"I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay..."

With sincere apologies to Robert Plant...

Some of my friends know of my struggle to obtain tickets for the upcoming Robert Plant/Alison Krauss concert this summer. The friends who have known me for many years are probably very familiar with my sort of lifelong admiration of Robert Plant. When I was a teenager, and very much into Robert and Led Zeppelin, I acquired a small Queensland Umbrella Plant that I named, of course, Robert. Due to many circumstances, I have never seen Robert Plant in concert.

So when he and Alison Krauss released a CD together, I bought it without ever hearing any of the songs on it, and I still love it (I also really like Alison Krauss, but I don't have the history with her and her music that I have with Robert Plant...probably because she most likely wasn't even born when I was so crazy about Robert Plant--but I digress). I also signed up for email updates of their activities and, of course, announcements of their upcoming tour.

So the day finally arrived: I had a chance to buy tickets for the concert online before they went on sale. I was so excited, I emailed just about everyone I know in the area, and got a few folks together for the concert. When the day that I could order tickets came, I came home from work, raced to my computer, logged in, and found...no tickets. I logged on again and again but was never able to get tickets.

I went through a period of reliving teenage angst, and then I got a second email from the website: for more money, I could get premium tickets for the concert, plus one of a kind souvenirs. I figured, what's $300.00 for the chance of a lifetime??? I tried to order one ticket (none of my friends were this devoted to seeing the concert): Well, guess what--no tickets available.

Anyway, last night I must have fallen asleep wondering if it was worth it to quit my job and apply for a position at the concert venue, because I had the following Really Bizarre Dream:

Robert and Alison were on their very successful tour, and Robert and his manager (female) were staying with me. Robert and his manager had some sort of romantic connection, and I broke them up. I won't bore the reader with all the details as I suspect that no one but my bestest friends, and anyone who is similarly devoted to Robert Plant is still awake reading this. But at one point, my "good angel" said to me that I should stop my involvement with Robert because I was breaking his manager's heart, and my "bad angel" said basically, "all's fair in love and war, and besides, other women have done it to you." You can guess the decision I made in my dream. After all, I have a 20-something year old plant named after him.

A side note: Alison Krauss was staying in another hotel, because she couldn't stand the noise of Robert's incessant partying.

But here is the weird part: At some point in my dream, Robert and his manager were arguing over a bra that I thought was hers. But Robert admitted that the bra was his...and he confessed to certain "behaviors," such as wearing women's underthings.

So now my dream about Robert Plant is ruined, and somehow Monty Python invaded my unconscious: I have the song "I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay," going through my head. I don't remember much of the lyrics, but the melody is relentlessly stuck in my mind.

And I still don't have tickets to the concert!!!

Out of Hibernation

My Nordic ancestors took over this winter, and I spent a couple of months doing not much of anything other than going to work and sleeping. I did, however, manage to paint my living room and hallway, and only need to paint my dining room to get rid of that ugly beige color that I've been living with since I moved in here.

Some insane part of me decided to go back to school. Actually I don't think it was really insane, just practical. Once I got over all of the distressing things that happened at work over the last couple of years, I realized that I don't have to be the kind of incompetent manager that I have seen so often.

So I will be taking an accounting course starting March 31...and participating in National Poetry Writing Month starting April 1. Should be interesting...

Not much else to say here. I'm still pretty much in the process of "waking up" to springtime. Imagine a bear stumbling out of her cave, looking around, and wondering what to eat for breakfast after a two-month hibernation.

Anyway, how many higher level brain functions did I need to use yesterday at my job? None. While I am certainly grateful to have a job in this economy, I really would like a position that challenges me so that I don't have to spend 8 hours on autopilot and watching the clock to see how long before I can get OUT of there.

Is there a happy medium for me between "totally bored" and "totally stressed" in the medical field? I'm beginning to wonder. Anyway, that's about it. When I'm more awake, I should have more interesting things to say.

Chasing Tails

I just got home from a meeting and I am wide awake, despite the fact that I still have to get up early to go to work tomorrow. I will have to get up early enough to stop by my favorite bakery for a supercharged latte to get me through the day.

As I sit here surfing the Net and pondering my blog, my cat Rosie is chasing her tail. It's really strange--it's as if all of a sudden she discovers she has this thing at the back of her and doesn't know how to deal with it.

So the Eternal Question for my insomniac night: Why do animals chase their tails?

I thought maybe I should watch the news, and/or catch up on the latest political developments, but honestly, I think it's more interesting to watch my cat chase her tail.

One of my friends tonight said something like she would vote for "any Democrat with a pulse." My dilemma is that I think contenders in both parties are old enough to know better, and neither party is truly taking responsibility for really leading the country. It must be too much fun to point out the specks in the opponents' eyes.

Oh, heavens, I just climbed right up on that soapbox, didn't I? Insomnia and political discussion make for uncomfortable bedfellows (pun intended).

I think I want that drug for insomnia that has the advertisement with Abe Lincoln and a groundhog playing chess in some guy's kitchen.

Maybe I have just done the human equivalent of "chasing my tail."

Off to try to get some sleep....

Pummelo Revisited

My couple of readers may remember that I'd had a dream about a piece of fruit that I'd never seen before last year, and subsequently found out that the fruit I'd dreamed about was known as a "pummelo." I went through a bit of angst over whether or not to try the pummelo, wondering if I would affect the time-space continuum or end up in the underworld like Persephone, who ate seven pomegrante seeds and then had to stay in the underworld for seven months out of the year.

Well, I finally tried the pummelo. As far as I know, I haven't had any effect on the time-space continuum, and I'm not in the underworld. Only time will tell as to whether I added months onto the winter season in the Mitten.

But I have to say the thing was horrible. It was about the size of a grapefruit, and I thought it might have a similar taste. But once I battled with the very thick, tough skin and got to the fruit, it was terribly bitter. Quite icky, actually. I ended up throwing the rest of it away.

Okay I think I've talked about fruit enough.

This is your brain on...

Some of my friends know that I have been struggling with a horrendous case of asthma, almost since I got over the pneumonia. Well, the treatment of choice for uncontrollable asthma is prednisone--a form of steroid, to put it simply. I was on a fairly high dose of it in order to keep my breathing under control, and it comes with a lovely assortment of side effects: stomachaches, mood swings, weight gain, to name a few. It also acts as sort of a stimulant, which means that I had LOTS of energy for the last few weeks.

The good news is that I am finally able to breathe without wheezing, which means that I can decrease the prednisone (it has to be decreased slowly, because if it is stopped abruptly, it can mess with the adrenal glands and cause all sorts of problems). The bad news is that my body had gotten used to the stimulant effects of it, and now...I'm...moving...really...slowly.

Yesterday between naps, I considered calling Agatestone and asking her to come over and feed me chocolate bars like she mentioned that Starsky did for Hutch when he had been drugged, but I kept falling asleep. :)

I haven't been all that tempted in my life to try illicit drugs. I guess when I have to take a whole pharmacy's worth of meds just to keep breathing, adding more drugs doesn't sound like fun. But I can partly understand why athletes succumb to the temptation of taking steroids. Of course, I haven't run any 3 minute miles or lifted 500 pounds lately, but if a mild, legal version of what they take can have such an effect on my body, I suppose it would not be a strong temptation for an athlete to say, "Just this once before a competition." Certainly I am not condoning it, especially since the long-term effects from even the legal version of steroids are quite scary, but guess I can sort of understand the thinking that might lead someone to try steroids for performance enhancement.

Meanwhile, it is really nice to breathe without so much artificial assistance. And I think I may be able to get through the day with only a couple of naps.

Recess!

The other day at work, I heard an overhead page: "Anesthesia to Resuss Stat!" For the nonmedical folks, "resuss" is short for a "resuscitation room." The hospital where I work has a large ER, which has several resuscitation rooms. Those are where patients go if they are really in trouble, such as the severely injured or extremely ill. But the strange thing is, when I heard the overhead page, I thought the announcer had just called anesthesia to recess.

"Anesthesia to recess stat!" I pictured all of these normally serious medical people bursting out the front doors of the hospital and starting a snowball fight in the parking lot, or climbing up the lampposts. It occurred to me that "recess" is a great idea.

We used to have it in grade school: an hour or so where we either went outside and ran around, or stayed indoors and played games, depending on the weather. Somehow in the process of what we laughingly call "growing up," the idea of recess faded to a soft memory in my mind.

I think we should bring recess to the adult world. Oh, sure, we have government-mandated breaks and lunches, but how many of us actually have any fun time planned into the day? I can't remember the last time I threw a snowball, or walked in the woods in the wintertime. But even in my urban hospital setting, we could still take walks around the hospital, play tag in the parking lot, or even bring in board games. I think we would all be the better for it.

While I'm thinking about it, I also think our world would be a better place if we all were given blankets, milk, and vanilla wafers and told to lie down and rest for an hour in the middle of the day. Maybe after recess.

Bureaucratic Idiosyncrasies

I may have just spelled my title wrong, but I don't want to worry about it at the moment. Anyway, I thought I'd share the latest red tape in the medical field: One of the Homeland Security mandates is that all hospitals in the U.S. have the same code "colors," like "Code Blue" for a patient in cardiac/respiratory arrest (probably a well-known code for anyone who watches medical TV shows). I suppose it makes sense, since that way you don't need to wonder which color means which emergency if you work in another hospital, but I don't even want to think about how much of my hard-earned money went to people who sat in a room and thought up different color codes for emergencies. I always thought I could mismanage my money far more effectively than the government can. But I digress...

So one day, I was running a lab test, and while waiting for it to finish, I looked at the brightly-colored poster with all of the standard codes on it. My eyes strayed to "Code Yellow," which means a bomb threat in medical-ese. I read through the standard advice, like, "keep the caller on the line as long as possible," "call security/police," "get as much detail as you can," "don't go near any suspicious packages," and "fill out the bomb threat reporting form..."

Bomb threat form? We actually have a bomb threat form somewhere in our facility?? Where is it? In the Bomb Threat Reporting Form file?? I considered casually asking my boss where the bomb threat forms were kept, but decided that might invite more trouble than I wanted.

I am more than willing to help out in times of emergency. But if someone does call my place of employment and informs me that there is a bomb planted someplace on the premises, the last thing I will be worrying about is which form I have to fill out.

And in the I Truly Feel Like a Number department, remember my bout with pneumonia? It wasn't enough that I didn't have enough sick time to cover the whole event, I discovered (or, more accurately, re-discovered, since I had read the policy and then filed it under "Idiotic Policies to be Ignored" in my mind) that even though I had a documented serious illness that almost landed me in the hospital, the documentation didn't matter. What mattered was the number of days that I was out of work. Each day that I was out of work for one serious illness counted as a separate unexcused absence (even for a documented medical condition). Never mind that I was hardly strong enough to make myself a meal, much less go into work and be effective. Apparently it also didn't matter that if I had been able to drag myself into work, I could have infected my patients--who are, by and large, suffering from a number of chronic illnesses and are also extremely frail.

The frustrating part of this is not so much that I am cocncerned about being disciplined (or, in the jargon, "written up"). My concern is that my employer has instituted a policy that discourages people with legitimate illnesses from staying home from work. If I, as a reasonably healthy, reasonably young woman can be incapacitated for close to a week with pneumonia, what does the administration think will happen to the patients who are much more frail than I am if I drag myself into work and expose them to whatever illnesses they have?

Oh, wait a minute. I think I just came up with an oxymoron: Administration thinks. Anyway, if I end up needing another job, I can just picture the interview: "Why did you leave your last job?" "Well, I was fired because I didn't fill out the bomb threat form and I stayed home from work because I had a potentially life-threatening illness." Sad, isn't it?

I have just about decided to dump the pursuit of my MBA. Although the school I have attended is an excellent one, I really think this world has more than enough managers and administrators, and far too few actual leaders.

Okay, rant over.

The sigline that I have on one of my favorite websites sums my current attitude up quite perfectly: "Lately it occurs to me what a long, strange trip it's been." --Grateful Dead