My Laptop is Back After Being Sent for Repair

Some recent events:

They came in with rapid atrial fibrillation, a lung mass showed up on a chest X-ray, and a probable small bowel obstruction. And they were rather old. The surgeon didn't want to open them up, but the family insisted.

At the bedside, he said "Look, we see this all the time, don't we?" (And he solicited my concurrence in which I offered an anecdote of the last patient we had who went through this.)

They opted for the surgery instead of going home with Hospice care. After several weeks of suffering a difficult, dangerous, and expensive recovery from surgery, they died in the hospital just as we had warned weeks earlier.

But we gave excellent care for which the family was very grateful. Once a family/patient decision is made we run with it, running like the wind. It's what we do.

All my cynicism stays out in the halls. It never gets into the patient rooms. It stands outside as my ever-vigilant watchdog.

Another:

I was grabbing a shopping cart in the Basha's parking lot when an older woman approached me out of the blue and asked if I lived around there. I replied that I did and she then asked "Well, do you know where I can get a good fried-chicken sandwich?"

She went on to say that her husband was in a nearby skilled-nursing facility and that he'd taken a turn for the worse. "He's dying. He says he feels like something inside him has changed."

I mentioned a place down the street that's known for barbecue and such. And I said her husband was lucky to have her, and that like William Carlos Williams red wheel barrow, so much depends on that gesture of a chicken sandwich. Well, actually I didn't really get all poetic like that.

Her eyes welled up a little and she made the sign of the cross as she thanked me many times going to her car.

One more:

We were off the main path that we'd taken up into the South Mountains. That's what I call them since there's more than one, but most people here refer to these as just the plain singular "South Mountain."

Following a shallow and narrow track that had been improvised by mountain bikers, my partner said "They're here. Feel that?" and I replied that I hadn't really been paying attention.

"This place is haunted. We just crossed into it," they said. After a moment of walking I suggested that we were travelling in the wrong direction so we turned west and in a few steps a stunning vast panel of Hohokam petroglyphs, maybe four meters by one high, came into view. Though this was the biggest and most elaborate, there were also others that we saw in that area. Animals, human figures, abstract geometrics...

From a high point I could see that we weren't very far from an established trail which we used to leave after gazing in awe at the centuries-old markings. "We're out now," my significant other said as we went down the path, "It's not haunted anymore."

Actually we did see a few small glyphs right along the trail that we had missed when we came up, in a spot where the trail closely parallels a wash for a bit. One was a human figure holding a vertical staff topped by a circle.