Tag Archives: work

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Ready

Cats don’t graze, right? Well, they do, though not on grass. Sol Duc likes to have at least two small meals during the day. I portion out her dry food in the morning and give it to her at intervals, two or three.

We are getting ready to head out again soon, back to work. Maybe Sol Duc will realize what a long car ride means. She knows something is up today and has been sticking close to me.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: graze.

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10 rounds

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!

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: strenuous.

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Authenticity and masks

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.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: identity.

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Love gently

Honey is older, nearly thirty years since that first feeling of being bitten by ants. She is back in corporate medicine, as a temp. Temporary, short term, maybe that will work better.

It is a joy to go in a room and be alone with a person and their monsters. Theirs and hers. Sometimes the younger ones haven’t experienced it, they are terrified if one of their monsters becomes a little bit visible, they hate seeing them. Honey tries to be gentle. If they only want to talk about the sore shoulder and not the stress and violence, well, she leaves the door open a crack. Sometimes the monsters cry.

Older people may be stiff to start with, but when they realize their monsters are seen, acknowledged, this isn’t another robot doctor in to say increase your diabetes medicine, lower your diabetes medicine, tell them a plan without ever connecting, the older ones lean back, sigh, and relax. The monsters play on the floor, Honey’s monsters playing with theirs, happy, engaged.

The hard part is the clinic staff. Honey is with them daily. The medical assistants are young. They kick their monsters aside as they walk down the hall. It is terribly hard and heartbreaking to work at her desk, with the medical assistants’ monsters cowering under their desks, kicked, abused, silent tears and holding bruises. Honey’s monsters mind. They climb into her lap and hide their faces in her shirt, under her jacket, peer over her shoulder. They don’t understand! Why can’t she be nice to THESE monsters?

Honey whispers to her monsters when the medical assistants are rooming patients. “I am so sorry, loves. If I acknowledge these, the monsters of the women working, I become a demon. It is very hard to share an office, no wonder I worked in a clinic alone for eleven years.” Honey has been through that. It is still inconceivable that some people don’t see the monsters at all. Is it learned blindness? Or just not developed unless someone had to learn it? Unless someone grows up in terror and seeing the monsters is the only way to survive.

Honey thinks some people learn to see them as adults, at least their own monsters. Hard enough to do that, without seeing the monsters clinging to other people.

Honey is tired of her monsters crying in sympathy with the staff’s monsters. She thinks maybe there are small crumbs that she can leave for these demons. Little gifts. Her monsters can creep under the desk when she is the only one in the room and leave something. A flower. A dust bunny. A crumb of a crisp. A small rock. A little gift to let them know they are seen and loved. A poem. A prayer. Just a tiny bit of love.

_____________________________

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: crisp.

The photograph is me all dressed up for the 1940s ball.

______________________________

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Free agent

The Agency contacted me yesterday.

“Yes?” I say.

“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.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: agency.

I write this and then start humming. Yes, this is the right song.


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All of my patients are smart 3

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.

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Something

Something is happening all around me
Something unpleasant is creeping around
I trust that feeling, that core that is free
I go quiet and listen, I will stand my ground
I am told no problem, this is routine
Nothing to worry about, averting their eyes
Lay down and be walked on, take it for the team
Blind-sided, I walk through a jungle of lies.
I walk very slowly then take to the trees.
I swing on a vine past the river of tears.
Wave to the gators with teeth to eat me,
Routine bad treatment not surprising nor feared.
In the treetops I sing to the stars quite alone
I am happy and making my quiet way home.

Suddenly I am thinking about home. Travel does that sometimes.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: travel.

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Food, food, food

When I get pneumonia, I drop ten pounds the first week. Since I had influenza viral pneumonia in 2003, I don’t run a fever. I just have a fast heart rate resting and get short of breath walking across the room. With Covid, I needed oxygen.

Each time, it takes longer to gain the weight back. Then I go over my normal weight and eventually have to rebuild muscle. This time I did not gain any weight back for over a year. But now it’s been three years and I am in the muscle rebuilding and weight loss section.

It does get harder as I get more mature. Older and wiser, right? Well, maybe. At any rate, I am trying to lose weight without any drugs or injectables or herbs. I am trying to eat the way the diabetic educators tell us to: half the meal should be vegetables. Every meal. A small grain and a small protein and not too much fat and vegetables. Corn really falls into the grains.

In clinic I often do a diet history of the day before. What did the person eat? I think about half of the histories come back with almost no vegetables. Pizza is NOT a vegetable, it’s mostly in the grain department. Grains are plants, I agree, but they send blood sugar up a lot more than celery and kale and collards.

Meanwhile, where is CHOCOLATE on that plate half covered with vegetables? Darn. My dessert could be a small piece of chocolate with a carrot on the side? Chocolate dipped carrots? I honestly do not like celery. Celeriac yes, celery no, though I have it in the curried chicken salad I made yesterday. That chicken salad is not half vegetables. It has some celery for crunch but it also has grapes. So, I ate it last night with an equal amount of mixed lettuce and sugar snap peas from the Farmer’s Market.

I do not have diabetes, but if I am recommending a dietary change, I think I should be able to do it too. We shall see. I think right now my diet is about 1/3 vegetables. Fruit does not count as a vegetable for this.

The other thing about vegetables is you have to cut them up. Ok, wash them too. And it’s not like one doesn’t have to cook beans or rice or meat, but vegetables do take time. If I have a person with low blood sugar or who is feeling awful, saying make half the meal vegetables may not be realistic. When someone is really frail or ill, it may be that getting out of bed, washed and dressed and to the table is overwhelming. Cut up vegetables? Cook from scratch? Maybe not.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: lunch.

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Coping or manipulation?

I see someone in clinic with a difficult boss.

This brought up work stories. Now, are these coping skills or manipulation or a bit of both? You decide.

Long ago I work in a lab at the National Institutes of Health. We are super busy and doing a lot of overtime and have some media pressure as well. Our boss gets us together and gives us hell, about making mistakes. I am annoyed, because I’ve been really careful. I stew. I write a letter, what I think he should have said, which is telling us all great job, you’ve worked super hard, we are under pressure and also we need to not make mistakes. I circulate it to the four other lab techs, who enjoy it. The lab cheers up a bit. Eventually I get brave and give it to the boss. He likes it and reads it to everyone, who try not to laugh. A year after I leave the lab, I visit, and he has that letter up on his bulletin board.

Long ago I am made chief of staff at a hospital. My goal is to finish the monthly meeting in an hour. I have two senior doctors who always blow up about something in the meeting. I decide to be proactive and go to each one before the meeting and prime them. I pick a topic, say I am worrying about it, and what do they think? They each then blow up in the meeting, but now they have no opposition so there is no brawl. I prime them about something that is not really controversial. I do get the meetings done in an hour.

One year I go to the lake with my family. My children are small. My father has been drinking heavily. I call ahead and say, “Will you treat our tent site like my house and not come there if you are drinking?” “You don’t own the lake land,” says my father. “We don’t have to come.” I reply. He agrees not to drink at our tent site.

He is angry, though, and pretty much won’t speak to me. I ask if he would come to a family sing at my site. He says no. I think about it for a while and ask my cousin to hold a sing at her cabin. My father agrees to that, not knowing that I am the instigator. He is happy at it because he’s said no to me and yes to her, and I am happy too, because I love to sing and sing with him.

My father was one of eight people to start Rainshadow Chorale in 1997. I sang with him in the chorale from 2000 until the year he died.

Where is the line between manipulation and coping with a difficult person?

I think this is a time travelogue, so let it be my Ragtag Daily Prompt for today.

The photograph is of my father in 2012. He died in 2013.

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Tinker, tailor

Tinker brought up this rhyme for me:

Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief,
Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief.

It turns out that another version is

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor,
Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief

And I had forgotten AA Milne’s version called Cherry stones:

Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief,
Or what about a cowboy, policeman, jailer, engine driver, or a pirate chief?
Or what about a ploughman or a keeper at the zoo,
Or what about a circus man who lets the people through?
Or the man who takes the pennies on the roundabouts and swings,
Or the man who plays the organ or the other man who sings?
Or what about the rabbit man with rabbits in his pockets
And what about a rocket man who’s always making rockets?
Oh it’s such a lot of things there are and such a lot to be
That there’s always lots of cherries on my little cherry tree.

Now I’m going to have to play with a version with some current jobs:

What about a tweeter, a twerker, a medical AI?
Influencer, programmer, cooker of meth highs?

Oops, that might not be the children’s version.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: tinker.