No Regrets

There's a handful of days in my life that I'll always remember the date of. July 4, 1993 was one of them.

An old friend and college roommate, Garrett, was visiting for the weekend. I'd been having a crazy year-- working two full time jobs, and carrying on a couple of relationships. I was looking forward to the summer-- that would mean a break from one of the jobs-- the teaching job-- and a break from both of the relationships I'd been carrying on. My life had become impossibly complicated because of it all, and I needed to back up and figure it all out. A weekend with an old friend was just what the doctor ordered.

My friend and I had been out hitting our favorite watering holes-- he'd roomed with me for a couple of months when he'd gotten out of the military a couple of years before, and wanted to go to the places we'd hung out in back then.

I got a call the morning of July 4th-- I was hung over, had my friend and a couple of other people sleeping at my apartment. It was one of the women I'd been seeing. She was, she told me pregnant.

I felt like a building was collapsing around me.

Over the next nine months, I struggled to keep it together. I felt completely unprepared to be a parent. I kept thinking of an old Firefall song, "Cinderella."



Cinderella by Firefall

"Last December I met a girl
She took a likin' to me
Said she loved me
But she didn't know the meanin' of the word

She imagined love to be grand
Me holdin' her hand and
Whisperin' sweet things and
Cooin' softly like a song bird

Then one mornin' she came to me
With a tear in her eye
And a sigh on her breath
And Lord, she said,
"Hon, I'm heavy with child"

And I said, "God damn girl, can't you see
That I'm breakin' my back
Just tryin' to keep my head above water
And it's turnin' me wild"

Cinderella can't you see
Don't want your company
You better leave this mornin', leave today
Take your love and your child away

Rockin' chair on the front porch
Well, I'm thinkin' about all the things that I did
As a young man
Now that I'm old

And I remember her and the boy
Did he have all the toys and the joys
That a young man should have
Before he gets too old

Cinderella couldn't you see
I didn't want your company
You shoulda left that mornin' left that day
Took your love and your child away"

One night, I was drinking with a couple of friends and discovered they had a copy of the album this song was on. I played it several times, drunk, letting the song sink in. I puzzled over the meaning of the song. Did he stay, giving up his youth to make sure his son had all the "toys and the joys that a young man should have before he gets old?" Or was he sitting on the porch in a rocking chair, full of regret, wondering what happened to the woman and the boy?

In the end, I stuck around. She and I made a go at it, but eventually ended. But the boy stayed. I took an ass-whipping dealing with his mother but I have no regrets. I don't have to wonder. He had baseball and Yu-Gi-Oh and Spongebob Squarepants and Star Wars and music and nights out for Chinese food and friends and the things a young boy should have. He's had laughter and love around him-- at least in my home.

He turned 18 earlier this month. He got into the college he wanted to go to. He got a scholarship and some loans and my plan, to get a nursing degree and a nursing job, worked; thanks to that, I'll be able to come up most of the rest.

His imminent departure brings out conflicted feelings. I did my job. I did my part in raising a smart, happy, confident adult. But my heart is breaking knowing I'll only see him a few times a year.

I keep coming back to a moment right after he was born when my father, who was full of regrets about his own children, told me: right now you're looking at the next 18 years as a long, long time. But you'll discover someday that it will turn out to be a short, short time. You get them such a short time in their lives and then they're gone. They come and visit, and you have a relationship with them and talk to them on the phone, but this time, this next 18 years, enjoy it. Remember that money comes and goes, but you can never get back time missed with them.

I'm sure glad I listened to my father.

At Long Last Friday Random Ten

Hello? (echo, echo, echo...). Anybody still there?

My posting has been incredibly lax. I do have a pretty good excuse-- working lots and lots of hours. Lots of overtime. We're very shortstaffed, and with a kid starting college in August, I'm not inclined to saying no to overtime.

Still, I've missed blogging. Lots has gone on besides overtime. I'll post more on it later-- two losses recently, two of my favorite people. My mother-in-law passed away about three weeks ago, and my friend Larry's mother, passed about a week later. Both shall be sorely missed. As I said, more later.

On the job front-- feeling more and more confident, and at the same time getting really disenchanted with it. The unit I work for is so poorly run. I've got some feelers out about other jobs. It'll be a year in August, and maybe time to move on. More on that later too.

I've got a list of posts to write: thoughts about the upcoming election, the Supreme Court hearing on the healthcare law, some music and art stuff, and of course, reflections about my son turning 18 recently, and his imminent leaving of the nest to go to college.

But until then, I've got to get back to my blogging duties, including posting my Friday Random Ten. Without further adieu...

1. Nobody But Me- The Human Beinz
2. It's Hard Enough Knowing- Pete Shelley
3. All My Loving- The Beatles
4. New Gun In Town- The dB's
5. That's Entertainment- The Jam
6. It Keeps You Running- The Doobie Brothers
7. West LA Fadeaway- The Grateful Dead
8. Show Me The Way- Peter Frampton
9. Chicago/We Can Change The World- Graham Nash
10. Souvenirs- John Prine


1. Great one-hit wonder that's on the Nuggets set. I think the word "no" is said over 100 times in this song.
2. The closing track from the Buzzcocks' frontman's first solo album, which I played to death in 1982.
3. One of the Fab Four's first hits
4. From the dB's' record "Like This," which I played to death in 1984 and 1985. The cd was very rare for years, until it was re-issued, thankfully, a few years ago.
5. Heard recently that Jam frontman Paul Weller quit drinking. He'll probably suck now.
6. "The Best of the Doobie Brothers" was one of the first records I ever bought, along with Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust" and the Eagles' "Hotel California."
7. Wasn't crazy about the "Touch of Grey" album when it came out, but have come to love it. Particularly like this ode to the dangers of the Chateau Marmont and its temptations.
8. Was delighted by the story recently where Peter Frampton was reunited with the guitar he had on the cover of "Frampton Comes Alive," which was lost in a plane crash in 1980.
9. About Bobby Seals and the Chicago 8/Chicago 7 trial relating to the 1968 Democratic Convention events.
10. "All the snow's turned to water/Christmas days have come and gone/Broken toys and faded colors/Are that's left to linger on." Maybe the most melancholy and beautiful song ever.

The Price

This has been a week at work. On Monday, I was in an "acute room" at one hospital-- instead of going to the bedside to the patient to do the dialysis, the patients are brought to us. In this particular hospital, two nurses work at once, two patients each. And in this particular hospital, we have a Licensed Practical Nurse (LPN) that the hospital provides, to help us with everything.

The other nurse and I were setting up, and the LPN started bringing in our patients. I had gotten in a little earlier, so I determined, with the LPN, which patients were going where-- the patients have different prescriptions for which dializer, dialysate, etc they use, so each machine is set up individually for each patient. As the other dialysis nurse got ready to set up one of his patients, who had been sleeping while waiting for dialysis, he tried to take an initial blood pressure. He realized he couldn't get a blood pressure.

We called a "Code Blue," and a "crash team" descended on the acute room. They worked on the patient for about half an hour, but were never able to revive him.

Yesterday, I was called to a hospital to I hadn't been to for a couple of months. I recognized the name, but it wasn't until I got there that I remembered the patient. I had done the first dialysis treatment that she had gotten when she entered that hospital, in late December. She had been lucid-- because she had a trach tube, she couldn't talk, but she could mouth words. She was one of the few patients who had ever thanked me for her life-saving treatment.

I noticed that she had nothing personal in her room-- not the pictures, flowers and cards I usually see with a lot of the patients. I talked to the primary nurse and discovered that she had no visitors. I made a mental note to stop the next time I was going to have her as a patient (we are usually told the night before who our patients are going to be) and get her a little pointsetta plant or some other little piece of holiday cheer.

As luck would have it, I wasn't called to do treatment on that patient, or even to that hospital, for a couple of months. When I arrived at her bedside, I was in for a shock. She looked nothing like the last time I saw her. She was not alert; her skin was dull and lifeless. She opened her eyes, but I could tell there was no cognition.

As I set up to do her treatment, I talked to her primary nurse, who told me that she had been doing better and better-- until two weeks ago, when she "coded." Obviously, she had been hypoxic (deprived of oxygen) while her heart and lungs were stopped long enough to damage her brain.

She was never going to get better.

As I finished the treatment, I quietly apologized to her that we medical professionals, with all of our expensive equipment and meds, couldn't help her get better. I found myself regretting that I hadn't been called to that hospital to treat her, and that I hadn't been able to drop off a pointsetta to brighten up the dreary room that will probably be where her last days will be. And I realized that the price I will pay to be in a profession that I love, and one that allows me to make a living helping people, is to be looking death in the face.

The Lesson of Egypt

I've been fascinated by the events in Egypt in the last year; they've been one of the participants in "The Arab Spring."

My interest in Egypt is, in fact, nothing new. When I transferred to Eastern Illinois University in 1981, I had plans to go there for a year and transfer to the University of Illinois to study Biology. This changed when I took one of my prereq courses, a Political Science course taught by, believe it or not, a professor named Faust.

Looking back, I know now that it was that class that led me to get a bachelor's and then a master's degree in Political Science. I hadn't been so fascinated in anything in years.

One October morning, as Dr. Faust was dismissing class, a guy ran into class and blurted out that Anwar Sadat had been assassinated. Everybody who was left in the class stopped and talked about it. I was hooked.



Three and a half years later, I wrote one of my Master's papers on Gamel Nassar, the first President of Egypt. It originally started with Samuel Huntington's idea, one of the ideas put forth in Samuel Huntington's classic "Political Order in Changing Societies," that sometimes military rule-- temporary military rule-- can be one of the means by which a society can establish the order by which development-- political, social, economic development-- can begin. Nassar started out as an idealist young military officer overthrowing the corrupt king of Egypt.

My faculty advisor encouraged me to base my Nassar paper on how much he followed the imperatives outlined in Huntington's book for the leaders of developing countries to stay in power. The idea was that they in order to enact change they must stay in power. But we all know that this is not necessarily always the case; Egypt's Mubarek stayed in power for three decades and little changed. Reading the accounts of the power struggles after the fall of Mubarek, it's like reading my Master's paper again; the military, the Islamic Brotherhood-- all the same players.

Nassar took the tack, which Huntington described, of creating an outside enemy. In his case, it was Israel. This was, of course, disasterous. Israel soundly thumped Egypt-- and several other countries allied with Egypt against it-- in 1967. And again, after Nassar was dead, in 1973.

In my Master's paper, I tried to compare Nassar to then-current leaders. Presciently, as it turned out, I compared Libya's Ghaddafi to Nassar (Ghaddafi was open about his admiration for Nassar). It turned out that the comparison was pretty apt. Ghaddafi, in his reign, more than four decades, was able to maintain power, but did not develop the government and social institutions that would allow Libya to thrive. Libya is suddenly a nation of armed gangs. Not a promising prospect.

The other person I compared Nassar to was Flt. Lt. Jerry Rawlings of Ghana. On May 15, 1979, Rawlings attempted to overthrow the extremely corrupt government of Ghana. His attempt initially failed-- Rawlings was court-martialed and sentenced to death-- but a group of military officers succeeded in overthrowing the government and rescued Rawlings.

Rawlings, who was then only 31 years old, led a military council, the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) in cleaning up the government. Rawlings then stepped aside for an elected government.

However, in December of 1981, Rawlings, unsatisified with the progress being made, overthrew the government again. Like Nassar, he ran for president (Rawlings would finally retire from the military in 1992). He won, with 58% of the vote. He would serve as President until 2001. He was prevented by the Ghanian Constitution from running again.

Was Rawlings successful? The fact that the Constitution actually prevented Rawlings from running again might be a measure of that success. Ghana is still poor. It is staggering, like many developing countries, under a lot of debt.

A book I picked up at a used book store years ago, one I've been reading on and off over the years, is about the resumption of civilian rule after the military coup that overthrew the government of Nkrumah, the Ghana's first post-colonial ruler. It's the kind of book that, probably, only someone like me, who has a Master's degree in Political Science would find fascinating. The upshot of the book is that the military voluntarily relinquished power in Ghana because as an institution, it did not have the attributes needed to process the conflicts and needs of a society. It's actually an amazing story. It plays into the ideas that Huntington brought up-- ideas that we're still trying to deal with today. What happens first-- political and social order followed by economic progress or vice versa?

Looking at Somalia now, or the horrific violence the engulfed Yugoslavia after its dissolution in the early nineties, one wonders if a bad government is better than no government. The military government of Egypt is finding the hard lesson that so many militaries have discovered in the 20th and 21st centuries-- indeed, what the United States discovered after easily defeating Iraq and Afghanistan-- that it's easier to overthrow than to govern. In the end, while a leader may stay in power, using the imperatives of Huntington, Machiavelli, Sun-Tzu or anybody else, in the end, if a society that does not have a form of government in which the needs and dreams of its citizens cannot find a way, or in which its citizens cannot even express those things, it is probably doomed. In the end, it may be Winston Churchill who said it best:

"Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."*

Delayed Friday Random Ten

I'm on call tonight-- so far haven't been called in yet. I worked over 40 hours this week, so it's a win/win-- either I get called in and make time and a half, or I don't and have a night off.

There's been a lot going on at work-- I've alluded to it previously. They've picked a bad time to be giving us a hard time; with the economy improving, the hiring has ratcheted up. Classmates who'd been struggling to get jobs, are being hired now. For my part, I'm keeping my head down and using this time to increase my skill set in order to be ready for my next job.

1. Good Old Rock and Roll- Quicksilver Messenger Service
2. Bridge Over Troubled Water- Simon and Garfunkel
3. Little Queenie- Chuck Berry
4. I'm Five Years Ahead of My Time- The Third Bardo
5. New Lace Sleeves- Elvis Costello
6. A Hard Day's Night- The Beatles
7. Brooklyn (Owes The Charmer Under Me)- Steely Dan
8. One of these Days- Ten Years After
9. Get Off My Cloud- The Rolling Stones
10. Wishing the Days Away- Billy Bragg


Notes:
1. QMS came out of the rich sixties San Francisico scene.
2. Still remember a great bit in the early days of Saturday Night Live where Charles Grodin wore an "Art Garfunkel" wig and imitated Art, while harmonizing with Paul Simon. Art Garfunkel came out and took over-- after confiscating the wig.
3. Bob Seger did a great cover of this one on his "Live Bullet" album.
4. From the great "Nuggets" garage rock collection.
5. Elvis Costello doing his best Burt Bacharach impression. Not that that's a bad thing...
6. Gotta watch this movie again soon.
7. From Steely Dan's debut album, which is, believe it or not, 40 years old.
8. Used to hear this one late at night on the local prog-rock station when I was in high school in the late seventies.
9. One of the Stones' funnest and funniest songs.
10. From "Talking To The Taxman About Poetry," one of my favorite albums of the eighties.

Flexible Friday Random Ten

My day today required flexibility. I was scheduled to do dialysis on two people. I couldn't get the access (an arterio venous graft) to work on one patient, and left word with the doctor. I packed up and went to my next patient. At the end of treatment, I discovered that they are mother and son. At 72, the mother has lost both legs to uncontrolled diabetes. The second one must have been recent-- the staples from the amputation are still in. The son, who is 45, has lost one. Both are obese; he weighed over 500 pounds. It was really, really sad.

Since I did not do one of the treatments, I was sent to another hospital to do another patient I'd tried to treat on Wednesday. A doctor was supposed to put a new venous catheter in at 4 pm. I got to the hospital about 4:30 and it was not done. In fact, the doctor was not even at the hospital. I ate my lunch-- which was now really a dinner-- and discovered that the doctor was still not there. I was sent home at 5:30 with my boss' blessings.

My immediate boss, the one who is a nurse and not an accountant, was there, having met with the big chiefs of the hospital chain that is our main account. The other nurse who was waiting for the same doctor to put a new catheter in another patient and we got to chew the fat with our boss for about 45 minutes and get the skinny on what's going on. It put me at ease-- for now.

If there's anything I've discovered is that to be an acute care dialysis nurse, I have to be flexible. And that I am.

Tomorrow I'm working-- the first Saturday I've worked in a while. Tonight I'm meeting some classmates for a drink. I've got to take it easy since I'll be working 12 or 13 hours tomorrow. But tonight, it'll be good to catch up with my classmates, who have all got jobs now. I'm looking forward to hearing about their experiences, good and bad. And I suspect they've learned that they need to be flexible in their jobs as well.

1. Too Much Too Young- The Specials
2. Make Me Smile- Chicago
3. LIttle Bit O' Soul- The Music Explosion
4. Fallout- The Police
5. Tighten Up- The Black Keys
6. Only Women Bleed- Alice Cooper
7. I Say A Little Prayer- Aretha Franklin
8. Psycho Killer- The Talking Heads
9. Living For the City- Stevie Wonder
10. Autumn Leaves- Tony Bennett


Notes:
1. Love, love, love that first Specials record.
2. The great thing about being middle-aged is not having to make excuses for loving big old dumb pop songs.
3. Great mid-sixties one-hit wonder
4. A Police B-side
5. Love the video for this one
6. Alice Cooper's grown on me over the years. Didn't hurt that he had a great time lampooning himself in "Wayne's World."
7. Grew up listening to my dad's copy of "Aretha's Gold."
8. My kids love this song since doing it in "Rock Band."
9. This song is still powerful today.
10. Tony's still on my "Bucket List." Gotta fix that this year.

Groundhog's Day

I think I've mentioned this before-- the movie Groundhog's Day has a local connection-- it's only a few blocks from where I live. Most of it was filmed in the town of Woodstock, Illinois, a town that is about 50 miles north of Chicago. However, the scene in which he saves the life of the town's mayor, who is choking in a restaurant, was filmed at a German restaurant that is gone now, Hessberger's, at Lincoln and Cullom Avenues in Chicago. This is how it looked then.

I happened to pass by it today while running errands. It's now a popular restaurant/bar called The Bad Apple that has a great beer selection, and from what people have told me, good food. I've only been there a couple of times for drinks. When I was still in nursing school, and we were still in our old place, I used to walk or bicycle past it on the way to and from work 4 or 5 times a week.

It was recently the 20th anniversary of the release of the movie Groundhog Day. Though I like Harold Ramis, the director, and the actor Bill Murray, it's not one of my favorite movies, though I like the message-- that sometimes we have to keep doing it over and over again before we get it right. It has a personal ring for me lately-- although I'm not too happy with my current job, I do love my profession, nursing.

Tonight, I was texting with my buddy Brent and discovered that he had an interview offer in a telemetry unit. He was going to pass on the interview and I talked him into going to it-- and taking the job if it's offered. It's a step up-- it'll increase his skill set and get him ready to do anything-- being a regular floor nurse, ER, ICU, etc. It also reinforced my decision to start looking for another job.

More On the Job

I just had a text back and forth regarding work with the guy who's turned out to become a great friend at work-- a friendship that'll continue, I'm certain, after we both move on from the job. More on that later.

I ended up having a day off-- a badly needed and helpful day off. I've mentioned before that the scheduling snafu is one of the things I hate about the job. I understand that as acute care nurses, we need to be flexible. But this has gone beyond flexibility; the "schedule" is more like some abstract impression of a schedule. I've mentioned before that the unit had an ill-fated scheme to cut back on overtime in which some members of the unit would work 6 am to 2:30 pm in the "acute" room (where nurses and techs do two patients at a time) and be relieved by people working 2 pm to 10:30 pm; the people working the afternoon/evening shift would pick up a "solo" patient in the evening if needed. This scheme came unravelled immediately. I was one of the two people first scheduled for the 2pm to 10:30 pm shift, and worked it exactly twice. I came in at all hours-- noon, 2 pm, 4 pm, etc. and left at all hours-- including, one day, 7:15 am. And never once at 10:30 pm.

At the monthly staff meeting last month, they told us they were discontinuing that schedule. They did not. I worked, ostensibly, the 6 am to 2:30 pm shift-- with an actual schedule that was similar to last month's, except starting very early. And often ending very late.

At this month's staff meeting last week, they said they're discontinuing that schedule and going back to the old one-- 3 or 4 twelve/thirteen hour shifts a week plus a "call" shift every week to two weeks. It's rigorous, but works for me, and most of the other nurses and techs.

I have other beefs. They regularly schedule some of us for over 40 hours a week-- and then complain that we have lots of overtime. They are getting worse and worse about stocking. The fact that they've gone from having three drivers delivering to one-- they bragged at the last meeting that one of the drivers, who was, according to co-workers the best and most reliable-- was fired for "excessive overtime." Yeah, hilarious. So we all hoard supplies, knowing we may have trouble doing treatment if we don't have those supplies, or take longer to do them-- incurring more overtime-- if we don't have them. And we are constantly being criticized for hoarding supplies.

Communication is a constant problem. For starters, we are dispatched to our patients by an archaic paging system-- yes, pagers. That's how backward we are. And once in a while it doesn't work. Since our schedule is chaotic-- sometimes we have a day off when we're scheduled, and sometimes we're called in when we're off-- one would assume that if you're not paged, you're not working. But since the paging system is unreliable (sometimes not only do we not get a page that was sent, but when we call to confirm our assignment, sometimes that fails to go through too).

Another communication problem: there's a hospital chain that is our main account. We are all set up to sign in and chart at all the hospitals in that chain. A couple of months ago, word came down-- 2nd, 3rd and fourth-hand-- of a new way to chart the dialysis treatments. It was, we were told, mandatory. Here's the problem: five different people told me five different ways to do this mandatory way of charting.

But never fear! We finally got an email with an explanation of this way to chart. Problem is these instructions are hopelessly muddled. I'll do my best.

Today, I was relieved to be told that our patient census was low and I had the day off. It allowed me to do a bunch of errands-- groceries, laundry, cooking-- and to think about it all. I've decided to tough it out. I'll try to make it to August, when it'll be a year. That year is magic in the profession. Once you have that year, jobs open up.

In the meantime, I'm trying to make the best of it all. And remembering some of the fine people I work with.

My first day in "the field"-- my first day working in a hospital with another nurse/preceptor, I worked with Molly. She's literally about half my age-- 25 or 26. If you didn't know her, you'd think she was a sorority girl. But when you get to know her, she's anything but a sorority girl. She's smart and got a wicked sense of humor. When I'm working in the same hospital, she always checks up on me, and she's someone I can always call for advice and information.

Another person who's good for advice and information is Ben. I worked more with him than anybody else when I was training. He and I shared a love of music and being parents-- though, at 28, he's just starting the parenting game-- his kids are 3 and a newborn). I'm at the tail end of it, with kids who are 17 and 15. Ben, who is Filipino-American, grew up just a few blocks from where I grew up in Chicago's Albany Park neighborhood, but obviously decades apart. When I have larger nursing questions, I talk to Ben, who I think would be a great teacher.

In my training class, I became friends with two guys-- Neil and Brent. We're all close in age, and doing nursing later in life-- Neil and Brent are in their late forties (I'm 50). I always enjoy running into Neil. He's smart and sardonically funny. As we've gotten to be friends, he's opened up about his life a little more. He comes from a tight Irish family. He's been with the same guy for some time now; they're trying to decide whether or not to move in together. He worked as a nurse for a couple of years before this job, so he's also someone I ask for advice at times.

The guy I've become really tight with is Brent. At first, he annoyed the shit out of me; he was, at times, way too eager. He was one of the only ones who would wear his scrubs during the classroom part of training. He talked a lot. But pretty quickly, he and I became friends. In the end, we had a lot in common; we came from different fields than the medical field (he ran printing presses for one of the Chicago newspapers, and I was a teacher) and we both have kids (and ex's).

Once we got in the field, we not only became better and better friends, but came to depend on one another for help. Our cellphones were lifelines, texting back and forth, sharing experiences, observations and new information. And in one case, when we were training, commiserating about an unbelievably awful preceptor. As the job has turned more disappointing and frequently more stressful, it's been great to have a friend and ally to talk to. It's turned into a total Bromance. I know Brent's always got my back and I'll always have his.

Looking ahead, I know that I won't work at this job until I retire. At this point, I'm hoping to make it a year. I know that the next job will certainly have a its share of nonsense-- what job doesn't? But there will be a next job. Knowing that is helping me tolerate this job.