I'll see you in the ICU!

November mornings...

I was musing on the way to work today that I'm going to miss the crisp November mornings. The light has been amazing these past couple of days...the sky an indescribable shade of blue, the clouds black and pink, the trees are red and dropping their leaves--in Italian, we'd say "Mozzafiatto" (a breath flattener, or breathtaking, I guess. I like flattener of breath better.)

I have only two more day shifts to work before switching to nights, and though part of me is anxious to get away from the strange games women play (I think the night crew is a bit more laid back) I am going to greatly miss daylight.

The mediterranean is in my DNA, for crissakes...how am I to live without the sunshine?!

Those of you who know me know me well enough to understand this: I have a plan.

I plan to use the nights when I'm off to study for going back to school. I will pour over acute care/critical care books and get really really comfortable (hopefully) with the physiology of acute care.

It really bums me out to have been taking care of a very good looking young man (44) who was recovering from a surgery, and then coded, only to be lying in a vegitative state for the last week or so...it's so damned sad. ugh--I can see how this can happen to anyone, and I try to treat every one of my patients with the dignity, care and respect that I would want to be treated with, and what's more, that I would want anyone I care about to be treated with. I can see my own end, someday, lying in a vegitative state in a random hospital bed, full of bed sores, unable to move under my own power, no one giving two fucks about me being there, the nurses saying "doesn't she have any family?" and so forth. It's a damned shame how most of us come to an end, it is.

In short, it's depressing this job. Every day I wonder how people can do this for years and years. We develop a macabre sense of humor, to be sure, and we develop a sense that our time is numbered. We too shall walk down this path to the end of our own personal trails...

I guess I am looking forward to going back to school. In fact, I don't want to let the opportunity go by me and give up my spot at Columbia to risk not getting into another program. Screw it, I'll just suck it up and go back next year and be done asap.

Tomorrow I'm going to hang the thick dark purple (almost black) curtains I got for the downstairs bedroom, where we have to relocate to. It kinda creeps me out a bit to go back down there to sleep...that's my old bedroom, the one I slept in as a teenager, the one I snuck in and out of in the middle of the night, the one G and I moved back into when my mom grew very sick toward the end of her life...I can almost hear her padding around lightly upstairs, back and forth to the bathroom at night. That's going to be hard. I'm almost afraid I'll dream she cracks the door open and says something to me the way she used to. After she died, we moved upstiars and changed everyhing around. Her room became my study, lined with bookshelves, and my drafting table, and desk...and her sewing machine. The room I slept in as a baby is now my bedroom, but it gets WAY too much light for a day sleeper, so back downstairs I go.

Where's Anne Rice when I need her? This sort of thing would have appealed to me when I was about 21 years old...but at twice that age, I only dread the idea of day sleeping.

I have found a gorgeous (but expensive) pool for a morning swim, after my hectic shifts, and then I'll come home, walk the pooch, and settle in for a sleep.

I'm going to start collecting pictures of sunny beaches to put on my desktop at work--just to remind me. A terrace in Tuscany, with the orange glow glinting off the terra cotta tiles of neighboring roofs, the swaying palm on a white sand beach of some tropical island...it's only temporary, I tell myself. And everyone has had to do it. It's not the end of the world.

Still, my biggest fear is dying suddenly without having a chance to ever see the sun again. New York is 10 months away. Miles to go before I sleep and all that sort of stuff. PS--how do the Nordics handle this long dark winter crap?!

Enjoy the light, my friends.
:)

posted by sketchmonkey @ 9:38 PM