07 April 2008
28 March 2008
18 February 2008
PLACES I HAVE BEEN
Map Legend: 6%, 16 of 263 Territories
Maroon 
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PLACES I WILL GO
Map Legend: 8%, 23 of 263 Territories
Yellow Maroon 
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02 January 2008
14 August 2007
07 August 2007
Fun With Awards
Aw, shucks! My best homey over at My Quotidian Mysteries has given me a
"My dear friend Emunah over at Yahweh of Emunah
is a terribly brave person. She works in a psych unit
of a hospital and regularly faces really challenging
people in her work. She loves and cares for people
who hallucinate and cut themselves and get lost in
the dark corridors of their minds. She's also starting
training to become a nurse and she's facing that new
challenge with aplomb. Head on over to her site and
give her lots of love. She's a blessing to me! In fact,
she is my best friend and the godmother of my daughter.
Talk about BRAVE!"
Thanks, Laura! It's funny how each person has things that come naturally, but that are daunting for others. I mean, I don't necessarily feel like I'm being brave in the work that I do, even though I've gotten bitten, head butted, hit, kicked, spit on, had lots of things thrown at me, and been stabbed with a pen. Part of the appeal in this kind of work is the excitement of not knowing when you might have to handle someone freaking out - and the sense of accomplishment when what you did really worked in helping someone calm down or not kill themselves. It's a skill that people develop over time, and several of my co-workers are rock stars at this. And you know, despite the potential for physical danger, the real risks I feel in this line of work are in attempts at therapeutic conversation with either a patient or parents: What to say, when to say it, how to say it, when not to say it, and what to do when you have no idea what to say.
On the other hand, there are areas of life in which I marvel at the level of bravery that others possess and I do not. For instance, people that get thrills from extreme sports. I don't really get this. I don't even like skiing the bunny hill because I'll end up on the ground, facing uphill, slipping wildly backward every time I try to get up. Nothing would show me up as more of a coward than the real risky stuff. People seek out activities that approximate the feeling of a near-death experience. Or at least the biggest adrenaline rush they can find: bungie jumping off a highway overpass, snowboarding over a cliff into a forest, skydiving into Pakistan, inventing bizarre human slingshots. On a more passive level, I honestly cannot even watch a movie that has an ounce of scariness in it. What a pansy! I like action and adventure, and some mild thrillers, but if it has any sort of horror aspect to it, I will absolutely leave. Can't handle it. Yet there are so many people who think: "Bring it on. The scarier the better." This is the kind of bravery that completely escapes me. Not to mention military combat. Good grief.
I think I'm supposed to give the award to a few others, but I don't honestly know other bloggers, so I will have to do some research on this and get back to it.
Watching Mysteries Unfold
A few nights ago at work, just after the kids went to sleep, we looked out from our stretch of third-floor hospital windows to see the turn-about driveway and its parallel street along the hospital buildings packed with police cars and a trauma ambulance, all lights flashing. They had the area roped off with "Police Line: Do Not Cross" and surrounded a civilian car with all the doors flung open. The car sat immediately outside a main employee entrance, and the police circled it, shined those blinding flashlights inside, and scribbled notes furiously on their clipboards. A police van arrived a few minutes later, and unloaded several plain-clothes detectives, with badges around their necks and gun holsters wrapped around their shoulders. They put on gloves, took dozens of billion-watt flash photographs, and measured distances with a little wheel on a stick handle. Combing the landscaping around the driveway, they didn't seem to come up with anything, either. Two of our teenage patients, just before their bedtime, had said that they had seen the police escort two people from the civilian car into the back of the police car. There was a heavy cluster of officers around this police car, too, and they seemed to be frequently talking to the people in the backseat. A young woman stood around the scene, and the police seemed to treat her as if she were a witness. At the height, there had to have been almost twenty uniformed and plain-clothes officers, in addition to the hospital security barricading the entrance doorway. After almost two hours of intermittent observation, we thought we saw a man lying motionless in a white t-shirt and green sweatpants, across the backseat of the civilian car, only partially visible once the police shined the mega-flashlight beam through the back window of the civilian car.
What do you do about having watched a scene like this? We don't get to be part of the investigative team, and, in fact, the people with knowledge of the actual events can't share a word of it. Hospital security made this very clear to us when we tried to ask about it. All that the news said the following day was that there had been a shooting, and that the man died later at the hospital. We live in a city that is generally peaceful & wholesome, existing, just the way I like it, almost entirely below the radar of national notice.
But we humans just seem to have such a thirst for drama, and a morbid curiosity about the details of other's violent destruction. Yet unlike movie thrillers and mystery novels, in life we almost never have all the information, whether it directly concerns ourselves or not. Watching a real mystery unfold, we may never have more than a few clues or soundbites or snapshots to go on, like Rosencranz and Guildenstern from Hamlet. It's an opaque dialectic, and we scrounge meaning as we go.
29 July 2007
Psych Blurb
The other day, on one of our locked adult units, the charge nurse had a panic attack and disappeared for over an hour. Admissions and transfers were piling up to the extent that the emergency room director came up to the unit to see what the heck was causing all the congestion. And the staffing meeting among other charge nurses became so contentious that there was shouting and chaos. The psych dept director had to come sort it out himself. People, people...this is why they say that there is a very fine line between psych patients and psych staff.
19 July 2007
Oliver Sachs
Today in Chemistry lab while we were measuring the heat of combustion from a burning pecan, someone brought up the drug L-Dopa, and then we talked about the book/movie Awakenings. . I forgot how much I love Oliver Sachs, an amazing neurologist and writer, especially The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. This is one of my early influences toward brain chemistry and psychiatry. Such fascinating true stories!
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