Can I tell you something?

Do you know? I love my job. Can you tell? I like going to work. Did you hear? I love taking care of these people.

I went to visit my Norsk today. He went to a different unit after spending some time in the ICU. He's pretty confused, seeing things, saying strange things; he looks pretty beat up, too. He has a tube coming out of the spot above his eyebrow to drain whatever might be building pressure behind his eye. He's got a gigantic clot of blood underneath his nose and a few cuts from surgery. But he's breathing easily. He's alive. He recognized me when I visited him. He held my hand and made that noise of recognition. "You work here, too?"

Haha. Oh, I love my Norwegian man. His wife is doing quite well. Sometimes she laughs at the things he says, cause they're so weird. Sometimes it's laugh or cry. When you choose to laugh, it's actually funny. She said she slept well last night. Rest for the weary. Who came up with that? Thank You.

I hung a red sheet up in my window, and it makes everything in my room warm and red. I am definitely going to make a habit of that. And we made it to sushi tonight. And it was good.

I'm trying to stay up a little because I have nights M,T,W next week. But I'm tired. It's only 11:30.

death

Three people died on my floor this weekend. I took care of all of them.

One was even yellower than yellow man. He was mustard colored. His liver stopped working completely. And his fingertips were black and hard - necrotic tissue. And they smelled awful. He was unresponsive, but was breathing through a trach on his own. His family took him off curative cares. It's called comfort cares. And he lived for five or six days after that. They had begun to wonder if they had made the right choice. He died on his wife's birthday just after my shift was over and before my next one started.

The other man was one I talked about before - the sickest man I ever met. You know, if you're in the medical field, you hear people say, "I could just tell when I saw him; it was cancer." or "I knew he wasn't going to make it. He had that look about him."

I get it now.

He made it home before he died. That was what they all wanted.

I didn't get attached to the other lady. It's a good thing, too, because hers was the first and only body I saw dead. I was in the room when she died. She was on comfort cares, too, but her family wasn't around when she died. They had gone out to eat. And didn't come back for a few hours after her death and didn't answer their phones. She had been seizing all day long, the nurses think. Her eyes were rolling back and forth, back and forth, slowly, slowly, all day long. She appeared to be in a lot of pain. And we went to clean her up, and it all happened so fast. Body processes I won't tell you about. I was amazed at the nurses I was working with. They were incredible. It happened at six pm, just before my shift's end at 7:30.

That morning, I had been teary-eyed. Everything I was doing was making me cry. So I took a minute. I thought that's all it would take, but when I got in the bathroom, I couldn't stop crying. I was beyond the point where I could wash my face and look normal. So this girl opened the bathroom door - she didn't know I was in there. And she was totally cool with the fact that I was crying so hard that I was hiccuping. And we talked about death. Cause she's a nursing aid on that floor. Has been for like...three years or something. And I was a little more composed until I went in the room of mustard man with my preceptor to clean him up. And we talked about death more. Death process. Death paperwork. Family coping. Personal coping. Still wanting to come to work, even though there are hard things. And how getting through this and coping with this job says a lot about a person. "If you can do this, you can do anything," she said.

I'm okay, really. Yeah, I think I'm okay.

PS: Sushi fell through.

discovery

Here is an unorganized something.

I had a root canal. The whole experience made me feel like a little kid who had just pooped his pants. I had this huge rubber thing attached to my face exposing one tooth. And I couldn't suck in my spit, so I was drooling all over. And I couldn't talk. I kind of grunted to the dentist lady so she could suction out my spit. On the ceiling, which I stared at for a good majority of the 90 minute visit, there appeared a chart about the acidity and sugar content of various beverages. "Sip All Day - Get Tooth Decay". Crafty. It was interesting for about seven minutes. Then I wished there was some kind of art up there.

As I was feeling exposed, awkward and abused, I started thinking about going home to bed. And how ugly I felt. And then I started thinking about my roommates. They were going to go to the cities and help out their youth group. And I could ride along if I found a place to stay. Earlier, I had called my friend Matt, whom I barely know. "If I happened to come to the cities tomorrow, would I have a place to stay?" He figured he could work something out. But by this time, I was thinking, "I don't want to go. I want to go to bed."

And that's when I realized that if I went to bed, I would feel depressed all day long. And even though I didn't really know what would happen if I went to the cities, I figured it would be better than being depressed, so I hung out with Matt and his grandma in her big, old and wonderful house. And I laughed so hard I peed my pants a little.

In other news, yellow man might have cancer around his liver. He's not really that yellow anymore, though. He looks pretty good actually. Last week, I saw a man sicker than I've ever seen anybody. It was eerie. Cancer sucks. It hit me.

I met someone with what's called pure red cell aplasia (aplasia = no growth) a long time ago. This part has been a long time coming. He said that at the time of his diagnosis, sometime in 2007, I think, there had not existed 100 people diagnosed with his disease. It is that rare, and that poorly researched. And he was in a clinical study in order to test the efficacy of new drugs on his condition. It's a type of anemia (you could say anemia means low/ineffective red blood cells) related to the depletion of erythroblasts (the cells that make the red blood cells). A lot of times, when people have anemia, it's because something is killing their red cells or because their red cells aren't working right. This condition was different, because the problem was up higher, you might say, in the process of the formation of the cells.

I feel like life is coming around again. I catch myself smiling for no reason. And I like that. Also, I find myself telling the same stories over and over again, and asking the people around me, "Did I tell you this?" because I can't remember who I told and who I didn't. In fact, I was just going to write something about already mentioning red cell aplasia. I feel like I did.

After all was said and done, the dentist cost $600. But my tooth doesn't hurt anymore. So I guess someone would say that it was worth it. I haven't decided yet. I think dentistry would be a horrible job. Nurses make people feel better. Dentists make people feel worse. Doctors do too, sometimes, but for the most part, the people aren't awake during the worst stuff. It's not fun to feel your head vibrate as a drill goes into your tooth and feel the spatterings of tooth and smell the drill smell. At one point, my bottom eyelid went numb. That was a weird feeling. I'm glad I'm not a dentist.

I'm going to eat Sushi with a band called Bread of Stone today. Yeah...I'm that cool.

Munificent wrote to me. Did I ever tell these people about Munificent? I guess I'll have to save that for a later post, because at the moment, I'm using someone else's computer in someone else's house as I wash my clothes (and someone else's clothes) in someone else's washer and dryer. My friends let me use their house even though they're not here. I thought that was really nice. And I'm eating their popcorn. Truly, does life get better than this?