the patients. It is the corporate workplace and how it abuses people. And circles the wagons against a threat. Including against employees that it views as threats.
I think all of my patients are smart. “You got this,” I say. I explain what carbohydrates are and that they are in everything, practically, except meat and oil. And some meats have carbohydrates too: shrimp, for example. But my patients can figure this out! My patients rise to the occasion! I am not saying that they do smart things all the time. No one does, including me. Even the smartest ones can do things that are not a good idea or are a really bad idea. Growing up in an addiction household, I think I escaped addiction mostly because I had decided that no adults could be trusted by the time I was three. I thought they loved me but I couldn’t trust them not to give me to someone else. Ironic, that the distrust saved me from taking the same path. My sister took it and is gone. My patients are smart and all I have to do is share my education and experience! They take the ball and run with it! Not all. Sometimes it’s too late and everyone dies eventually.
Corporations, on the other hand, are infuriatingly stupid.
The photograph is me in 2015, sailing my father’s boat with my daughter, in Port Townsend Bay.
Discover and re-discover Mexicoβs cuisine, culture and history through the recipes, backyard stories and other interesting findings of an expatriate in Canada
Engaging in some lyrical athletics whilst painting pictures with words and pounding the pavement. I run; blog; write poetry; chase after my kids & drink coffee.
Refugees welcome - FlΓΌchtlinge willkommen I am teaching German to refugees. Ich unterrichte geflΓΌchtete Menschen in der deutschen Sprache. I am writing this blog in English and German because my friends speak English and German. Ich schreibe auf Deutsch und Englisch, weil meine Freunde Deutsch und Englisch sprechen.
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