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Impersonal Day

After I post my story about nuisance on Thursday, I have a bigger nuisance show up. I get ready for work, tell my cat to have a lovely day, get in the car, open the garage door, back out and press the button to close the door.

It doesn’t close.

I try again.

It won’t close and is wonky at the base.

Dang it. I pull back into the driveway and investigate. Two of the wheels are out of the track and it’s obviously broken. There is a button lock between the garage and the house, but the garage also has stuff in it from the owners, including tools. I get a chair, stand on it and am clear very quickly that I can’t fix it.

Next I call work and apologize, but I can’t secure the house and can’t leave. They cancel my day. I have to dig around for the rental number but I find it. I call once, text, wait a bit and call again. He calls back and sends a person over.

The person take about half an hour to get there and he can’t fix it. They call a garage door company.

So now I am cooling my heels and stuck here. My kids all have wishlists for Christmas so I get everything ordered and sent off to my son’s. They will be rather inundated with packages since one Amazon order generated 7 packages all on different days. Goodness. I do some cooking, read a novel, and wait.

At 3 pm I let the rental person know that I am still waiting.

At 4:15 two garage door people show up. The wire at the opposite side from where the wheels are off is all tangled and off the rails. They have some specialized tools and it is fixed by 4:45. Part of the time is just them waiting for payment permission to go ahead with the fix. The garage door now opens and closes! I thank them and they head out. Turns out that their boss lives on my street.

A friend says, “You called in a personal day.”

“No,” I reply, “I called in a stuff goes wrong day. A very impersonal day.” My work did not give me any grief at all about it. We were already shorthanded but what could any of us do? Apologies to any patients who got canceled! We all do the best we can, right? Things break down sometimes.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompts: shopping and nuisance.

I deleted some past posts to make room but apparently not enough, sigh. Another bit of a nuisance. I can post a phone photograph but not one from my bigger camera.

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Batter batter

Right now the nuisance in clinic is not a bat or a batter but a battery. I have a hospital issued laptop from last April. I had a day of orientation and one day that they walked me through the electronic medical record. I absorbed about ten percent of what they said. One day is silly, it should be broken up over the orientation, over three days or more, but places do not do that. Anyhow, Friday afternoon I was done and supposed to see patients on Monday, with support.

I wandered back from the IT office to the HR office. “Um, I’m supposed to have a laptop. Is it already at the clinic?” HR didn’t know. They called the clinic. Nope, IT was supposed to issue me one. We went to IT together. IT was in the middle of a massive update. No one had remembered that I needed a laptop. They “found” one and set up my program. This all took another hour.

Months later we were on the phone with IT and I had to say the name of the laptop. “Oh,” said the IT person. “THAT’S where my laptop went.” I was issued an IT one, not a provider one. I don’t care, do I?

Except, the battery is old. I guess the laptop is “old” too, but it works. So far. However, the battery won’t last even through a morning now. I put in a ticket to IT about a month ago and a battery is on order “because that’s an old one, we don’t have those in stock”. I plug it in to the desk top in the office, but we run two or three exam rooms and it’s awkward and a nuisance to plug in and unplug in each room. I leave the cord in one room and cross my fingers.

Yesterday someone from IT shows up right before my last patient and takes the back off my laptop. Except the battery he’s brought doesn’t fit. He has to put it all back together. I laugh, because it’s kind of ridiculous. He does leave me a second charging cord, so now I have ones for two rooms. The risk is that I will forget and walk away with it plugged in and drop it. Of course, then I might be issued a “new” laptop.

That is the present silly mildly annoying nuisance at work.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: nuisance.

The picture is from the Saturday parade, a tree on a distant roof.

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Parade

This photograph is jittery but I like the effect.

On Saturday I went to a restaurant downtown at 3 pm and then to the Grand Junction Christmas Parade, presented by the Bank of Colorado. The theme, oddly enough, was Christmas in the tropics. This was a difficult theme when the starting temperature was about 40 and dropping from here. No hula dancers, that is for sure.

Mostly the parade is trucks. Cement company, police, the fire stations, a shingle company. There are three marching bands of 70 entries. Three trucks are flatbed with a live band set up. One has an elk head mounted beside a blow up Santa. Spongebob Squarepants is there. Dune buggies are well represented as well as Harleys. The bank has a giant inflated black piggy bank balloon. I thought it was a fairly weird parade.

My favorites is a float entry about services for families and kids with Down’s Syndrome. There are lots of kids on and around that one, some with Down’s Syndrome, some probably not. Whole families. Bravo.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: jittery.

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Solo vessel

A duck is a sort of a vessel, isn’t it? Can you nap while floating in the water? I can’t. I hiked part of the Connected Lakes Trail and spoke to a member of the local Audubon Society yesterday. I did not have binoculars but he shared. I used my Panasonic DMC-FZ150, zoomed all the way in. It is still a bit difficult to identify this bird.

Now the pair are both awake. I think they are a female and a male ruddy duck, but it is a touch blurry and abstract. I like the photograph anyhow. The water and ducks and grasses and reflections were so beautiful.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: vessel.

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Busy clinic

Clinic has been hopping. I have been at the present site now for six weeks, so I am starting to know a few of the patients. That is, the ones that are sick and I am worrying about. It is best if your doctor’s pupils don’t dilate when they hear your name.

I have been getting helpful calls back from specialists. I have a person who has high liver tests where hepatitis and overweight and alcohol don’t seem to be the cause, so I needed an updated list of what labs to send for some of the less common liver problems. Thyroid disease, hemochromatosis, alpha one antitrypsin deficiency, smooth muscle antibodies, various other antibody disorders. The list is quite a bit longer than in the past. I warn my patient that some will come back right away and some may take a week or two. The patient is anxious and wanted to go right to the emergency room, but I ask them to wait: I get a call back from gastroenterology within 24 hours to set up the current laboratory order list.

For liver tests, we ask about alcohol intake first. Then look at weight: a high body mass index can cause fatty liver disease. Unfortunately, that can lead to cirrhosis and liver failure, so it is not trivial. We check for hepatitis A, B and C. Then we start looking for the less common causes. My person is relatively young, but that is with me taking care of age 18 and up. I tell my person not to take any supplements, I look at any prescribed medicines. No alcohol for now.

The list of tests changes quickly. If I have not worked this up recently, it’s good to check in with the specialist. The gastroenterologist may not be up to date on ankle sprains, but they are tracking the changes in their specialty. My specialty is everything, so sometimes I need a current update. Most of the specialists are just fine with this phone call.

Occasionally I do this by message. I have a new diabetic who has a cardiologist already. Diabetics are usually put on either an ace inhibitor or an angiotensin receptor blocker to protect kidney function. I message the cardiologist and get a fast answer. Start an angiotensin receptor blocker and the suggested dose. Also very helpful.

A patient tells me on the phone that I get an “A” for the day. I called them to check on them two days after changing a medicine dose and to say that the other specialist wants even MORE laboratory tests. The patient says she has not gotten a call from a doctor before. The “A” made me laugh, but it did feel good.

I am learning the local medical pathways and how to get things done in this particular medical system. The functional bits, the dysfunctional bits, and how to work around them.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: functional.

Sol Duc really likes staying in her pillow fort. Sometimes I want to hide in a pillow fort too. So much for being “grown up”.

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Cliff collapse

This is taken on Marrowstone Island, going south from East Beach. The king tides take down sections of cliff and whole trees every years.

The island surfaces in the low tides and the seals rest and sun and ignore the ships.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: collapse.

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Austere choice

What could be more austere than rock?

Taken in Echo Canyon in the Colorado National Monument, Thanksgiving, 2024.

Austere choice

Why do I still feel sad when I think
that I am best off with my cat
and that I should eschew dating.
Why do I feel like I am rejecting love?
I don’t have that sort of love.
It’s not like I am rejecting anything.
I am rejecting looking for it.
I am rejecting active interest in a partner
other than my cat.
What is wrong with that?

I do not ever want to reject hope.
I am not trying to reject wanting.
Hope and want are the deep and terrible ache
for the Beloved. I do not reject that.
I am still open, Beloved, to what you send,
though getting more particular in middle age.
A writer says that he uses a pencil and a pad,
because no better tool has been invented.
I take the same approach to wanting love.
If the relationship is more work than my cat,
for less love, why bother? It seems silly
and until I go home to the Beloved,
so far, I am best off with my cat.

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The first thing Sol Duc does when we go out for a walk, is roll on the sun warmed dusty sidewalk. The house faces south.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: austere.

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Vision

What will peace look like? People
will still disagree often
but like my parents they will appreciate
evidence and science. They will listen
to each other with interest, with respect.
They will bet a penny or a quarter or a million
imaginary dollars and one will go to look up
the correct capital of Azerbaijan, while
the other argues that they MEANT back in 1478,
really, so they do not owe one million imaginary
dollars and they both start laughing again.

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The photograph is of the ice in Echo Canyon, two days ago. Or maybe it is angels, waiting.