I was at the nurses' desk giving report. It was evening change of shift and I was looking forward to going home, popping open a case of shells, and pumping lead into schoolbuses. No, not really. It had actually been a good day. I was just thinking that would get your attention. As luck would have it, the real story is much more interesting.
The secretary gave me that look and handed me the phone, saying "shrimpie, I think you had better take this."
"Hi," I said, "This is shrimpie, I'm one of the nurses." I never declare that I'm a charge nurse or anything, because who cares? I certainly don't.
"Hi. I, uh, just took a lot of pills. I think my bipolar schizophrenia has been acting up on me, and I'm depressed about the economy. I can't get work. I think I might want to just kill myself," said a young woman.
"I'm glad you called," I said.
The secretary jotted down the caller's number and handed it to me. Not from here in Phoenix. Deep out among the far reaches of fuck-all Lower Foreclosurestan.
We chatted quite a bit. After a while the young lady assured me that she would seek help. I let the house manager know that I'd gotten the call. I have no idea how that happened. Our little telemetry unit is no place to direct such a call.
The nurse manager suggested that we notify Phoenix police, but instead the oncoming charge nurse googled up the number of the law enforcement agency that works out that way. I spoke to a very nice lady there who said that they would send a car over to the address, which I had gotten after I called back the suicidal young woman. She told me her name too, and that the pills were diet pills. Those made her feel "a little shaky." But that was all.
During the second call, the one I initiated, I also spoke to the woman's brother who told me he would take her to a local hospital which happened to be a sister facility to ours. Some of my old colleagues work there.
I hope they were able to help.
This article on rising suicide rates reprises this salient excerpt:
“The law ... rivets the laborer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality [and] mental degradation at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.”
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
A Muster of Storks
If I ever go violently crazy (don't worry, I won't,) it will be because of the color beige. It drives me out of my mind. I hate it.
Cats in the wild do not "meow." They only do this in the presence of people.
There are materials that are very dense. This is fascinating.
The class was split about fifty-fifty. Half agreed with the professor that it would be good if you could just take a hypothetical pill that would give you all the benefits of sleep but without requiring that you take the time out of your life to do so. The other part of the class preferred to just sleep the good old-fashioned way.
Today is the tenth anniversary of the Columbine tragedy. I bought a copy of the new book about it. It's a bit creepy. I was shopping with my kid, who got the new Warriors of the Wild book that was just released. I saw the Columbine book and after I explained to them what it was about, they insisted that I buy it because they want to read it too someday.
Cats in the wild do not "meow." They only do this in the presence of people.
There are materials that are very dense. This is fascinating.
The class was split about fifty-fifty. Half agreed with the professor that it would be good if you could just take a hypothetical pill that would give you all the benefits of sleep but without requiring that you take the time out of your life to do so. The other part of the class preferred to just sleep the good old-fashioned way.
Today is the tenth anniversary of the Columbine tragedy. I bought a copy of the new book about it. It's a bit creepy. I was shopping with my kid, who got the new Warriors of the Wild book that was just released. I saw the Columbine book and after I explained to them what it was about, they insisted that I buy it because they want to read it too someday.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Easter Sunday Brunch, Conversation Overheard
Bo.
"Oh, that's their new dog?"
"Yup. Cutie, eh?"
"He's such a darling! Where did they get him?"
"From Senator Kennedy. He has some and he wanted Sasha and Malia to have one, too."
"I thought they were going to get a rescue dog?"
"I guess not. And when Ted Kennedy gives you a dog, you don't say 'no' unless you want to end up at the bottom of a tidal basin somewhere."
"Still, he's a sweet-looking little dog."
"Oh, that's their new dog?"
"Yup. Cutie, eh?"
"He's such a darling! Where did they get him?"
"From Senator Kennedy. He has some and he wanted Sasha and Malia to have one, too."
"I thought they were going to get a rescue dog?"
"I guess not. And when Ted Kennedy gives you a dog, you don't say 'no' unless you want to end up at the bottom of a tidal basin somewhere."
"Still, he's a sweet-looking little dog."
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
Daily Prayers
6CO2 + 6H2O + Energy ® C6/H12/O6 + 6O2
The speed of light is about 299 792 458 meters per second.
C6/H12/O6 + 6O2 ® 6CO2 + 6H2O + Energy
The speed of light is about 299 792 458 meters per second.
C6/H12/O6 + 6O2 ® 6CO2 + 6H2O + Energy
Sunday, April 05, 2009
Friday, April 03, 2009
A Murmuration of Starlings
Wealth is created by labor and innovation. Great wealth is created by corruption.
I was purchasing a book, Lucrezia Borgia by Sarah Bradford. There was something about the cashier's voice, and I forthrightly (perhaps rudely) asked him "Are you gay?"
His expression fell flat, and he said, Yes... why do you ask?"
"It must be a lot of fun being gay," I said. Then he smiled.
The earth has a molten core. This makes it difficult for me to relax.
Salt from a salt pig, pepper from a mill.
Events unfold at different speeds, like music spun out at various tempos. Yet all minutes are the same.
The morphine comes in its own glass injectable. We never have any carpujects, so we take an empty sterile syringe out of its wrapper, put on a sterile needle, then we draw up the morphine. We take it to the patient, use a prepared normal-saline-loaded syringe to flush the intravenous line, then remove the needle from the morphine syringe to just Luer-lock the medication syringe onto the line to inject the drug. Then we get another prepared saline syringe to flush after administration. We use a few alcohol swabs to clean the Luer-lock ports before screwing on the syringes. It's a lot of trash just to give one simple dose of medicine.
I was purchasing a book, Lucrezia Borgia by Sarah Bradford. There was something about the cashier's voice, and I forthrightly (perhaps rudely) asked him "Are you gay?"
His expression fell flat, and he said, Yes... why do you ask?"
"It must be a lot of fun being gay," I said. Then he smiled.
The earth has a molten core. This makes it difficult for me to relax.
Salt from a salt pig, pepper from a mill.
Events unfold at different speeds, like music spun out at various tempos. Yet all minutes are the same.
The morphine comes in its own glass injectable. We never have any carpujects, so we take an empty sterile syringe out of its wrapper, put on a sterile needle, then we draw up the morphine. We take it to the patient, use a prepared normal-saline-loaded syringe to flush the intravenous line, then remove the needle from the morphine syringe to just Luer-lock the medication syringe onto the line to inject the drug. Then we get another prepared saline syringe to flush after administration. We use a few alcohol swabs to clean the Luer-lock ports before screwing on the syringes. It's a lot of trash just to give one simple dose of medicine.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Bad Match
He was a frumpy-looking dour middle-aged guy with a gray sack of those freebie newspapers that are all advertisements, going from house to house, tossing the things onto the doorsteps of each. We were walking the dogs.
I had been listening to Sunday Baroque and sipping coffee. They had begun to broadcast a recording of Bach's d-minor keyboard concerto. Great stuff, but I've heard it many times. I have several recordings, and I once even heard it performed live by the late great Igor Kipnis.
Some music just gets into my ears and stays there and I can carry it along with me. So that was was a good time to walk the dogs. The morning was young and beautiful. But the paper-delivery guy was not so. Definitely not.
A man opened his door to collect the paper deposited there. He then yelled out to the deliverer "You know, some people would call that littering."
For a moment I thought he was ribbing the other guy, the one tossing the newspapers. But the energy between the two men wasn't one of playfulness. No. It was fucked up.
Bag-man yelled "What?" and the guy from the house reiterated "I call this littering."
Bag-man replied "Well I call it work," and for emphasis he spelled it out, loudly, "W-O-R-K," the letters resounding throughout the morning air, floating above like psychedelic Peter Max style bulletins, only instead of being colorful and fun, they were drab and leaden.
Grown men delivering papers on a weekend morning. That used to be a job for boys on bicycles.
Bag-man later got into his dirty old car which had been parked at the end of our usually quiet block. The wheels had no hubcaps. And they didn't match.
I had been listening to Sunday Baroque and sipping coffee. They had begun to broadcast a recording of Bach's d-minor keyboard concerto. Great stuff, but I've heard it many times. I have several recordings, and I once even heard it performed live by the late great Igor Kipnis.
Some music just gets into my ears and stays there and I can carry it along with me. So that was was a good time to walk the dogs. The morning was young and beautiful. But the paper-delivery guy was not so. Definitely not.
A man opened his door to collect the paper deposited there. He then yelled out to the deliverer "You know, some people would call that littering."
For a moment I thought he was ribbing the other guy, the one tossing the newspapers. But the energy between the two men wasn't one of playfulness. No. It was fucked up.
Bag-man yelled "What?" and the guy from the house reiterated "I call this littering."
Bag-man replied "Well I call it work," and for emphasis he spelled it out, loudly, "W-O-R-K," the letters resounding throughout the morning air, floating above like psychedelic Peter Max style bulletins, only instead of being colorful and fun, they were drab and leaden.
Grown men delivering papers on a weekend morning. That used to be a job for boys on bicycles.
Bag-man later got into his dirty old car which had been parked at the end of our usually quiet block. The wheels had no hubcaps. And they didn't match.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Twigs Both Thick and Thin
Repo Man:
Otto: "Lobotomy? Isn't that for loonies?"
Parnell: "Not at all. Friend of mine had one. Designer of the neutron bomb. You ever hear of the neutron bomb? Destroys people - leaves buildings standing. Fits in a suitcase. It's so small, no one knows it's there until - BLAMMO. Eyes melt, skin explodes, everybody dead. So immoral, working on the thing can drive you mad. That's what happened to this friend of mine. So he had a lobotomy. Now he's well again."
Revolutionary war statesman James Otis:
"My dear sister, I hope, when God Almighty in his righteous providence shall take me out of time into eternity, that it will be by a flash of lightning."
In 1778 Otis was standing on his front steps looking at the rain when he was struck and killed by a bolt of lightning.
Ann Coulter:
"Anorexics never have boyfriends. ... That's one way to know you don't have anorexia: if you have a boyfriend."
That could be a confession.
Sartre:
"Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do."
Einstein:
"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"
Otto: "Lobotomy? Isn't that for loonies?"
Parnell: "Not at all. Friend of mine had one. Designer of the neutron bomb. You ever hear of the neutron bomb? Destroys people - leaves buildings standing. Fits in a suitcase. It's so small, no one knows it's there until - BLAMMO. Eyes melt, skin explodes, everybody dead. So immoral, working on the thing can drive you mad. That's what happened to this friend of mine. So he had a lobotomy. Now he's well again."
Revolutionary war statesman James Otis:
"My dear sister, I hope, when God Almighty in his righteous providence shall take me out of time into eternity, that it will be by a flash of lightning."
In 1778 Otis was standing on his front steps looking at the rain when he was struck and killed by a bolt of lightning.
Ann Coulter:
"Anorexics never have boyfriends. ... That's one way to know you don't have anorexia: if you have a boyfriend."
That could be a confession.
Sartre:
"Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do."
Einstein:
"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Everybody Should Have Goals
If you are walking down the street and you see people waiting in a line, join it.
Listen to your pets. They have been thinking a lot and they have formed essential opinions about many things.
If you have a favorite recipe for a savory meal, change it to sweet. Or the other way around. Sweet to savory.
Go north.
Collect pebbles. Or new words. I made up a new word once: tagerectaphobia, which is the fear of having the tag inside the back of your shirt collar sticking up in an embarrassing manner so you keep checking on it to push it back down.
Listen to your pets. They have been thinking a lot and they have formed essential opinions about many things.
If you have a favorite recipe for a savory meal, change it to sweet. Or the other way around. Sweet to savory.
Go north.
Collect pebbles. Or new words. I made up a new word once: tagerectaphobia, which is the fear of having the tag inside the back of your shirt collar sticking up in an embarrassing manner so you keep checking on it to push it back down.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Just A Few Minutes
These Hohokam petroglyphs, quite typical for those found in the Phoenix area, are located on a low flat knoll off the northeast shoulder of Lookout Mountain. We stumbled across them while hiking Friday. I suspect that astronomical alignments are indicated here. I'll have to go back there this summer to check it out.
A line drawn from the circle figure through the sun glyph might indicate solstice sunset; it seems to point in that direction generally. Of course these markings could also be just decorative.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Twenty Minutes
Dani walked up the hallway to the desk and told me that the patient in room 10 wanted to leave "against medical advice."
"You mean the chest pain guy with the GI bleed?" I asked.
"Yes," she said, "He doesn't want the tests."
"But his cardiolyte [stress test] was positive and he's got an active bleed," I said.
"Maybe you could talk to him, shrimplate," said Dani, but I had a feeling it was a lost cause. The patient was a little belligerent when he came up yesterday. All he did was complain.
For example, he said that he wanted to eat but refused his insulin because his blood sugar was only 290 and that "wasn't high for him." And he was using 70/30 insulin at home on some kind of weird sliding-scale, the way people use Novolog or regular insulin. The doctors here had ordered a regular insulin sliding scale but the patient wouldn't have anything to do with that. He said that it would "kill him."
I had talked to him then and figured out at least what he did at home; though I didn't agree with it, it made sense to him and we managed to get that one issue temporarily out of the way.
Today, he wanted to go home because he was "all through with us." Hmmmm....
Abnormal stress test.
Bloody stool.
Poorly controlled diabetes.
Sounded to me like he was just beginning: A long, slow, expensive spiral into further hospitalizations, heart failure, renal failure, and eventually a miserable death.
I explained that the cardiologist wanted to do a catheterization to fix the clogged blood vessels in his heart, but we wanted to first make sure he wasn't losing blood from an ulcer in his digestive tract.
See how simple that is? Just one little sentence. Does that make any sense to you? It does to me. I couldn't make it any plainer than that. We'd have him patched up and in a day or two he'd be just like new. New for him anyway, whatever that's worth.
The patient scoffed and said that I was talking down to him. "I didn't get to be 68 years old without knowing what's going on with me," he coughed out.
"So then, what do you think is going on with your heart?" I asked, and that set him off even though I was using a polite tone of voice.
"Nothing!" he barked, pulling on his pants. He was dressing himself in street clothes as we had our little chat. He added that further testing would just stress him out and his body couldn't take that. As if internal bleeding and cardiac ischemia provided his body with pleasant rest and relaxation. Oh well. That gave me what I needed to chart on him leaving AMA.
Then the GI resident came in; she asked me to leave so that she could talk with him. I said that I just wanted to ensure that the patient was making an "informed decision," and she asked me to leave again. I went to get the against-medical-advice form for him to sign.
I returned and set the paper on the bedside table between them. He looked up and said "what's this?" and I just replied "It's for you." The resident said that I could finish talking with him in a moment and I said that I was all done.
He left twenty minutes later.
That was yesterday. Chances are pretty good that he's had recurrent chest pain since then. It doesn't go away untreated. It just eventually gets worse. He's probably in another hospital. Maybe right now, as I write, he's pulling on his pants again.
"You mean the chest pain guy with the GI bleed?" I asked.
"Yes," she said, "He doesn't want the tests."
"But his cardiolyte [stress test] was positive and he's got an active bleed," I said.
"Maybe you could talk to him, shrimplate," said Dani, but I had a feeling it was a lost cause. The patient was a little belligerent when he came up yesterday. All he did was complain.
For example, he said that he wanted to eat but refused his insulin because his blood sugar was only 290 and that "wasn't high for him." And he was using 70/30 insulin at home on some kind of weird sliding-scale, the way people use Novolog or regular insulin. The doctors here had ordered a regular insulin sliding scale but the patient wouldn't have anything to do with that. He said that it would "kill him."
I had talked to him then and figured out at least what he did at home; though I didn't agree with it, it made sense to him and we managed to get that one issue temporarily out of the way.
Today, he wanted to go home because he was "all through with us." Hmmmm....
Abnormal stress test.
Bloody stool.
Poorly controlled diabetes.
Sounded to me like he was just beginning: A long, slow, expensive spiral into further hospitalizations, heart failure, renal failure, and eventually a miserable death.
I explained that the cardiologist wanted to do a catheterization to fix the clogged blood vessels in his heart, but we wanted to first make sure he wasn't losing blood from an ulcer in his digestive tract.
See how simple that is? Just one little sentence. Does that make any sense to you? It does to me. I couldn't make it any plainer than that. We'd have him patched up and in a day or two he'd be just like new. New for him anyway, whatever that's worth.
The patient scoffed and said that I was talking down to him. "I didn't get to be 68 years old without knowing what's going on with me," he coughed out.
"So then, what do you think is going on with your heart?" I asked, and that set him off even though I was using a polite tone of voice.
"Nothing!" he barked, pulling on his pants. He was dressing himself in street clothes as we had our little chat. He added that further testing would just stress him out and his body couldn't take that. As if internal bleeding and cardiac ischemia provided his body with pleasant rest and relaxation. Oh well. That gave me what I needed to chart on him leaving AMA.
Then the GI resident came in; she asked me to leave so that she could talk with him. I said that I just wanted to ensure that the patient was making an "informed decision," and she asked me to leave again. I went to get the against-medical-advice form for him to sign.
I returned and set the paper on the bedside table between them. He looked up and said "what's this?" and I just replied "It's for you." The resident said that I could finish talking with him in a moment and I said that I was all done.
He left twenty minutes later.
That was yesterday. Chances are pretty good that he's had recurrent chest pain since then. It doesn't go away untreated. It just eventually gets worse. He's probably in another hospital. Maybe right now, as I write, he's pulling on his pants again.
Sunday, March 08, 2009
Saturday, March 07, 2009
Friday, March 06, 2009
Wide Screen Domestic Battleground
Soprano Patricia Petibon
Borzoi
Arizona
Bach organ tablature manuscript
Jesse Owens 1936 Olympics
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
A Cover of Coots
Life is short. Work is long. Time is long, too; infinitely so. But it's always running out. There's never enough of it.
I'm rarely in the mood to appreciate that. It royally pisses me off, actually.
Cats, unlike dogs, do not wag their tails because they are happy to see you. On the rare occasions when they do so, it's because they are smarter than you.
You can't see around corners, at least not without using a mirror. But with practice you can learn to hear around corners.
Everybody knows what the outside of the Sydney Opera House looks like, but not many would recognize a picture of its interior. I probably wouldn't.
There are never no more questions.
Like humans, birds tend to name their songs.
I'm rarely in the mood to appreciate that. It royally pisses me off, actually.
Cats, unlike dogs, do not wag their tails because they are happy to see you. On the rare occasions when they do so, it's because they are smarter than you.
You can't see around corners, at least not without using a mirror. But with practice you can learn to hear around corners.
Everybody knows what the outside of the Sydney Opera House looks like, but not many would recognize a picture of its interior. I probably wouldn't.
There are never no more questions.
Like humans, birds tend to name their songs.
Sunday, March 01, 2009
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