Juxtapose

In VA for the holidays, with 65 degree weather (warmer than the inside of our apartment, generally), hash brown casseroles, jello salad molds, and lots of tea. It's been wonderful. And if I don't reach the ten pound weight gain mark that I'm supposed to hit by twenty weeks along by the end of this trip, I don't know what in the world will make me gain weight.

I've had fun giggling at the Super Christian vibe down here, as well as the way every house here seems to be decorated with holly berries, wreaths, and excessive lights. For someplace so warm and lacking in snow, it looks like a winter wonderland straight out of the North Pole. The decorations on the houses of New Englanders don't even compare to the lengths that have been reached by desperate southerners praying for a small Christmas flurry to miraculously appear despite sunny skies: wreaths, fake green garlands draped everywhere, blow-up Santas in every yard, and icicle lights hanging from dry-as-a-bone gutters. You can tell, up north, that New England is already sick of the three feet of snow they've gotten while we've been down here simply by comparing their one feeble wreath on the door of the house to these houses down here.

Of course I love being a part of the family most of all. Christmas day was spent with the Van Der Hydes on the farm, with forty people crammed into the kitchen, waiting to go around the table to get food. Shortly after grace was said, and about four feet from where I was standing, a metal beam in the basement had slowly rusted out on the bottom and gave way, dropping the floor about two inches and producing a bang and shudder that sounded and felt like someone had either hit the house with a car or the floor would completely cave in. You just wish something that exciting happened at *your* Christmas party. After that, we ate and sat watching the little kids open presents in a living room room crammed full with one set of grandparents, ten of their children, thirty or so of their offspring, and then one and a half (the pookie in my belly is the half) of the kids' offsprings' offspring. That evening we came home to supper with my Mom-in-law's family, including Gommie, who was sprung from the nursing home for the day and lay comfortably on the living room couch, eating Utz party mix out of its barrel and looking incredibly cute and happy to be in her own home for the day. It was a lovely Christmas.

Today we spent the day working on a complicated puzzle at Gramma's kitchen table with Gramma and my dad-in-law. It was one of the more wonderful, relaxing events of the trip. It reminded me of the niceness of sitting around at your grandparents' table in a kitchen that still looks the same way it probably did in the sixties, and doing pretty much nothing except for talking. It reminded me a lot of my Yiayia's house and how it would probably be if she were still around. After that, we went to the old tobacco plantation that Mark's maternal grandparents still own and rent out and we spent a few minutes taking pictures of those things you never see in Massachusetts - ancient tobacco barns with vines and trees growing on and through and around them, giant untrimmed trees in front yards, and acres and acres of farmland. On the way home from there, we stopped to take a few pictures in front of the church we got married in almost two years ago. Married two years, engaged nine months, dated nine months, met a year before that. It's all gone very fast, but what an incredibly wonderful thing it has been. I love my second family and the man who decided to bring me into it.

Better days.

Okay, so I seriously don't see many people die. Well, I do. But where I come from, people "code," go flatline, arrest, whatever, and then the troops rush in and everything is all adrenaline and movement and you either work it until the docs say it's too late (but sometimes it can be a two-hour ordeal, depending on the patient and the doctor), or the patient is like, Oh, hey, scratch that, I'm still here. I still don't understand, from a Christian standpoint, how that works - that limbo of soul - is it here or there or what? I'll ask that one in the heavenlies, I guess.

So today I saw my first, bonafide person expire in that way that looks most natural but seems most unnatural to me, cardiac-surgical nurse, revasculizer extraordinaire, worker of a floor where people generally get better or get shipped to hospice to give up the ghost. The few times I have seen them expire on the telemetry monitors there has been family present, and I didn't go and gape at the scene like I wanted to. This time I had had this guy as my patient three days ago, he was talking and up and around and cute as a button, but pretty much ready to stop having trouble breathing and carrying around an o2 tank everywhere with him, one of those "do not resuscitate, do not intubate" types. I really don't blame him, but I kinda thought he'd go home and die there sometime way later in the future. I kinda wish he had gone home. All the same, his family left a few hours before he started having extreme difficulty breathing and he started circling the drain so quickly that even though they called right away, the family was still en route while he was passing away. When I went in to check if the nurse caring for him was doing okay, I saw our critical care educator sitting there, as well as a bunch of other newer nurses standing around, holding this guy's hands, and eventually his breathing got slower and slower and his heart rate did too, and eventually they just took of the o2 mask that was the little thread holding him there, and it was over within a minute.

I guess I'm a little hormonal, all things considered, but my eyes welled up because all I could think of was that this happens all the time, all over the place, and people don't even know who God is. Like, what He is about. That He is so full of grace for our most vulnerable times like that of death. I like to hope that he took this guy by the arm and introduced him to heaven. But I just don't know, and this is the part of nursing that I hate, because sometimes I'd rather forget the part about how fragile these bodies are. One dumb thing happens and you could be gonzo in a second, and what have you probably accomplished? Probably not much, if you're anything like me. You've probably done a lot of great and fun and exciting things but nothing worth much to speak of, really, when it comes down to the serious stuff. Really makes me think.

So that's that. I had my cry on the way home and Mark suggested the great plan of going out to eat at our most favorite Mexican restaurant ever, La Carretta, where we were served by a (presumably Mexican, but at least Spanish-speaking) guy who looked almost exactly like a south-of-the-border version of my favorite Asian man, John Pham. When we looked at the check at the end of the meal to see the name of our server, we laughed - "Johnathan." How's that for irony? We left a big tip in honor of his good service, as well as his welcome resemblance to Pham, and now we are home, bunkered in for the weekend, or at least until I work again on Sunday, warm and exhausted in my home.

I don't know why I always feel the need to cry during the first month of starting a new job, but that's how I feel now. Two twelves down this week, one to go.

Despite the commute time and the office politics and overwhelming patient census and all the terrible, horrible, no-good things I whine about in regards to my "old" job on the bypass unit, somehow my 8-hour shift there on Sunday is looking, to me, like a piece of strawberry rhubarb pie. That is - delicious, relaxing, best enjoyed in the company of good friends (or, in this case, good coworkers). I can't wait to be back at my old unit where I know where everything is and how to work all the equipment and where everyone knows that I work hard and am not as big of a scatterbrain as I am in other areas of my life. I rarely feel dumb there.

Right now, at this new place I'm working, where the patients are no sicker or have no weirder problems than any of my patients from my old job, I nevertheless have to ask about EVERYTHING. I'm back on orientation with someone else's routine to follow, a new system to learn, a new way of doing things, new doctors to remember.

Bad day. Dreading tomorrow. Hoping to get some sleep tonight. I am a certifiable Big Baby.