Me

Holiday weekends are always outliers in the emergency department, and coupled with the cooler temperatures and rain that we had, Thanksgiving was even more so. We weren’t busy, with our census hovering at around 60%. We didn’t get a lot of patients, but the ones we got were sick. In other words, we were a true emergency department and not just a free clinic for welfare queens, homeless bums, drug addicts, and illegal immigrants.

My shift was cancelled on Thanksgiving day because there were only 40 patients in a unit with the capacity of over 100. My wife and I had not made dinner plans because I was supposed to be working. We discussed having a freezer pizza, then decided to go out. All of the restaurants in the area were either closed or full, so we wound up driving to Orlando and eating at Maggiano’s. It was amazing.

I actually worked on Friday. A man came in complaining of flank pain. He had a history of kidney stones, so that’s what I worked him up for. It turns out that it wasn’t stones- when his CT scan came back, he was riddled with cancer.

Another man came in came in complaining of shortness of breath that we diagnosed with lung cancer.

At one point, we had a brief rush of patients during the 90 minutes that we were briefly understaffed. The morning nurses had gone home, and the ones scheduled for the afternoon hadn’t come in yet. I was covering 5 rooms for that period, and I was OK with that because three of them were empty. Then a line of ambulances came in to give me an asthmatic, a hip fracture, and a woman with a blood sugar of over 500. While that was going on, a woman flagged me down to unhook her father from telemetry so he could use the bathroom. He wasn’t my patient and I was quite busy, but it only takes a minute. I unhooked him and started to leave, and she stopped me to say, “He doesn’t walk well. I need you to walk him over there.”

I replied that I was too busy to do so and left to go see my patients, so she began yelling at me while following me across the department. I told her that she could walk him to the bathroom if she wanted to. It was at that point that she began yelling even louder and started telling me that I am a dick. She then said, “I am going to go get the doctor and tell him what an ass you are. I hope you get fired.”

My response was to call security. I told security to remove her to the lobby until she learns to control herself and act like an adult. Her husband chimed in at this point, saying “That’s my wife. She’s just worried about her father.” Security asked me if I wanted the husband removed as well, and I replied with: “No, he isn’t interfering with my patient care, just her.”

She ran over to one of the ED doctors and began complaining. The joke is on her. Doctors don’t run the hospital, nurses do. People think that because doctors write prescriptions and orders for patient care, that doctors are in charge, but that isn’t how hospitals work.

Anyhow, my charge nurse had to get involved at this point. He pulled me into the medication room and asked me what happened, then agreed with me that her following me around the ED was interfering with my care of my patients. They decided to teach me a lesson by having the father sign out of the hospital against medical advice. All because I was too busy taking care of sick people to be her personal butler. I guess she showed me.

On top of that, I had a patient with COVID, two with RSV, and the funniest one of all. A woman had gotten in a physical altercation with her roommate, and it was so funny I had to leave the room to keep from laughing. It went like this:

• Doctor: “So why are you here today?”
• Patient: “I got in a fight.”
• Dr: “How did that happen?”
• Pt: “My roommate locked me out of my room and said I wasn’t allowed back in because my pussy is too hairy, so I punched her in the face. She hit me in the face with the remote control, said ‘Merry fucking Christmas,’ then hit me in the face with a fruit basket. I fell and bit her on the toes, and that is how two of my teeth came out.”

It was at that point that I had to leave the room to keep from laughing.

That was my holiday weekend. Now to resume normal blogging…

We finally sold our old house and the closing is next week. I called the insurance company to cancel our homeowner’s policy, effective on the date of closing. They refused to do so, telling me that they can’t leave me without insurance unless I can prove that the house is insured elsewhere. Uh, it isn’t going to be my house any longer, so why would I continue to insure it? And, since the house is paid off and there is no mortgage holder, why is it any of their business if I choose to be uninsured and assume the risk myself? I am betting you that they won’t be so concerned about leaving me without insurance if I don’t pay the premium.

Doing the math, we have owned that house for a total of 15 years and we never filed a single claim against our insurance. It was paid off and mortgage free as of six years ago. My insurance is about $2000 per year. If I had chosen to assume the risk myself as soon as we paid it off, I would have (counting my normal investment returns of about 8 percent) an additional $15,000 in my bank account with which to take care of any problems.

Speaking of homeowner’s insurance scams- I wanted to insure my solar installation. I was kindly informed by my insurance company that it would cost $2500 per year just to insure my solar panels against hurricanes, but there would be a deductible of $10,000 for hurricane damage. They are otherwise covered under the rest of my homeowner’s policy with a deductible of $1,000. Uh, the solar panels themselves cost $20,000. So in the event of a hurricane (remember my panels are engineered for winds up to 140 mph) I would actually be losing money to insure them if they can make it at least 3 years without being damaged (The cost to insure them for 4 years is $10,000, plus the $10,000 deductible). Needless to say, I elected not to cover them. I think my risk of a 140 mph hurricane in the next 4 years is pretty low.

I also recently bought a new truck and traded in my old one. I tried to log into my insurance company to take care of things, and the system wants to send a 2FA text to my wife’s phone. She isn’t home. There is no option to select my phone number to log in. So now I have to call them and get stuck in phone tree hell.

My wife and I are spending our anniversary in the Bahamas. Her parents asked if they could come as well, so they are here with us.

My mother in law is the cheapest person I have ever met. Whenever we go places where anything is included, she gorges herself on it. I have seen her eat the salsa that comes with chips at a Mexican restaurant with a spoon and keep asking for more because “it’s free.”

I have one odd thing that I am picky about food. I won’t eat anything that anyone else has touched. Once you touch it, it’s yours. Like many people in the medical field, I am a bit of a germophobe.

With the stage set, we move on to today’s topic. We were at a restaurant for lunch that charges a flat fee for the meal. Whenever the appetizer came, it was vegetables, shrimp, and pita bread with various dipping sauces: hummus, baba ganoush, and tzatziki. I watched as the double and then triple dipped her food. I asked her not to do that, so I also watched as she took some tzatziki, licked her spoon clean, then used it to take some baba ganoush. At that point, I wasn’t going to eat any more of the appetizer.

When it came time to order entrees, you had a choice of things like filet mignon, broiled lobster, poache grouper, and other proteins. They came paired with sides. She ordered lobster and some grouper, but told the server not to bother bringing sides. Trying to “get her money’s worth,” you see.

When the meal arrived, she used her fingers to push food onto her fork, then licked her fingers clean.

It was really embarrassing. I get along with the MIL most of the time, but eating out with her is not on my list of favorite things to do.

Karma made an appearance. A woman who, a few years ago, made my life difficult at work wound up as my patient. When I worked with her, she made no disguise of the fact that she didn’t like me and did all she could to be a pain in the hindquarters. Why did she do that? Because I was hired to be her boss, and she felt that the position was rightfully hers because she had been there for a long time.

She has Stage 4 cancer and was in a great deal of pain. The cancer was attacking her nervous system, and although it was making her right side go numb, the only sensation it left her with on her right side was pain. You know what I did?

I treated her pain and gave her the absolute best care that I could, because I am a professional. I showed her and her family every bit of the kindness and compassion that she never showed me.

I went to the doctor and asked for an order to give her a full milligram of Dilaudid every hour as needed to control her pain. Cancer is a very painful and horrible way to die, and its victims deserve all of the care and compassion we can provide.

With that, I am leaving on vacation for a few days. Posting will be spotty.

A woman is in one of my rooms, and her oxygen saturation keeps dropping into the mid 70s. Every time I go in, she is still on the oxygen I placed on her, and her numbers rebound. Suspecting foul play, I watch her from where she can’t see me. As soon as she thinks I am gone, she takes it off.

I go in and confront her, and she complains that it dries out her nose. I point out that it is humidified oxygen. She then tells me that she doesn’t want to wear it. I present her with a choice:

• You can wear it or
• refuse to wear it, and when you pass out, we will put a tube down your throat and a machine will breathe for you, or
• Sign out against medical advice

Those are your choices. The next words out of her mouth were “I want to speak to your boss. You are rude.”

I responded with “I am trying to keep you alive. I make no apologies, but let me go get the charge nurse.”

The charge nurse walked in and told her “You are not going to be taking off that oxygen.”

She went online and gave the hospital a one star review and specifically named me as being mean.

People, I swear.

The reason my posts for the last couple of days have not been topical is due to one simple fact: I am avoiding the news and reading current events. The wall to wall coverage of the election just got to be too much. It’s a constant barrage of ads for Amendment 3, Amendment 4, and a slew of attack ads for one politician or another.

I miss the political ads where candidates put forth their political positions, but those days are gone. Instead, the only real issue for Democrats is abortion. The only issue for Republicans is that they hate Democrats. The only issue for Harris is that she isn’t Trump. Then there are the ugly comments from both sides, each side calling the other names, then the left complains that they are being attacked.

I just couldn’t do it anymore, so I decided to clean my guns, clean the house, load some magazines, and get a bunch of projects done around the house. I haven’t turned on a TV in over a week.

The election only has two possible outcomes:

1. The cheat steals the election, tosses Trump in a camp, and begins their 2025 revenge tour, or
2. (less likely) Trump wins, the left loses their collective shit, and the riots start

After this week’s post where a fellow nurse reported my so-called (in her opinion) poor patient care, I got a surprise email telling me that I am being promoted, effective Saturday. This was a huge surprise, being that I was just promoted in August. While I am sure that this was not related in any way to my argument, it just feels like icing on the cake.

I am waiting to see what kind of raise comes with this.

No, it isn’t a management position, but it does mean more money and prestige.

The reason that posting has been lacking a bit is that it’s been a busy week. Let me recap it for you:

There are seven days in a week, of course. Three of them were spent at work this week. The first day this week turned out being a 14.5 hour shift because of a stroke patient, a fellow nurse who used to be a supervisor trying to bulldoze me, and a little thing we will talk about in a future post called permissive hypertension.

The second day this week was a 14 hour shift because I had some relatively sick people and the nurse taking my patients was late doing so due to her trying to find a sitter for her Baker Act.

The third day, they cut me an hour early because the census was low and they didn’t want me to slide into overtime.

Then my days off wound up being filled with personal details- the house that we used to live in is now under contract. We first listed it for sale back in early March after replacing the floors and the air conditioner. We tried selling by owner, no luck, only one showing that never called us back. We tried one agent who didn’t even get us a single showing. The second agent had multiple showings, and we finally sold. Now I can use the money to get a pool, an outdoor kitchen, and pay off half of the mortgage on my current house. Speaking of mortgages-

We have been trying to refinance the house we live in, because our original loan was for 8%, and we got a refi offer for 4.8%. We close on that this week.

I have also been working on the network of the house. If you will remember, I wanted to put a UPS on the network. The one that’s in the house as built was supposed to have a 28 inch media panel. It didn’t- it had a 20 inch panel, and that was too small to fit all of the stuff I needed. So I pulled out the old one, put in a 30 inch panel, and wired the network in the house with a MOCA system. That 30 inch panel let me put in the modem, the MOCA converter, the master mesh node, a couple of network switches, and the UPS.

While installing the MOCA system, I had to use a cable tracer to see which cables went to which rooms. There are 8 cables coming into the house- one for each bedroom, one in the living room, one to the media panel, one to the bonus room upstairs, and one that I still don’t know where it goes. I put a cable tracer on the lines, and three of them were showing open circuit. I started investigating, and this is what I found:

The one in the master bedroom was hidden behind a phone jack:

The one in the upstairs bonus room was simply not connected. An inspection camera revealed that the cable was stapled to the studs above and below the box.

Still, I have it all done, and the MOCA system is now installed, so my mesh network now has an Ethernet backhaul, which increases network speed and reliability.

Then I spent a day this week going to my grandson’s soccer game.

All of those things have taken quite a bit of time, and left me quite sleep deprived. There was one night that I had to make do with only three hours’ sleep. So Sunday is a day off. I am going to get caught up on sleep, head to a diner and get a rib sticking breakfast, then spent the day with my bride doing nothing.

With all of that, there was precious little time for blogging or even reading the news. I am looking forward to vacation. I have a vacation coming up, where I am spending a week in Bimini for some well earned time off. Until then, life goes on.

This week has been pleasant in Florida, with temperatures being typical for a Florida Autumn. The highs have been in the high 70s to low 80s, lows in the upper 50s and low 60s. Pleasant breezes carrying air that is, for the gulf coast, rather low in humidity.

It has triggered some strong, pleasant childhood memories. I remember most vividly a fall day spent watching my mother decorate the house for fall with expanding paper pumpkins and other assorted fall and Halloween decorations, the windows open and cool fall breezes blowing through the house as dinner cooked in preparation for my father coming home from work. It is one of the more pleasant memories from my childhood. I still fondly remember those decorations to this day, 50 years later.

Now, the child is gone. My mother and father are gone, the paper pumpkins are gone. The country that I grew up in is gone. All that remains are the memories of a time that no longer exists in the head of a man who now is old enough to get free coffee at Denny’s and has grandchildren who are older than I was in those memories of an autumn long gone.

I had a tough week at work. Because the weather has been so mild, people haven’t been coming in to the ED for the stupid reasons that they usually do come in for, so we haven’t been as busy as usual. I have been in the critical zones, and my patients have been truly sick. More than half of my patients have been admitted to the ICU, and that makes for a heavy workload and a lot of thinking about life and death.

Combine the battles with death and the upcoming anniversary of my mother’s death and father’s birthday, and you have what I suppose is the reason why I am feeling a bit- nostalgic.

My wife, without even knowing the memories and thoughts in my head, has decorated the house for autumn. It makes me content. I don’t think of myself as an old man, yet. I’m not old enough to be a boomer, but I still feel older every day.

It’s a perfect metaphor. I am in what is probably the October of my life, and missing the time when I was a child. I can feel the chill of an approaching winter, can you?