Last time I wrote I said that my writing life had degenerated into chart notes. At this point, chart notes don't really register for me anymore, but I spend an inordinate amount of time on to-do lists. I think that to-do lists are really almost as good as a real journal. I write them in my journal, actually. Looking back at the lists of yesteryear reminds me what my priorities were back then, what was on my mind, and what I still have not freakin' done! But, I digress.
An update is on order. It feels like my lens on the world has a new filter on it since I last wrote. My Dad died of ALS on Christmas Day, 2013. It still feels very surreal to write that. I was expecting his death for so long, and I am still shocked that he died. ALS is universally fatal, so when he was diagnosed in May of 2011, you would think that I would have started expecting him to die. But it was a very gradual change in thinking. At first, there was just no way that he could die. My Dad was a superhero, after all. He was super strong and super smart and super loving. He loved me since the moment I was born, refusing to leave my side when the nurses took me away to the nursery. He loved me in a way that was so powerful, so unconditional, that I don't expect to ever feel that kind of love again. But, over the course of his getting sicker, I did start to expect his death, in a way. In his last six months of life, he would have breathing crises periodically that were so bad that each one seemed at the time like it could be the thing that killed him. In August he was hospitalized with several pulmonary emboli, which can be fatal to people without pre-exitsting respiratory compromise. But he survived all of that. So, when he really was dying, even in the last hours when he had decided he was going to die, there was still a grain of doubt. We had been down this road before, and made it through alive, so would that last day really be the end? It was. He died on Christmas at about 7pm. I will always, always remember those last hours with him. He was his truest and best self. He really had nothing left to lose, and he was the kind of person who, in that case, just let all his love hang out. He told us that he had only ever given us drops of love, but that he had oceans of love for us. Imagine: all that love that I felt from him, my whole life, and it was just a glimmer of what was there. Maybe I'll understand how that's possible when I'm a parent. I miss him. I learned so much from him, and I learned so much from his dying too. It's all precious.
I spent a lot of time in 2013 in Tennessee and flying back and forth, and being in Seattle wishing I was in Tennessee (agonizing, really, over not being there), and being in Tennessee worrying about my life in Seattle. It was hard on my marriage, and I worried about my job. In retrospect, my job is great and all but in the face of being with my dad in his last months, my job can go jump off a cliff. The irony here is that my dad was a nurse, and he never called in sick. In fact, one of the few times I can remember him not going to work was when he was a patient on his own unit (an ICU). So I think it freaked out me and him both a little, that I was taking FMLA and not going to work. Although I'm still very dedicated to my job-and I love it-being forced to take time off to participate in the huge moments of my own life was a growth experience in itself. I think I came away with a more nuanced view on the trite phrase 'work-life balance.' It's not so much a balance of two equal but opposite weights. It's more like a weaving, back and forth, of threads of my identity.
I still work at the same hospital. I still love the patients, and I keep enjoying and respecting my co-workers more and more, too. Today we had a major 'bed dystocia' on postpartum, so I had a chill day just taking care of one mother-baby couplet on L&D for 8 hrs. In my time since I've started I feel like I've had some bad, bad things happen and at the time I hated it, but in retrospect, I feel like I've become a little bit seasoned. One of the gifts of working in a high risk facility is that I see rare things that I might not otherwise see until year 30 of my nursing career somewhere else. So, 3 years in and God knows what's to come!
Bringing this up to the present:
Yesterday I went canoeing with a friend from work. Every time we hang out we have some unexpected adventure, and I LOVE IT. Our very first time hanging out we went on an epic bike adventure to Canada. We laughed, she cried, we soaked in rain and hot tubs and bummed a ride and changed a flat and generally had a freaking blast. The second time we hung out, we stayed out drinking at a very cool, secret feeling bar until WAY past my bedtime. I was planning to stay until about 7pm, and I looked up at one point and realized it was almost midnight! My abs hurt from laughing so much the next day, and I also learned that I am far from the only L&D nurse who has some food phobias resulting from her job. Scrambled eggs smell like amniotic fluid and it makes me want to gag. Other nurses are hung up on raw meat, correlations not to be mentioned here on this innocent blog.
So yesterday: I rode my bike out to a mall where we ate approximately 30 dumplings between us. Then, we drove over to the university boat rental place, where you can rent a canoe, sail boat or rowboat for $7 a day. As we were launching our canoe, Bekah's keys fell in the water. We puzzled over what to do for a second before Bekah borrowed a fish net from the office. After about 20 min of poking around in the duckweed and silt with the fishnet: no keys. That's when the real fun started! I got to jump right into Lake Washington and dig around with my toes, like some sort of terribly orchestrated archeological dig. Found: a lot of cheap beer cans. I got it on good authority that canoeing at universities is also known as caboozing. Other things I found: a pair of hip sunglasses with leaches on them, lots of sticks, a dead fish, and the KEYS! Honestly, the rest of the canoeing was very beautiful, magical even. But it wouldn't have been as fun without getting to jump in!
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