That's soft and slow

2006-01-15 - 6:55 p.m.

I'm feeling much better than I did last time I wrote here. Perhaps not all better, but definitely better than before.

After working two weeks of evening shifts I've totally gotten myself onto an evening schedule. Since I'm a morning person it seems as though I'm never really totally awake. Last night I went to bed at 3am (which was pretty early compared to when I've been sleeping recently) and didn't get out of bed until 1pm, when the alarm I'd forgotten I'd set to make sure I started thinking about getting ready for work went off. That's ten hours, but since I only slept four the previous night, I figure that's not too bad. Today I didn't have to work because Frosty asked me to switch a few shifts with him. I'll be working next Saturday instead.

But just to show you how much better I've been feeling, last Thursday I worked an evening shift with a per diem pharmacist who does very little work. It was crazy busy and she was sitting there on the phone with her husband. Weird stuff was happening but I wasn't stressing over it. I was totally able to handle it with no weird emotional things going on. Then there was a code in the OR. I had to get all gowned up and scrubbed in so I could help. They were trying to repair a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm on this poor guy. The aorta is the major artery that comes straight up out of the heart and makes the famous arch and goes straight down through the chest and the abdomen before it bifurcates into the iliac arteries. Needless to say it's major, about the size of a garden hose in the abdomen, and having it rupture is not a good thing. Anyway, blood was splashing and gushing everywhere, so much so that I had to walk with my arms out to help me keep my balance and not slip in the blood on the floor. Then after it was all over, I happened to glance over as someone took an armful of the guy's intestines and dumped them back in his abdomen. Did I throw up after this? No! I didn't even feel a twinge of nausea. Yes, I'm definitely feeling better.

I had Friday off. I ended up making some lasagna. Lasagna was always a birthday dinner tradition for me, but Lolo offered to make me dinner for my birthday and I thought it was unfair to request for him to make me lasagna and then not be able to help but compare it to my mom's. So I made it and invited Lolo over to dinner Friday night. It turned out fairly well. He stayed for a game of Scrabble (he beat me!) and then I drove him home.

Lolo and I both requested a whole bunch of the same days off in September. I didn't expect that we would both get them off, but it turns out we did! I'm very excited about that. So far we're thinking we're going to take a trip to England. It's funny, I know very little about England. Have any of you ever been there? Do you have any recommendations of things we should do and see while we're there? Yesterday I went to Half Price Books and bought a Rough Guide to England. I haven't looked at it too closely yet, though.

I spent today doing non-physical chores like balancing the checkbook. It's been a really long time since I did that. Well, I always write down all of my transactions, I just haven't been reconciling it with my bank statements. I finally did that today. I discovered that Kitten still hasn't deposited a check I wrote to her last June. I should ask her about it, maybe she lost it. I also discovered that I seem to be missing $16. I wasn't able to find where the difference came from. I also cleaned up all of my receipts--I like to reconcile my receipts with my credit card bills. I decided I really need to spend less money. I can't believe how high my credit card bills are! Anyway, new goal: lower credit card bills.