Squeaker

Today, Jack asked me: "Mommy, where does snot come from?"

I'm sure it is meaningful that he is observant enough to wonder, and curious enough to ask.

******

Last night, I turned off my computer and went to kiss Aimee goodnight. She was sleeping peacefully. She has never been a solid sleeper. She was four before she slept all night. For about two years, from age three to about five, she spent most of the night on a crib mattress next to our bed. Anyway, last night, I tucked her in and went upstairs (she sleeps downstairs) to brush my teeth. All of a sudden I heard her crying, hard. Hysterically, like some stranger had come in through her window and tried to kidnap her. I went back downstairs and found her in the bathroom. I asked her what was wrong.

"I don't know!" she wailed. Her eyes were open but she was very confused.

"Did you have a bad dream?"

"No!" she cried.

"Are you sick?"

"No!"

"Do you have to pee?"

"No! I don't know!"

She paced and cried. She's done this before but never this frantically. I have learned when she is like this to step back and let her go, and just watch to make sure she is safe.

She went upstairs and went to Jack's room, then ours, then the bathroom. She stopped by the toilet and then carried on. No amount of soothing would calm her down. Trevor picked her up and held her like a baby, but she was down again in 10 seconds wandering and scratching her belly and crying. We made her a little bed on the couch because sometimes when she has a bad dream she likes to sleep closer to us. She laid down for not even 10 seconds and resumed her pacing. Finally, Trevor convinced her to sit on the toilet and she peed, and kind of woke up. She calmed considerably, and she and Trevor decided she was hot and needed cooler jammies. They went downstairs to her dresser, on top of which is the hamster cage. He turned on the light, and there was little Aloysius, sitting on the open door of his cage, looking as if he was about to make a break for it.

I think we dodged a bullet there. Five minutes in the wilds of our house and he would have been cat food. My theory is that Aimee was overtired and the hamster was being noisy, and he disturbed her sleep, a problem compounded by the discomfort of her full bladder. She woke up enough to know that something was really wrong, but not enough to know what to do about it. I think she tried to fix the problem by addressing the hamster situation (how, and to what end, I'm not sure). In any case, once she peed, and we secured Hammie's house, she slept the rest of the night, on the couch, like the proverbial baby.

So now, in addition to the concerns I have about teenaged sex, and the drugs being dealt behind their elementary school, and pedophiles, and the sorry state of her education fund, and the damage I am doing by working full-time instead of parenting, and the risk of leukemia and brain tumours, now, I am worried that she sleepwalks and will wander out to the road in the middle of the night, or fall down the stairs, or release the hamster, whose tiny little head I will find, say, on the breakfast table one morning, a present from the evil cat. I have no doubt that the cat's just biding her time, waiting for an opportunity to mangle any or all of us.

Anyway, welcome to parenthood. I hear she comes by it honestly... her father has been known to do strange things in his sleep. Hopefully tonight is better. I sleep with one ear to the door now. Poor kid.

Trauma

We had a code at work today. I was heading to the chemo room anyway, and I heard, "Code Blue, Chemo Treatment Room. Code Blue, Chemo Treatment Room". My doc, Dr. M, followed along behind me and we hurried up to see if we could do anything. You almost never can help, by the time you get there, there are a million people and you end up being a rubbernecker with no useful function.

Alas, today, my uselessness was not to be. It was a patient of mine and Dr. M's. He was on the floor and a resident was doing CPR. I was the only nurse who had ever met his family, so I got the difficult task of escorting them to a quiet room away from the chaos. I asked them if they would prefer company or updates on his condition. They preferred updates, so I went back to the mayhem.

Turns out, the family became a little concerned when he was taking a long time in the bathroom. After a few minutes and some unsuccessful tries to get a response from behind the locked door, they broke in and found him, blue, on the floor. The CPR was started right there on the bathroom floor. Dr. M and a social worker went in to sit with the family. It wasn't long before the ICU team showed up and intubated him and shocked his heart. After a good twenty minutes, they got a weak rhythm, and after a lot more drugs he was stable enough to transfer to a stretcher and take him to the ICU. The social worker took the family. I went back to work. The chemo room was left to clean up the mess. Someone put his dentures and his shoe, just one, that was found on the floor, into a bag and took it to the family.

I would be surprised to hear he was still alive right now. He was down so long. Who knows how long he had been in arrest before they started CPR. He was blue. Literally. I have seen some dead people before, but never one so blue.

I am so sad for the family. The patient was probably dead before he hit the floor, but his family will live with the image of him, blue, on the floor of a bathroom that wasn't even his own. I think they were spared the sight of his shirt open and tubes hanging out of his mouth and a central line, all bloody, stuck in his neck. I'm sure he was clean and covered with a sheet before they were allowed to see him. But the shock of seeing him like that will stick with them forever.

I can't stop thinking about it. I assume it's adrenaline that kicks in when you are in the middle of something that dramatic. The nurse who found him was shaking, red and blotchy. She is a seasoned veteran, has been involved in hundreds of codes in her career. I'd bet she never had one like this. I was shaking for quite a few hours, and I didn't really have a lot to do with it. It's something you can't really imagine, no matter how many episodes of ER you've watched, unless you've been there. You can only truly debrief with those who were.

It was especially shocking because we work in an outpatient facility. Things like this just don't happen. Oddly, our patients are relatively healthy. They have chronic illnesses, not heart attacks (which this probably was). We are prepared for chemo reactions, which can be life-threatening, but this guy had finished his chemo and was heading home. When I got back to my desk, his chart was on the top of my stack.

Anyway, I'm feeling the tiniest bit PTSD tonight. I guess an adrenaline hangover lasts awhile. It's pretty hard to let go of all the drama and emotion and just go back to work. It's a good thing it was 4:30 pm, because I wasn't all that productive afterwards.

It's days like this that make it absolutely impossible to leave work at work. I will lie awake tonight for a good long time trying to banish the image of my patient on the floor being pounded on by the code blue team. And if I'm feeling badly, how's the nurse that found him? How are his family? The sight of his wife and daughter sitting there, absolutely stricken, fearing the worst, might be the only image more endurng than that of the patient. Tonight they're probably making funeral plans.

I could easily develop a drinking problem. In fact, I probably have one. A nice glass of Irish whisky is about all that stands between me and some sleep right now. It gives me perspective. I'm going to get some perspective now.

Stuff

Since the hockey game SUCKS, I thought it might be time to update the story of our lives.

We have new cars. Well, one is new and one is new-to-me. We traded our giant, socially irresponsible, gas-guzzling van for a new Mazda 3 for Trevor and a5-year-old Mazda Protege for me. Mine was extra exciting, despite its silver four-door-ed-ness because it has Command Start, which the dealership didn't know about. I can't imagine using it very often, because I really think that letting a car idle is almost as obnoxious as driving one that is too big for your needs (there is no livelihood that I can think of that would require a Hummer in its practice). And besides, I'm cheap. And it was free. The car is great, though. It saves me an hour a day in commuting (half of which I spend in bed, despite my best intentions to get up at the usual time and be productive), and interestingly, I suddenly feel like a real grown-up, rather than a kid just playing house. I'm independent. Adults have cars, and now I have one. I take my briefcase to my car and drive to work and home. Sometimes I even get to pick up the kids from daycare for a change. I must be an adult. Good realization, just in time for my thirty-fifth birthday.

We have new pets. One of our doggies died in December, and the other was on the block (but I changed my mind at the last minute) and the kids lobbied successfully for a replacement. The school hamster had many babies, and Aimee saved her money and watched pet store flyers, and did some comparison shopping, and got a hooley-dooley cage and a free hamster from school. Along with its brother. At least we hope it's a brother. So now, we have a dog (Basil), a cat (Boozer), a fish (unnamed and about five years old) and two dwarf hamsters (Aloysius and Findley). Aloysius (or "Allowishis" as Aimee spells it) is pretty cute and reasonable friendly. Findley is a little more viscious and always slightly greasy. They live in separate cages now and are extremely cute and quite industrious and fascinating to watch. Findley also has gummy eyes today, so I hope he isn't sick. I wash my hands a lot these days.

Work is good. I am quite enjoying my job these days. I am molding my doctor into someone who is good to work with and in the meantime, I am liking the patients and learning a lot. Chemo is quite a bit different from radiation. The patients are a lot sicker, so there are lots of professional challenges. I've also been accepted to graduate school in the fall, so that will cut into my blogging time even more (sorry). Oh, and I was appointed to the executive of our provincial professional organization for oncology nurses to be the editor of a provincial newsletter. Oh, and I passed a major exam to become one of the five nurses at work to become Ceritfied Oncology Nurses (or certifiable, maybe). Apparently it's a huge deal in the oncology nursing community. It's been busy around here.

Jack has had a dreadful school year in kindergarten, with an unenthusiastic teacher and a huge class. As an example, his class got to watch the finale of American Idol during school time. Excellent use of teaching time, don't you think? They got an earful from me and I got the impression that the principal hadn't known about it until my email and that the teacher was directed to apologize and promise it would not happen again. Very satisfying, if it wasn't such a perfect example of the substandard education he's gotten this year. Remarkably, his hideous behaviour stage seems to be fading. We have more civilized days than horrid ones lately, and although he talks incessantly, he hasn't called me a stupid idiot in a while, and actually spends more time playing than isolated for making bad choices. Aimee has turned into a really nice little girl too (it was touch and go there for a while with her too). She had her eighth birthday last month, and one of her friends gave her a toy that she already had. She thanked her politely and was suitably grateful, not mentioning that she already had one. Jack pipes up, "Aimee, you already have that!" and she, looking mortified, says, "Shut up, Jack, I do not!" just to save her friend's feelings. It gives me hope that they might turn out to be civilized adults. Tonight was their last karate class, and Aimee is still in gymnastics, and both are in swimming.They are active kids.

Trevor finished school and graduated with distinction. He seems most relieved to be done, if not to be back to work. I think he secretly enjoyed it, though. He occasionally talks about going back for a grad degree. In physics. I might have to mock him mercilessly.

My spare time has been consumed with sewing and biking. I started a quilt, which will end up small and pathetic if it ever gets finished, because I discovered I do not have the patience to cut fabric into precisely measured little shapes and sew them back together again. I would like to finish it, though. Just to say I did. Then, I was in Old Navy and saw all sorts of cute clothes that looked like they were made of $0.50 worth of fabric, so I went and bought a few remnants and have so far made a skirt (for about $2.50), complete with zipper, a pair of pajama shorts and a pair of pjs for Aimee (which were originally for me but they didn't fit). I made up my own patterns, too, which is remarkable for such a spatially-challenged person. For exercise these days, after my triumph at the half marathon relay I ran in April (6.5 miles in 59:39 - with my fastest mile done in 8:04 - a personal record) I am sick of running, so I have been biking. I am riding in the MS Bike Tour in August which is a 185 km round trip done over 2 days to raise money for MS. I will publish the link to my donation page, if anyone wants to sponsor me. So I need to prepare my butt for 4-5 hours of cycling for each of two days in a row. It's harder than I thought. Pretending I'm Lance Armstrong (or chasing him) helps.

So that's why I haven't written much lately. I'm busy and tired. Now I'm going to watch the last five minutes of Game Two of the Stanley Cup Final and mourn the passing of the Oilers' fantastic run. Trevor predicts that Roley will make a miraculous recovery and play Game 3. I sure hope he's right.