Jeeps

There is only one benefit of working until 3am and that is the drive home. I drive the jeep to work at 3pm even when it’s sweltering out just so I can pull out 12 hours later with the stars above me and the cool night breeze on my face. My jeep is a 1987 wrangler. It’s bright yellow. It doesn’t have a top. Not as in “the top is being stored in the garage for the winter”, but as in the purchase price of $1500 didn’t include a top, so once it gets cold the jeep goes in the garage until spring. My jeep has 160,000 miles on it. Once the engine warms up it becomes so difficult to get the transmission into first gear that I often have to start in second and gun it. If you go over a bump the dash lights and the radio go out until you wiggle the key into just the right position. It is perfection.

I have wanted a jeep since I was a teenager. Every summer Kristen and I would spend a week at the North Carolina coast at Topsail Island, with our families. Being super cool and possessing amazing judgement we would often to go the pier in the evening, hoping to meet guys. One of our best summer weeks was the one we spent with two boys named Jeremy and Bobby. We met them at the pier (surprise), and weren’t super interested until we saw that they were driving a Jeep Wrangler. To us, nothing said summer like a car without doors or a roof. We smiled and hopped in for a ride. Every evening we would cruise the island with them from end to end, stopping every once in awhile for a snack or a pretty view of the ocean.

We knew these boys didn’t posess the highest intellect or the most mature outlook. We didn’t care. They were cute. They wore long baggy shorts and wife beaters. They surfed. They drove a jeep. For the rest of the summer we would drive to Topsail regularly to seem them. Both of the boys grew up at Topsail and were often ducking or taking sharp turns when they saw someone they knew. Kristen and I thought nothing of it. Maybe they just didn’t want to talk to family. Maybe our company was so mesmerizing that they didn’t want to waste a second of attention on anyone else.

We found out the real reason one evening, when Bobby, who was driving with Kristen in the passenger seat while Jeremy and I smooched in the back, hit a garbage can with the side view mirror. Glass shattered and sprayed all over us, but especially Kristen. We learned two things that night: First, that Bobby was NOT boyfriend material. While Kristen bled next to him and I picked glass out of her face Bobby pulled a mirror out of the glovebox and used the fractured headlight to carefully inspect himself for any sign of injury, all the while muttering “my face! my fucking face!”. I don’t know that he ever asked Kristen if she was ok.

We also learned that the boys who had been driving us around all summer had just turned 15. Not a driver’s license between them, let alone a jeep. We, being newly 16, found this age gap unacceptable; horrifying really. We also understood why they had been so quick to evade everyone they knew. I don’t know that we ever found out who that jeep belonged to, but it didn’t matter. Summer was over.

Despite injury to our faces and our egos, Kristen and I maintain a love of the wind in our hair and the sun on our shoulders, although we are now much more responsible about sunscreen application and choice of romantic partners.

Eagle Rays and sunny days

There has been a mistake. I was not meant to live in a cold, dark place where the sun sets at 4pm and one spends 3 months of the year fighting the urge to get into pajamas before seven. I am reminded of this as I write from the beach of a Island in Belize where I am lucky enough to spend this week.

I fell in love with scuba diving when I was 22 and bumming around SE Asia. I got certified, and then got some more specialty certifications a few years later in Costa Rica. I am always embarrassed when I say that I dive- it is such an expensive and frivolous thing to do, but I love it. I love being weightless and in a silent, foreign world. I love even more that no one can talk to you. The most one can do is bang on their tank to get your attention and gesture, hoping to be understood. The most I have to do (unless I am about to be eaten by a shark or run out of air) is smile and give the “ok” sign. Dreamy.

ANYHOO, I took the kids on a shallow dive a few years ago and they both liked it so their christmas present this year was the certification course and then this trip to dive. The weather is beautiful and the visibility underwater has been almost perfect. Weve seen Eagle Rays and Moray Eels and all sorts of fish. My only complaint is that food is expensive as all get out here- like, every meal is comparable to a nice meal out at home which we do NOT eat very often because it is so frizzling expensive. I am working hard to be chill and think of it as an extra work shift or two and NOT a reason to stress out on vacation.

I think about work a lot. My mind ruminates on different patient interactions, treatments and scenarios, and wonders why something was done a certain way or if I should have clued in to something sooner. Most of all, I think about the last few shifts before I left. When I say there were no beds in the ER I mean that we had more people on stretchers in the hallways than I had ever seen. We had opened a section called “the chairs” (even though they are also beds in the hallways), which I had never seen used before. There were multiple times throughout each shift where all 3 trauma bays were full and every bed in the department had a body in it. What if there had been a pile up on the interstate? A mass shooting? An industrial accident?

Perhaps more scary than that- what if you or someone you love walked in to the waiting room and were having a true emergency that was hard to detect given what you said and how you presented? All of my amazing colleagues work their butts off to make sure people who need immediate care get it but when you are one person in charge of 50 people in the waiting room, 5 of whom are having psychiatric emergencies that require lots of attention and often security, four of whom are screaming in pain even though they have a hang nail or a touch of ye olde gas, one of whom just puked on the floor and another who has clogged the only two waiting room toilets with diarrhea of a probably infectious nature, and you know that even if you have a very sick person walk in there is no immediate place to send them, the chances of something “slipping through the cracks” increases exponentially.

Administrators tell us that the ED is full because the hospital is full so we can’t get the patients who need to be admitted out of our department and into another. There is lots of talk of staffing shortages at all levels. That makes it sound like it is a problem of the education system, or the hiring mechanisms and while those two things play a part the “staffing shortage” excuse is, overall, a lame one.

We are short staffed because providing health care has become an exhausting, thankless and potentially physically dangerous profession that is run by corporations who care more about their bottom line than about their staff or the patients they purport to serve. On a larger level our health care system in general, from dental to primary to prenatal care, has become inaccessible to so many that we are forcing people to avoid seeking help for easily treatable conditions. They can’t access care for “small” problems like high blood pressure so wait until the problem becoms a full blown emergency. We have patients every day who wait for 5-10 hours to refill a prescription. They have no access to a primary care doctor. These are people who are trying to take care of themselves. They are loosing a days wages to take care of themselves. We sometimes roll our eyes: “can you believe this dude waited so long just for a refill?!” But the truth is they should be lauded for going to such lengths to take care of themselves. They should also be provided with a primary care provider because if they are not (and while the ED we can give you some phone numbers we can do nothing about your insurance situation or the fact that its going to take you 8 months to get an appointment) they will be back every 30 days for the same reason, until they get too frustrated and decide instead to let their blood pressure go untreated. Then we will see them in 18-36 months as a heart attack and, if we are watching our bottom line, that costs a lot more than an in-office med refill.

There are lots of people who study this and know way more than I do but from my scant experience (plus the experience of living with a doctor for the past 20 years) it is NOT a staffing problem and to let it be perceived as one allows those responsible for creating it off the hook way too easily, and leads those looking for solutions down the wrong path.

Rant over.

Happy nursing thought- I was working a few weeks ago and realized that I was sharing my “zone” with two women who have been working there since I spent a day in the ED as a student. I remember looking at them and thinking how smart they were. So knowledgeable and cool under pressure. So kind. So cute in their scrubs. And there I was next to them! Right where I want to be.

Just as I am right now. About to pour a glass of wine and read my book as the sun sets over the ocean.

The Big Show

I’ve been off of orientation for almost two weeks now but so far working in less acute areas and starting to feel a little angsty to be “up front” - where the sickest patients get roomed. Last night was my chance, and I got my ass kicked. In school we talked all the time about prioritizing: you have eleven plus four hundred things to get done and four patients, how do you decide which must be done first, which can be left until later in the evening? I thought I understood. I thought I was decent at prioritizing. Last night I think I may have made the wrong decision at almost every turn so that by the end of the night, when I had to hand off my patients to the very good and very experienced nurse, I felt like I could barely find my own ass let alone give a coherent account of the four people who I was in charge of keeping alive.

I love Dr. Who. In the newer seasons there is a creature called the Ood. Although it looks horrible, all the Ood wants is to be free and to live with its people. They communicate through the “Song of the Ood”, a haunting sort of a-melodic moaning. One of patients last night was, I believe, trying to communicate with their people via the same song. It is still unclear to me exactly what was wrong with him but for a million reasons he was a time suck. ICU and medicine were arguing over who should take him, and doctors from both floors were putting in orders. Another specialist was insisting that he be put on a hospital bed (instead of the stretchers we have in the ED) because of his wounds. The same specialist suddenly decided the patient may be having a stroke and poof, the patient needed to be taken to CT immediately, and I was wheeling an Ood singing, twitching, sweaty, disoriented patient to a CT scan there was no way they were going to be still long enough to successfully complete.

Craziness.

STABLE caziness.

That patient looked like a hot mess and had MUHHnay problems to be addressed, but he was stable. Blood Pressure, oxygen saturation, temperature, respirations = normal. Heart rate a little fast, not surprising given everything that was going on and not fast enough to indicate imminent demise.

Meanwhile, the patients cycling in and out of my other 3 rooms included a woman whose coronary artery was 90% blocked and she was having chest pain, someone with an almond stuck in her throat and a patient who came to the ED because they had fainted and in the time I was in struggling to get the Ood onto a hospital bed fainted again, had crushing chest pain and shortness of breath and I came out of the Ood room to find the crash cart set up and defibrillation pads on the patient.

NOT stable.

Luckily I work with generous, brilliant nurses who, while I’m sure they were internally cringing as I sped away with the Ood on yet another adventure - this time to an MRI scan which is basically just a giant magnet that will pull everything magnetic on your insides to your outsides, hence a very strict “no metal” rule - FORGETTING to take out the patient’s enormous eyebrow ring, they took care of all my actually sick patients. They spoke to me in calm tones while letting me know things like “your patient is trying to bite off their admission bracelet”, “I started a second IV for you incase she decompensates and needs to go to cath lab immediately” and “they just intubated your guy in 7”. Thank you all. I will pay it forward.

So! Lesson learned. The smile and nod is my go-to move for tonight. Do NOT get caught up in the Song of the Ood. Smile and nod at the doc asking for a hospital bed and prioritize that request to the bottom of the list. Stop. Breathe. Step back and evaluate the situation.

New grad. New nurse. Wishing I was further along than I am. Trying not to beat myself up too badly. Trying to borrow some millennial lingo and look at my “opportunity for growth” instead of my “glaring fuckups”. Despite, or because, of it all, loving the song of my ER peeps.

Month 1 in the books

And I have learned that there are two types of people. The type who want to hear all the gory details of my shifts (which I am more than happy to supply in a fully HIPAA compliant manner), and those who want me to stop talking the moment I start with “I had this patient last shift…”. My brother and some of my closest friends are in the latter category. Some can’t hear anything about eyeballs, for some it’s bodily fluids or things where they shouldn’t be or sticking out in directions they aren’t meant to. Except for the intersection of tiny crawling bugs and the human body, I love it all. I’ve learned what it means when someone is “degloved” or is experiencing a “facial avulsion”. I am loving getting to see all these new things and getting to be part of the team that helps get people back to (or close to) their normal.

Work is great.

2:30am 11.5 hours in to a 12 hour shift. Struggling.

Lots of things outside of work feel not so great. A friend whose cancer may soon stop her breath. A family member undergoing inpatient psych treatment, another who is being whalloped by a debilitating condition and the side effects of treating it. I know so many others who are struggling - it seems to be the way of the world right now.

In a nod to this shit storm my writing group prompt this month was “bucket list”. My contribution is below, and since one of the rules of writing group (after “we don’t talk about writing group”, of course) is that you’re not allowed to preface your contribution, I leave mine here:

Golden hour.  

The base of the sun begins to flatten as it is engulfed by the Atlantic. Elephant matriarchs lead trains of babies down the beach to find fresh water.  The breeze coming off of the ocean cools my face, still covered in a paste of sand and sweat from our day driving across desolate dunes.  The Skeleton Coast of Namibia is as beautiful as I have always imagined, and the cocktail that I have just been handed reminds me both to savor every every moment and how ridiculously over privileged i am to vacation in a country where one day of my trip costs as much as the people working around me make in half a year.

This, I know, is where my good fortune begins.  My husband sits to my left, his eyes closed, taking in the sounds of the animals that we cannot see.  His depression, his burnout, and his struggles with a concussion that would not quit are behind him.

My adult children are to my right.  My daughter will be graduating from college soon and deciding if she wants to live on the East or West Coast.  My son is happy whatever he is up to.  He is not living in my basement and, most importantly, he is alive.  He made it through barely attending highschool due to crippling anxiety. He survived in and out-patient mental health programs, and the years of feeling betrayed and bewildered by his own brain which, he believed, was determined that he never feel happiness.

Down the beach I can make out the silhouettes of my brother and sister in law trailing behind their kids who zig zag up and down the sand laughing as they try to avoid the surf.

Just up the beach, in chairs looking over us and out to sea, are my parents.  My dad’s depression has also returned to manageable levels, and with the help of family and professionals he has worked through the loss of his wife and made a new life for himself just down the road from my brother.  

My mom smiles.  Her people.  She did this.  She sees who each of us are and in the face of our flaws and struggles she gives us love.  This love binds us.  It keeps us going, checking in with one another, staying when staying feels too hard, believing when there is no reason to.    

Even in my bucket list fantasy I know that she is not there.  I know that if i turn to look it is just my dad sitting up the hill.  

But she is always with me and so there she is.  I turn back towards the ocean and my face relaxes into the breeze.  I lift my glass and toast her.

First few weeks

I’m still here, although the 3p-3a shift almost did me in. Do my bosses not see that I am OLD, and haven’t been up until 3am for at least a decade!?

First impressions :

• There is a lot of extra training for new graduates at work. Some of it I am very happy to receive. Please, show me how to access a port. I would much rather learn on a mannequin than a person. There is other extra training, and this unfortunately seems to be the majority of it, that is designed to create jobs for people who create trainings and then need metrics by which to measure their success. I feel like a real asshole asking a nurse, who is already doing extra work be precepting me when they have NO extra time, to sit with me at the computer and click boxes giving my skills in SIXTEEN different areas a numerical rating. Ugh. So sorry. Also no thank you scavenger hunt. And no thank you to any education involving children. There is a whole separate half of the ED for that.

• I have spent a total of 20 hours “on the floor”. I can do all of the tasks. Drawing blood, taking people to CT, starting IVs and scanning bladdars and wiping butts. The two places where I have SO much to learn are:

  • The computer. Holy hell I am just WAITING to forget to click “ready for MRI” and have a patient taking up a room for hours and everyone mad at me because there are 30 more waiting to be seen but no room because no one ever came to get my person because I didn’t click a button. It will happen. I will (probably) cry. There are so many small steps, clicks, “dot phrases”, notes. It slows me down more than a old person with a UTI.

  • Critical thinking. The experienced nurses can take a look at the chief complaint in the computer and a glance at the patient and have a pretty good idea of what is wrong with them. They anticipate what procedure to set up for and labs to order and weather to get them a gown with or without metal buttons. Not me. (Unless, like, you’ve sawed off your finger. Then I’m pretty clear on what’s going on and what needs to happen.)

  The good news is that I love it. Being married to a disillusioned doctor has taken the surprise out of all the crappy parts of medicine. I know the system is falling apart and there is pressure on all sides to focus on throughput instead of on people. I know there are grouchy people. I know that no amount of education or prestige makes you infallible. I anticipated all of these things so am not as upset by them at work. Jeremy has also advised me never to make eye contact with a trauma surgeon unless I’m ready to get yelled at. Noted.

  I love feeling like a nurse. Sitting at the nursing station. Bustling around with a pocket full of flushes. Working calmly on the computer as someone is screaming and security is running down the hall. I love hearing the patients stories and getting to help them. All of the nurses in the ED have been nothing but supportive and welcoming, and the people who started at the same time as me are all great. Since I’m still a baby nurse they’re not letting me near the big traumas yet. I feel just fine about it and also confident that, when the time comes, I will be shitting-my-pants scared and make mistakes but will, in the not too distant future, be able to handle it.

  I wear my mom’s necklace for every work shift. I had to get a cheap chain that would easily break on the off chance that a patient grabs it, but it is with me. I think about everything I have learned over the past two years and how much that knowledge, had I had it when she was sick, would have changed my actions. I would have told her how sick she was. I would not have left her at home in NC. I would have asked more questions of the surgeons and doctors. I would have been a better advocate. I could have done more to alleviate her suffering. The things I did wrong fill me with sadness and regret. Every patient that I make a connection with, that I help to feel safer or more understood, I think of her. It makes me sad beyond measure but it also assures me that I am in the right place, doing what I am supposed to be doing, and that feels pretty damn good.

Hayden was super unexcited about finding Big Buck Hunter while on vacation in Colorado. He was equally unimpressed with my excitement. #teenagers

First Day of Work

Wow.

I wrote my last post here during my second month of nursing school.

Now, when I’m feeling official, I can sign my name “Elise Raimi BSN, RN, MPH ”. More letter than anyone needs but what they mean to me this evening is that tomorrow I will walk into the Emergency Department for my first day of work as a nurse. I started nursing school thinking that I wanted to do hospice nursing but, ever since my second semester of school when I spent a day in the Emergency Room, I have known that I wanted to work there.

That day I showed up in the ED at 7am and by noon I had done CPR on two people, had blood splash on my shoes as a doctor put a chest tube below me while I did compressions, and a man had come through the ambulance bay doors holding his abdomen which, when he released it, spilled its contents. A seasoned told me to pick everything up, and off to the trauma bay we went. I was hooked.

Now, after working there as a student, I know that it’s not all trauma. On bad days it feels like you have a front row seat to watch our society crumble into a pile of poverty, mental illness, fear and antagonism. But there are more good days then bad and on the good days it feels like you are able to stick a hand into that pile and help someone out. Yes, there is still an enormous pile. Yes, the person you help out may well get swept back in again. But you get to go home knowing that, at least for a few moments, you made their lives better.

Tomorrow I walk in to the Emergency Department with a badge that says RN. I am excited and terrified and can’t wait and don’t want it to start because there are still so many things I don’t know. I know the next year will be full of high highs and low lows and I’m hoping to get this blog up and running again as a way of processing it all.

Wish me luck for tomorrow!

Where the sun shines bright on Loch Lomand

Four years ago was my the last night my mom breathed. I had been spending every night at the hospice house with her and we had a ritual that I counted on. During the day friends and family were in and out but once my dad and brother headed for home and the night shift nurses had given her medicine, we were alone. I would swab her mouth and brush her hair and then, just as I had watcher her do for her own mom, I would lotion her feet, legs and hands. As I did this I would sing to her. The same song she sang to me when I was upset as a child. “Speed Bonny Boat”.

I remember coming back from a party in middle school and, in dramatic fashion, tearing into the house and up the stairs, throwing myself on my bed and sobbing. I don’t remember what upset me but I do remember feeling like NOTHING would EVER be ok. She came in and rubbed my back and I managed to ask, through my tears, if she would sing to me. I knew I was too old for it, and I knew it was the only thing that would make me feel better. I still remember how safe I felt that night, depleted by my theatrics and falling asleep to her warm hand and her Welsh voice.

At the hospice house it was my turn. I sang. I told her how much I loved her. I told her that we would be ok without her, and that it was ok if she wanted to go. That was a fucking lie if I've ever told one. In the 1,460 days since she has been gone there have been happy days and hard days and not one of them has been ok without her. If there was a price I could pay for five more minutes with her; for the sound of her voice or the feeling of her next to me, I would find a way no pay it no matter the cost.

The next morning I woke up and headed to workout with my sister in law. Cynthia, moms best friend, stayed at mom’s side and promised to call if anything happened. The hospice nurse had told us we were in the “hours to days” phase of death two days before. I can’t remember if it was my phone or Kaitlin’s that Cynthia called. I do remember is rushing out to the car, Kaitlin asking me if I was all right to drive, me saying I was and then appreciating very much that she didn’t question me even though I probably looked like a lunatic.

You know the way you walk when you’re super late for something but trying to look like everything is fine and you're not in a rush? I think that is how I drove. We went into her room and mom was quiet and still in bed, just as she had been for the last few days. Daniel, dad, Kaitlin and I gathered around her . She took a rattly breath. Then another. Then no more.

I cried. I touched her face. I told her how much I loved her. My throat felt so tight that I couldn't catch my breath. I wondered what would happen if I did what I felt and started wailing. If i climbed into bed with her body held her and refused to get out. Would that stretch out the last time I would be in a room with her? Already her body was growing stiff. Her mouth was open a little and her tongue as thrust forward. I remember pressing my cheek to hers and thinking how odd it was that there was no warm breath. No hint of coffee or cigarettes or alcohol or breath mints.

We sang to her.
Loch Lomond.
“But me and my true love will never meet again on the bonnie bonnie banks of loch lomond.”

I left the room finally to call Jeremy and cry with him. Dad wasn't ready for anyone to move her body yet so I sat on the porch of her room with the birds flitting in the afternoon sun. Finally, when he was ready, they covered her in a quilt and all of the workers at hospice, along with my family and some close friends, lined the hall and silently watched her body be rolled out.

There wasn’t much to do after that. Friends packed up the room for us and dad and I got into his car to drive home. “Can we stop at Costco?” he asked. I laughed and then looked over at him and realized he wasn't kidding. Yes. Sure. Of course. Why wouldn’t we? “What do you need at costco?” He needed champaign to toast mom with at dinner. And maybe some salmon. And some socks.

The Long and Winding Road

Whew - it has been a WEEK or two. Turns out the “putting em back on” portion of things is much more extensive than the taking ‘em off part. The type of reconstruction I chose involves taking your belly tissue, moving it up to your chest, shaping it (there is more shaping in another surgery in 3 months), reattaching it to a blood supply and closing everything back up. The three days of inpatient post-surgery were relatively dreamy - lots of chocolate pudding, pain meds, awesome nurses and no one needing anything from me except to know my pain score which, by the time I was discharged, was a totally manageable five. (I hate those things. I never say a number higher than nine because if you get to ten then you have nowhere to go but what if the pain gets worse? Can you go to 11? Stress.)

After a few days at home I got an infection. I realized something wasn’t right when I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and my legs were shaking so badly my knees were literally knocking. If I could stop that then my teeth started chattering so hard it felt like I was going to break one. I chattered and sweated through the night, was put on antibiotics the next day and had another pretty miserable night.

From all the science I have been taking in the lead up to nursing school my big, overarching takeaway has been one word - homeostasis. Everything in our bodies has a certain rate at which it operates and if anything gets faster or slower or more or less, you’ve got issues. That second night it felt like everything was so far from it’s baseline - I couldn’t regulate my body temperature or control my limbs. I kept feeling like it I fell asleep I would stop breathing. I told Jeremy he had to stay awake and watch me so I didn’t die. I also apparently asked him to buy me a tiger. I blame the later on the drugs. All joking aside, it was fucking scary. Jeremy took awesome care of me and told me later I was almost septic and that he had already called the surgeon and the ER to be ready to expect me if it came to that. DoctorHusband perk for sure.

I’ve been steadily improving since and am feeling good. No pain, feeling mostly like myself with a leakier than usual brain, and a walk around the block feels like I’m trying to summit Everest.

With the two major surgeries behind me the next step is figuring out what kind of meds I need to be on. There was some talk of chemo but in the end my oncologist decided (much to my delight) that it was unclear enough if I would benefit from chem, and that going through it (especially right now with Ye Olde Covids) the benefit did not outweigh the risk so no chemo for meo. My tumor was fed almost entirely by estrogen so, because of the chance that a few cancer cells broke off into my bloodstream and will eventually find somewhere to regrow (and it’s not a teeny chance since the pathology report showed some vascular invasion) the best solution is apparently to make it so my body no longer produces estrogen.

Most estrogen comes from the ovaries I can either have mine removed or can have a shot every month to turn them off. The shot option was a no brainer since I am feeling super over surgeries as of late. They will also give me an additional medicine to stop any other estrogen production. So, as far as I can tell, that means that today I am a 43 year old pre-menopausal woman and when I walk out of the lab on Thursday I will essentially be hurtled into menopause. While this sounds better than dying from cancer it doesn’t sound super fun. I know people have really varied experiences with menopause so I’m hoping that mine is relatively benign, although the oncologist was gently telling me that the first few months usually suck donkey dick. Awesome.

Besides Cancer and Rona, Zeni finished elementary school and Hayden finished middle school. Watching them feel proud of their accomplishments was great, even if the celebrations occured mostly in cars and all without actual contact with other human beings. I’m trying to piece my brain back together enough to finish biochemistry and microbiology, Jeremy is being very kind about my bossy requests, and we just planned a trip to Glacier National Park for August - a taste of normalcy!

One Day More

Yesterday was a doozie. I was 4 days post and 2 days pre-surgery. I was feeling pretty pain free and ventured downstairs, in search of a new couch to sit on. I noticed zeni’s hamster’s water bottle was really full. I reached inside the cage to make sure it wasn’t clogged and brushed my hand across a very cold (but not stiff) hamster. I plucked CreamPuff from his cage and while he was in fact frigid he also made this little hamster gasp sound. I tried putting some water in his mouth with a dropper incase the water bottle was broken. It dribbled down his cold cheek. I attempted vigorous rubbing of said hamster and some chest compressions. I listened with Jeremy's stethoscope. There was a faint heartbeat. Every minute of so the hamster would let out this kind of raspy sigh. I was a horrible hospice nurse to the hamster- i couldn’t let him go quietly into the dark night. I rubbed and compressed and dribbled water for another half hour. Finally, no more sighs. He was an ex-hamster.
I just absolutely could not tell my black daughter, with whom I had just discussed the concept of race riotes, who is dealing with cancer and quarantine, that the Puffer has shuffled off this mortal coil. I sent jeremy to the store for a substitute. (Shh. She doesn’t know. If she asks i will happily tell her next week, when i am out of the hospital. If she doesn’t ask then I’ll tell her when she’s old enough to laugh about it.)
While jeremy was shopping i turned on the oven for dinner. Soon the house was filled with acrid white smoke. I turned it off, opened the oven door and found what looked like a post-apocalyptic scene of melted, dripping plastic in several hues. Our cleaners came yesterday morning for the first time in months. In preparation for their visit Jeremy had been trying to clear off all the counters like I asked him to, and stuck a bunch of stuff in the oven.
He returned with a hamster (a BABY hamster- like, a third of a size of the original hamster) to a house with smoke streaming out the windows. He ran in ready to pull our unconscious bodies from the flames and discovered me, with a knife, trying to get the plastic off the bottom of the oven before it cooled and hardened. We both sat in the floor and laughed and cried for awhile. Then I saw the teeny hamster he brought home and laughcried some more. We removed all oven racks with their mangled, now hardened plastic to the backyard and left the rest of the oven to be dealt with at a later date. We introduced mini CreamPuff to his new home. We went to bed.
Zeni came into our room that night. “Mom. I’m worried about Creampuff. He used to be so fat he couldn’t even fit through his tube but now he slides right through.” I didn’t miss a beat. “Sweetie. Dad and I noticed that Creampuff seemed like he was loosing weight. We gave his cage a really good cleaning (read: bought a new one) and put him back in. I think he will be ok and start gaining weight again (read: mature into an adult) but you keep a good eye on him and tell us if he’s not, ok?” I brushed her soft cheek and she padded back to her room. “Wow. That was good.”- I think I worried jeremy with how easily the lie came.
Happily, yesterday’s chaos ceded to today’s good fortune. My pathology report is back from the surgery and says that both my lymph nodes and the margins of the breast tissue she removed are cancer free. Basically, barring some unlikely errant cell that has somehow traveled somewhere unexpected, when all this is over I will be cancer free. Pretty fucking awesome. I had an appointment with the surgeon this morning where she spoke reassuringly and she drew all over me I felt good enough to sit in the yard and read, had visits from some lovely friends and then went for ice cream and watched an episode of Lost with the fam. This time tomorrow I’ll be out of the 10 hour surgery, installed in a hospital room with people watch me and where my only job is to rest. I will be on the next step towards being done with this whole crazy zag this last two months have taken.

I’m nervous, for sure. Mostly about the pain, a little about being alone with no visitors allowed. After my moms diagnosis she flew out to Spokane to visit us and ended up in the hospital. I bought her a warm blanket to have in the hospital room - she always hated shoddy linens. I packed that same blanket into my bag tonight to take to the same hospital. I talked to my dad and my brother and sister (in law although she’s been putting up with my dad in her house this whole quarantine time so i think that upgrades her to sister). I kissed my kids and my husband. I have more texts and we’ll wishes from friends and family than I can believe. I won’t be alone.

(below- Creampuff, following some warm-towel and rubbing which yielded…. little. And my oven. Circa yesterday.)

Bye Bye Boobies

I think I am going to have to abandon the musical-themed titles after this one. My dad, who has one of best senses of humor of anyone I know, can’t take it when I speak crassly about everything that is happening. It’s like he wants me to abandon all defense mechanisms and bare true feelings. I’m not sure I can do that, but I can probably come up with more tastefully titled blog posts.
I’m sitting up in my bed surrounded by a nest of pillows. The windows are wide open and the spring breeze flows through the room and carries with it the faint smell of lilacs. The mastectomy is done, but when I look down on my chest things look similar to how they did before because the surgeon put air filled spacers into the cavities she created by removing the tissue. It’s only when I look in the mirror that I can tell how mangled everything is- the sides if my chest where my top of my arms sit are totally caved in, I assume from removing the lymph nodes. I wasn’t sure if I was going to want to look at all. I also assumed that everything was wrapped and taped and wrapped again so after surgery, when I was helped out of the gown to get dressed to go home, I looked down without giving it a second thought and there were my strangely high-sitting breasts, with surgical tape covering the incisions across the center and edges that looked like the sides of mountains that had just experienced huge landslides. It didn’t bother me like I thought it would, maybe because I was so glad to have the cancer (hopefully) gone and the (first) surgery over with.

The worst part of the mastectomy was not having jeremy there before or after. They did let him come back just before they discharged me so he could hear the instructions but that was it. Before surgery I was lying in the pre-op place and people were very kindly and very cheerily (except the anistesiologist, he was kind of an ass and said “ok honey” and patted my hand when I told him what I did and did not want) coming in and out and asking questions and I was nodding and smiling and being cheery right back even though it felt like a very odd way to behave. Then my friend Carol , an amazing woman and surgeon, popped her head in the curtains . I knew she was going to try and stop by before her own surgery but wasn’t sure she would make it. As soon as I saw her face my tears started to flow. “I’m scared.” I crygulped. She held my hand and told me that made perfect sense and that I was going to be fine. Soon after she left they put me to sleep.

The sleeping was easier than the waking- I woke up feeling nauseous and in pain and apparently wasn’t doing a stellar job of breathing because people were putting tubes up my nose and talking about oxygen saturation. “She looks pretty puney”, I heard my surgeon say. “She can stay the night inpatient if she doesn’t improve”. This was music to my ears as I had no idea how I could go home while feeling so crappy. A few hours and new meds later I was much better. Jeremy got me home and settled, the kids came back from Stacey’s (I didn’t want them to see me when i first got home in case I was in a lot of pain) and we watched an episode of Lost, just like we had the night before.

The past few days have been quiet and relatively pain free. Our people have made us feel so loved and cared for- I am overwhelmed by their kindness and generosity. I have a few more days of quiet before I go back to the hospital Wednesday morning for the first reconstruction surgery. This is a bigger procedure than the mastectomy so I will be in the hospital for 3-4 nights. I am already starting to feel anxious about it, and about being in the hospital without being able to have visitors, but I know that it will come and go and, weather it is smooth sailing or miserable, it will end and I will be back in my pillow nest, with my people, without my cancer.

Jeremy and I just before discharge- I remember thinking I was smiling really big….

The boobs will come off, tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow...

….they’ll be gone….

Tomorrow I am scheduled for a bilateral mastectomy. Tissue from both breasts will be removed along with some lymph nodes and air filled “spacers” are left in their place until the following week when I go back for the first reconstruction surgery.

I won’t have any nipples. And it is an outpatient procedure. These are the two facts I am having the hardest time wrapping my mind around.

Remember the old Twilight Zone the movie where the kid watches too much tv and he turns around and where his mouth should be is just smooth skin?  That’s what I picture my breasts will look like, but with a big scar across the center. It is disconcerting. It is also a small price to pay to be healthy. A few nights ago the group of friends with whom I have spent every Thursday night with for years (in addition to camping trips, school events, hikes and girls weekends and birthday celebrations) made a wish I didn’t even know I had into a reality. “Is there anything you want to do before your mastectomy?”  They asked. I hadn’t given it much thought beyond making sure the house was clean, that jeremy had homeschooling instructions and that I had pajamas and comfy sheets, but as soon as they asked I knew the answer. “Skinny dip.  Or atleast a topless swim”. It’s May in Spokane. Our lakes are fed mostly by snow melt. Our lakes are cold. I have no idea how they did it but my girls found another friend who had a pool and a hot tub, was going to be out of town, and is, as someone put it, “a woman’s woman”. She was asked. She said of course and offered up her beautiful backyard for our float.

We gathered at dusk. We all had a drink. We all took off our tops and  got into the hot tub. It felt so natural and comfortable and empowering and intimate- all the reasons I have always loved skinny dipping. I read something i had written about all the places i had skinny dipped: Atlantic, Pacific, Indian Oceans, Sea of Cortez, Gulf of Thailand, lakes up and down the East Coast and a few in the Himalayas. I read about my favorite place, in the Indian Ocean off of Cape Town with Ondine and how I felt so free in those times and so consumed, right now, by fear and logistics and the unknown and more fear. They listened, and they made me feel heard. 

I’ve tried to keep today as normal as possible. School with the kids and a workout, Family dinner and an evening walk along with a Covid test (I swear that lady tickled my brain for like 30 seconds) and some blood work and an Injection actually, there were SIX injections and they were done right around my nipple which no one mentioned until I was lying there topless…) with more nuclear crap so they can find the right lymph node tomorrow.

My hope is that jeremy and I will slip out tomorrow for my 6am check in and I will kiss the kids sleeping cheeks without waking them up. Jeremy will drop me off and pick me up but can’t come into the building. Stacey will have my kids over (yes, I know, play dates and hot tubs and Covid,  but also cancer, so we’re trying to balance needs and safety) while jeremy picks me up, gets me home and into bed and looking as ok as possible before the kids come home. The dog has gone to the awesome dog sitter lest she lick tear my stitches which is disproportionately sad to me, and this time tomorrow I will be without breasts. And without cancer. I know it’s a good trade off but tonight it’s hard to remember. 

A last snuggle with the best dog

Some last family game time

My mom, with her free ice cream coupons that she got with her cancer diagnosis. I wish she was here to laugh with me now but I am so thankful to Daniel and Dad and Kaitlin.

Deets

I was unsure how to tell people outside of my immediate circle about Ye Olde Cancer. Especially with most every day social interactions currently on hold, the chances of bumping into people and being able to tell them seemed slim, as did the likelihood that I could find a graceful way to share the information that didn’t leave me either in tears or talking like a robot and leave them feeling put on the spot.

So I did what all boomers do, I put it on Facebook.

*My kids seem entirely uninterested in the actual definition of boomer and as soon as I point out that I was not in fact born immediately following World War II they start to roll their eyes, so I have embraced the monaker.*

I have always been a bit of an oversharer, and writing is how I process my feelings so with some hesitation I hit “publish” on my last blog post and linked it to my fb account. Holy shit. The comments, calls, texts, cards, flowers, presents left on my doorstep, offers of help, commiseration, offers to share personal experiences and recommendations- they left me without words. I felt so.fucking.overwhelmed in the best way. Surrounded by love and support from people I know to be amazing, it made me feel a twinge of regret for sharing only because there are so many people for whom the shit is hitting the fan right now and I am so lucky to be surrounded by so much love and I hope that everyone else has the same. Thank you all.

I had a bunch of people ask specific questions about diagnosis, timeline, etc. so in the name of oversharing here you go.

Disclaimers:

1. Please skip the rest of this post if you find medical details boring because you will be bored, and correct.

2. I am not a medical person so everything below is as I understand it which is probably at best loosely related to fact.

3. I have been stunned by how personal these decisions feel. Everything here reflects my decisions and thoughts and has nothing to do with what anyone else in the same situation decides. Unless you decide you’re a christian scientist and it’s not cancer but the fear and thought of cancer that you need to cure. Then I might judge a little but I promise I would STILL keep it to myself.

I felt a lump about 3 weeks ago. I have lumpy boobs and a previous biopsy that turned up a finding of lumpy (also called “fibrocystic”) breast tissue so I figured this would be the same. Primary care referred to imaging who did a mammogram and ultrasound followed by a biopsy. Biopsy came back two days later positive for Invasive Ductal Carcinoma (the most common type of breast cancer). It’s a grade 2 (they can’t be positive about the stage until surgery but that is most likely a 2 as well). The cancer is progesterone and estrogen receptor positive (good because it means drugs other than chemo can be used) and HER2 negative, is about 3cm in size and isn’t showing lymph spread on ultrasound.

The plan seems to be surgery first, which will almost definitely be a bilateral mastectomy. I only have cancer on the right side so, unless it turns out that I have the BRCA gene, I can choose lumpectomy, mastectomy or bilateral mastectomy. Lumpectomy is always followed by radiation which can cause of scar tissue which looks not so great and can limit mobility. Also there is still breast tissue which means there can be another breast cancer. Mastectomy = bigger surgery, elimination of most future concern of breast cancer, radiation almost certainly not needed. Bilateral mastectomy = no breast tissue left on either side and breasts that match after everything is over.

I was surprised to learn that the mastectomy itself is not a huge procedure. It is technically outpatient, and recovery is intense but most people are back to normal by 6 weeks. Reconstruction, on the other hand, sounds like it kinda kicks your ass. There are different kinds of reconstruction but I am doing the one where they take your stomach and make it into breasts. This is lovely for multiple aesthetic reasons and a bummer as it has the longest recovery - 6-12 weeks. Ouch.

After surgery will probably be some kind of hormone treatment and possibly chemo, but right now my brain is only grasping up to the point where I have surgery.

As I type my 11 year old daughter, who is having the hardest time with all the news, is making my immediate environment into a Guantanamo-type situation. I have her Kindle and her Alexa and, as she knows, they will be returned as soon as the day’s (very small amount of) school work is done. She is standing next to me chanting “can I have my Kindle” and making it impossible to see my screen by flailing her arms in front of my face. This has been going on for 45+ minutes and I’m waiting to hear her start running water and filling up a bucket. If there was ANYTHING I could do to make this easier on her and Hayden I would do it in a fucking heartbeat. The only thing I can do is stay as calm and regulated and loving as possible, try to keep things as routine as I can (hence the schoolwork) and see their insanely annoying behaviors as the only way they know how to cope with everything that is going on right now. I hate it. Jeremy hates it. They hate it. Fuckity fuck fuck.

Sheets and Jammies

When my mom was first diagnosed with brain cancer she fixated on two things- nice sheets and comfy jammies. She was sure she would be spending a LOT of time in bed and wanted to do so as comfortably as possible. We poured over websites. She decided that LLBean sheets were the most comfortable and durable. We ordered a flannel and a cotton set because, choices. She decided on an adorable set of PJs from Garnet Hill- light blue cotton with cherry blossom flowers.   I still wear them to bed.

Since I already have her jammies, my own search for cancer sheets began today. Last Friday (May first) a radiologist called with biopsy results - I have breast cancer. Jeremy and I were stunned. I have lumpy bumpy  boobs and had a different lump biopsied and returned with a negative finding a few years ago. I figured the same would be true for the newest lump in my collection. Not so.

”Invasive Ductal Carcinoma”, the voice on the phone said.

“Will it kill me?” The answer seems to be it will almost certainly not.

With that out of the way I realized we had to tell the kids. While my special little snowflakes are sitting pretty in the grand scheme of access to shelter and clean water, quarantine plus cancer is a lot of worry to put on their shoulders. We sat them down and when the words “I have cancer” came out of my mouth they both went white. Jeremy took over and explained that what I have and what took their grandma from healthy to dead in the space of six months are both called “cancer” but that does NOT mean I am going to die, or even get as sick as Mamo got. They took it better than I expected. I think they were probably too shocked to really process it (so were we!) and in the days since there have been some sleepless nights, some outbursts of tears and yelling, and some retreating into fantasy words of books and videogames. We keep telling them we will get through this together, that the next few months might suck and then everything will go back to “normal”. They seem to believe us. I think that’s about as much as we can ask right now.

Monday was a two hour meeting with the surgeon to make a plan. That felt overwhelming but good. I always like a plan. She even wrote me out a flow chart and a to-do list. She speaketh my language.

Tuesday was for sheet shopping. I settled on a new set of the kind I know I like with a dark background and chevron pattern. I chose dark incase they get blood on them. I also procured some candy, a new pair of earrings and a set of brush pens to practice lettering. You gotta love Target. I came home and plopped by goods on the kitchen counter. “Cancer sheets”, I said, when Jeremy looked questioningly at the bundle. He didn’t know that was a thing. Now he does.

Steel and Bone, Snail and Wine

I have flown my fair share of sketchy airlines.

There was YetiAir in Nepal, where landing in Lukla you are treated to the sight of former Yeti Air parts from planes that did not quite stick the landing. Air Zimbabwe where the pilot and copilot locked themselves out of the cockpit and had to use the bar from the coat rack to break back in (this was pre-9/11, thank god!) and our most recent touch-and-go situation with Ethiopian. None of these airlines left as bad a taste in my mouth as EgyptAir did on our flight from Addis to Cairo to Paris. There were no near misses or breakdowns or even lost luggage. There were just a LOT of men, airline employees, who treated me and my daughter like we didn’t exist, couldn’t answer questions for ourselves or, if we insisted on answering, needed to have our answers verified by a male traveling companion. Holy hell I was a hot mess of rage as the ticket taker refused to take the tickets from me and looked at jeremy, waiting for me to hand him the boarding passes to present. I refused, jeremy refused, and I thought for a moment we may be creating an international incident before the taker finally relented, took the tickets from my hand, put them down as quickly as possible and then used one pinky to flick them off of each other, as if they were tainted with some kind of infectious lady juice. No more EgyptAir for us. On the plus side, the airplane windows didn’t have shades but a button which, when pushed, somehow magically tinted them. So that was fun.

Paris was great. Hayden picked the Catacombs as the thing he wanted to see and we did a guided tour which was really interesting and, damn, that’s a lot of bones. Zeni picked the Eiffel Tower which we showed up for only to realize our tickets were for the next evening. This error on my part turned into a delightful outting where we wandered the city until past midnight and saw the fountains going off and the tower lighting up, street performers, crepes avec Nutella, and generally enjoyed ourselves almost like a functional family would.

We returned 24 hours later and went to the top of the tower which was windy and beautiful and très agréable until, at the top, zeni realized she was terrified of riding down in the elevator. Jeremy gave her a long lecture about the physics of pulleys which (shocker) didnt do much to calm her so we road down the first bactch of packed elevators with her sobbing and then walked down the next set to the bottom. Thwt’s 1,120 steps for anyone keeping track.

Our hotel was close to the Bastille with beaucoup de restaurants close by so Jeremy and I got to sneak away out for a few meals on own which was delightful. Turns out snails are only useful as a conduit for butter and garlic and are not very tasty on their own. Also turns out that 🍷 makes that ok with me.

As always there were crappy times too. Times when one of our kids acted so put out and sour about having to walk instead of Lime Scooter a mile along one of the most famous river banks you would have thought they were raised by the Egyptians (joke! Im sure the women and the men we did NOT run into are lovely people!) or when the pizza we walked forever to find appeared with actual, real live chunks of tomatoes on it. Zut alors!!

We also had a Griswald-like experience at the Louvre where we were in some kind of tourist cluster fuck of people circling the entrance to a wing we wanted to go to and were never quite in the right position at the right time to peel away from the group and make a break for the entrance. “Look kids! Mona Lisa! Winged Victory!” The kids and I finally made it out and left jeremy, who could spend days and days in museums, to fend for himself.

Train travel remains one of my favorite ways to get around and the high speed train from Paris to Barcelona did not dissapoint. Hurtling throught the countryside catching glimpses of Roman aquaducts with frequent trips to the cafe car was fantastic. Jeremy and I had a pre-departure consult about weather our kid who is prone to motion sickness needed to be medicated and decided that no one gets motion sick on a train. Wrong. We arrived in Barcelona minus two sets of clothes, plus one new and hard earned nugget of knowledge.

Rains and planes

Our prop plane neared Addis in a torrential rainstorm. I had just been telling Jeremy that having kids has cured my fear of flying because I’m either asleep or helping them with something and there’s no time to stare out the window waiting for death. I was proud of my dry palms as we bumped through the clouds.

We hit the runway and immediately ascended again at an alarmingly acute angle. Sweat began to pour out of my nose, pits, palm- if it had sweat glands it was wet. I looked out the window as we zipped above planes waiting to take off. On the same runway we had just landed on. 

The short of it is that once we were above the clouds the pilot explained that it had been too rainy to land, headed out of the city and turned around to land on the same runway on the other direction. The slightly longer is that (1) I don’t think it was the rain but the wrong direction on the runway that was the problem and (2) I could not reign my panic in. I tightened everyone’s seat belts. I made them look at the emergency preparation handout at the “brace” position and had them count the rows to the exit. I whispered to Jeremy that he would take Zeni and I would take Hayden and we would trample the suddenly incompetent looking couple seated by the emergency exit and get our kids out of that plane. 

We landed ten minutes later, braked hard, and I burst into tears. 
Back at the guest house we ordered pizza for delivery (that is a thing in Addis I was thrilled to learn), I showered off the sweat and was awake all night thinking about different ways to die.

There was one last full day in Addis. Jeremy and Zeni went to a movie and Hayden and I stayed in with a stomach bug. Jeremy made it three hours into my time in the bathroom before he reminded me that, before I tried the Dorze version of moonshine and rare cow meat, he had told me not to. I pointed out that Hayden, who had only ingested Pringles and Fanta for at least 96 hours, was also sick. And that his opinion was not helpful.

we arrived at the Addis airport at 1am and two painful, exhausted hours of security lines, immigration lines, and people cutting in line, were checked in for our ur Egypt Air flight through Cairo to Paris. Caio Caio Ethiopia, we will see you in a few years!

Family Day

Yesterday was too much. We were all still jet lagged and although our agenda: museum, mall and lunch, seemed doable when I thought it up at home I had not fully remembered the stress that comes with getting from one place to another in Addis. The traffic noise and fumes drive Jeremy up the wall. The women with tiny babies strapped to their back knocking at the car window and motioning to their mouth, asking for food, is too much the kids, especially hayden.. He cries, he gets mad, he learned on our last trip that if he gives them anything he is suddenly surrounded by a growing group of people wanting something as well. And they should want- they are wanting for everything. Everything he has and takes for granted every day of his life.

In part we make this trip so that we will see things like that.  I don't want to (nor could i!) shield my kids from the beauty or the poverty and struggle that our world contains.  Sitting in traffic with people begging at the windows two feet away for 20 minutes felt like we had crossed the line from exposing them to rubbing it in their faces.  Hayden was sobbing, Zeni was wanting to talk to the kids who, without a few twists of fate in her early life, could easily have been her, and her friendliness was causing unsettlingly large group of people to gather around the van.  We finally started moving and I breathed a sigh of relief, and then we stopped 15 meters ahead and the whole thing began again.

Long story long, that night jeremy and I talked about cancelling the whole thing, saying hi to family tomorrow and giving them the gifts we brought and then changing our plane tickets to wherever we could go that was, in a word, “easier”. 

We woke the next morning feeling similarly.  I was so nervous I felt sick.  Zeni was refusing to get dressed.  Hayden was clearing his throat 9 million times a minute and Jeremy was still talking about flying out.
Big Zeni (Zeni’s mom), Getachew (Big Zeni’s dad) Fitsum (Zeni’s half sister) and Fitimlak (Big Zeni’s husband) arrived a little after 10. Just like during our last trip my anxiety grew as I heard the car pull up to the point where I didn't think I was going to be able to hold it together.  They came up the stairs and that tight, coiled up feeling in my stomach melted away.  At the sight of her mom Zeni, who had been hiding behind me, zoomed down the stairs and threw her arms around Big Zeni in a huge embrace that lasted the entire time everyone else was saying hello and shaking hands.  When they finally parted they stayed arms linked as they made it up the stairs and in to the living room of our guest house.

We hung out and exchanged gifts and talked. The kids colored and jumped rope. We spent the rest of the day with them visiting extended family throughout the city. Every house we went to people were genuinly welcoming, and not in an awkward or forced or any kind of way other than warm and loving and made us truly feel like family. Zeni and Hayden ran around with the kids in the neighborhood, Zeni giggling and Hayden playing with the babies and doing zillions of dabs much to the boys’ delight. Jeremy and I sat with the adults and listened to family stories and asked questions.

As the long day drew to an end Zeni and I accompanied the driver to take Big Zeni and Getachew home. We got out of the car to say out goodbyes and Zeni hugged her mom tight. Her mom kissed Zeni’s cheek. They both whispered “I love you”. Zeni popped back in the car and fell asleep in Addis rush hour traffic.

Since before we left home Ive been prepping Zeni for seeing her family, talking about different feelings that might come up and how they are all ok to feel and talk about. As I watched her snoring in the backseat I realized that maybe, when she says she is good with everything and I think she is lying and hiding her feelings, that maybe I’m the one who cant clearly see. Maybe she is fine. Not always, of course, but maybe for her this reality, having two very different families who both love her very much, is (for now at least) not angst ridden or hard to process or sad. Maybe its just family. After spending the day with them they felt, to me too, like exactly that.

my zeni, her mom and her half sister.

🎶Du be du Dubai🎶

My kids have figured out how to deal with jet-lag much better than I have. They boarded our 14 hour flight with their headphones around their necks so that before their seatbelts were buckled they could plug in. Emirates Airlines has something like 14000 on demand movies, not to mention video games, tv shows, and this super cool thing where you can watch a camera mounted to the bottom of the airplane and see what’s going on below you. It was a spectacular site over the North Pole as well as entering the Middle East. It stayed daylight for our entire trip- we were so far north that we flit above the night sky and landed in Dubai as the sun was setting around 7pm.

As the wheels bumped the ground both kids startled. They had been six inches away from a screen for the entire trip. A screen which they had not looked away from except for mandatory walk breaks and when the flight attendents came by with cookies. They missed flying over the Burj Khalifa at twilight. They missed the over-served elderly Indian man who neglected to lock the bathroom door and mooned everyone when we hit turbulance. They did not sleep, nap, doze, or slumber. They started at their screens watching content that was probably as inappropriate as it was unmonitored by either of their parents.

i was no slouch in the movie department either. “Get Out”, “The Black Klansman”, “If Beale Street Could Talk” and “This is Life”. Poor Jeremy, reading the medical journal articles he had fastidiously cut out to review on the flight surrounded by a bunch of pop culture consuming nimrods. As we taxied to the gate the entertainment system was shut down and Zeni started to cry- that cry that you do when you are so exhausted the air is hurting you can you can’t think straight. Thankfully it was a silent cry that she was able to hide behind her hair as we cleared customs and made our way through miles of empty, opulent airport to our shuttle. Hayden wobbled behind me like a zombie, at one point falling asleep standing in line.

Walk to shuttle, shuttle to hotel, 45 minute line to check in at the hotel. We left the kids on a lobby couch as we stood in line and said no thank you with decreasing politeness to people who wanted to sell us gold, or a city tour, or these intricate pictures made from layering different colors of sand in a bottle. Finally, key in hand, we woke the kids up. Zeni cried more, Hayden stumbled and managed to both knock his glasses off his nose and step on them, Zeni cried harder as she realized she had left her ipad on the airplane, and I forbid them to get into bed until they had both changed into pjs and brushed teeth, which was done in record time and they were both tucked in and snoring before jeremy and I had put the our stuff down.

As I write we are back at the airport, waiting for the short hop to Addis.

Zeni hasn’t stopped talking since she woke up at 4 am. As we approached the gate she tugged at my arm and nodded to all the Ethiopians, who were smiling at her. It feels so good to be able to do this for her and with her. Wheels up in Dubai, down in Addis, bring in the endless movies!

I Don’t Wanna!

It’s a brave new world writing for public dissemination with a teenager and a tween. Their stories are their own. Although they effect every aspect of my being their struggles, experiences, perspectives and actions are not mine. I don’t want to publish things they would not want shared. I also don’t want to exclude MY struggles with them from this writing because it’s a huge part of me, and because it would paint many things, including our upcoming trip, in an “edited for social media perfection” way that always chaps my hide

The good news- packing is almost done. We have two enormous duffle bags full of donations (thank you!!), one big suitcase and 2 carry-ons. Not bad for 4 weeks and 2 very different climates. I am still reserving the right to add an extra carry-on. For my shoes. Visas are acquired. Reservations are confirmed. Vaccines are complete.

The less rosy news- at least two of the four people in my household are currently emotional disasters. One of them started crying yesterday because we didn’t have a preferred cereal available, and basically hasn’t stopped since. This individual is refusing to talk about any emotions they are having that may be related to the upcoming trip, insisting that there is NOTHING to talk about and that it is COMPLETELY normal to cry and rage for hours about the presence or absence of Honey Nut Cheerios. When I offered that I was always available to talk and that I love them always and no matter what and nothing they ever say could change that they screamed “I HATE YOU”, and then asked if I still loved them. I mean, yes, I absolutely do, but sheesh…

Individual number two is irritable at all times unless engaged with a screen. I don’t mean irritable, like, a little grouchy. I mean loud. Stompy. Enraged. This is especially unfortunate given that the more this behavior continues the more freaked out I get that there is some kind of actual addiction/brain thing going on with screens and while YES I am glad it’s screens and not “something worse” I am also acutely aware that in a few years it could be. So I restrict more. Stompy-ness escalates. We are all feeling worn down.

Also, the dog ate the protein bars I was packing and barfed all night.

The hamster escaped.

The dishwasher broke.

Also when I went down to the basement this morning to complete the last load of laundry I stepped into a small stream running through the basement. This explains the musty smell when it rains. I made the executive decision not to mention this to Jeremy until we have left the country.

So right now my over-priced, whiny self doesn’t wanna. I don’t want to go. Cancel and refund please. And book me a night ALONE in a hotel.

One of my favorite parts of any long trip is when your first flight takes off. I exhale. Whatever is broken/flooding/all fucked up at home is literally behind you. Whatever you’ve forgotten to pack is now not part of your trip. Worrying about logistics and arrangements is pointless and what will be will be. It feels light. Relaxed. (Unless there is turbulence. Then I don’t feel so relaxed and may require additional pharmaceuticals to return to my previous state of relaxation. And a drink.) Needless to say, I’m ready for wheels up.

Packed!

This dog. Barfed up protein bar all night. This hamster. Escaped this morning and caused much rending of garments until recovered from under a pile of dirty clothes.

2.0

You know when you see a picture of yourself from a long time ago, or hear your voice recorded and cringe a little? That’s how I was feeling this morning looking at my blog. I started writing on that thing when the kids were too young for me to consider that they might one day turn into people and protest my sharing their escapades. I was too young to have lost a mom or know what it feels like when your body starts to age.

Time to turn over a new leaf. The old blog is still there (www.harvardtohomemaker.blogspot.com) in case you ever need to read about baboons or angsty stay at home moms but here liveth the new. No blogspot. Just harvardtohomemaker.com. Which you know, because you are here.

The impetus that has me blogging again is our upcoming trip to Ethiopia and Europe. I love writing about our travel - it lets me feel connected to everyone back home and record our (mis)adventures . We are still a few weeks from departure but my pile is already large. I have a place where I throw everything I don’t want to forget to pack - rain jackets, neck pillows, bug spray, etc. My fastidious husband is not a fan of this method of organization. He sneers at the pile as he walks past. The pile sneers back. The pile knows that when Jeremy is racing around trying to pack at the last minute it will be there, secure in it’s knowledge that it holds everything I need - no last minute laundry or panic-shopping necessary.

The itinerary:

1. Spokane to Addis via Seattle and Dubai. Spend one night in Dubai. We contemplated spending a few days here, seeing the Burj Khalifa, the manmade islands and the indoor ski hills. Then we remembered last time we flew into Dubai. How the opulent green city in the desert was encapsulated by the canvas tents of the people who work there. How the government is not so human rights minded. We decided to spend the necessary one night to make our layover and keep on going.

2. Ethiopia. We will spend a few days in Addis getting adjusted to the time and seeing our family and then we will try to use what we learned from our last trip (that the crazy chaotic city is too much for us and hard to enjoy for more than a few days) and head south to Arba Minch. This is the area of Ethiopia where Zeni’s maternal family is descended from. They are farmers and weavers and we will get to see how they live, shop in their markets and hike through their beautiful countryside. Then back to Addis for a few days of volunteer work and onto the next part of our trip

3. Addis to Paris via Cairo. Want to hear an incredibly annoying, over privileged statement? I don’t really want to go to Paris. Paris in August!? So. Many. Tourists. Heat. Crowds. Jacked up prices. How about instead we go to Istanbul? Cairo? Namibia? Mozambique? I was outvoted. The siren song of the Eiffel Tour and the Catacombs whispered to my kids. Jeremy’s eyes glazed over with joy as he pictured hours in museums. (Not pictured - his wife impatiently waiting for him with 2 kids who long ago lost interest in impressionists.) So to Paris we go.

4. Paris to Barcelona. On the train! Whoot!

5. Barcelona to Cadaques. After my mom died, we talked as a family about making sure we (Daniel, me, Dad and our peeps) saw each other regularly, all together. My mom was the one who would bop around, spending a few days with me, a few days with Daniel, and keep everyone connected. Without her we need to be more deliberate in planning time together. “Let’s go on a trip!” Said my dad. “Wherever you want to go. I’m paying.” Um…. yes please? Daniel found an amazing house in Catalonia, Spain on the Costa Brava, with windows that overlook the sea, an adorable town to walk to, and a pool. I would also like to note that the house is on a cliff that plunges to the ocean and that my brother chose it when his son was a newborn. It looks like the timing will work out so that the not-so-baby will just be starting to walk as we arrive. So that will be fun.

6. Barcelona to Spokane via Istanbul and San Frnacisco.

   One more 13 hour flight at the end of a delightful, exhausting, exhilarating, trip, what could go wrong?