awesome. the basement flooded. again.

and as you can see from the above picture, we have a lot of crap down there. luckily i am awake with rowan all night (no nurses) and noticed it before it got too bad. so i woke billy up and he, aaron, and i all hoofed stuff up to the main floor. there are men with large fans coming tomorrow morning to try and dry the carpet back out. i'm sure that will involve a lot more moving of things, but at that point i'm thinking i will be asleep. when we called the landlord her reaction was "wow, that hasn't happened in twenty years!" which is the same exact thing she said when it flooded last march. whatever. as long as everybody is okay there's not much that can phase me. the rest is just details.

billy and i got a chance to hang out in the basement last night after the night nurse came. he wrote in his journal and drew stuff on me while i played super mario brothers. here's the artwork i now sport on my left ankle:

we were really into the panorama setting on the camera last night, can you tell?

well the basement probably won't be functional now for at least a month, so i'm glad we enjoyed an evening down there last night. if a third of the house is out of order for a month, do you think we should get a third of the rent discounted? here's to hoping...

saline and toilet paper dreams

i'm not entirely sure, but i think last night i might have had a dream about normal saline and toiliet paper.

                                                            

i don't think you'll find that one in the dream interpretation books. i think it is a reflection of how my life is being over-run by medical things. one reason i became a nurse was because i felt it was a job that you didn't have to take home with you. you clock in, do your shift, clock out, and leave. the rest is up to you. i guess the joke's on me! i never dreamed i would be running a mini-intensive care unit out of my living room with my son as the patient. but it's okay, i'll just be uber-medical-girl for a while until this is all behind us.

i cut back on our home-health nursing hours today, and BOY do i feel awesome about it. now the nurses will just basically be here when we need to sleep, and not while i'm awake and perfectly capable of taking care of Rowan all by my mommy self. i wish i would have done that a long time ago, but i didn't even know that i could. and i suppose it was nice to have some extra coverage while we adjusted to everything at home. but hopefully, with a little help from friends and family, we won't need all the nurses up in our face all the time and Rowan can go back to being a sweet little mommy's boy for a while :) ever since Rowan's been born there has been a nurse of one sort or another messing with him in some way or telling me and billy what to do with him. between the NICU nurses, the rehab nurses, and the home health nurses, the boy could definitely use a reduction in the RN factor in his life. and so can mom. when Rowan cries in the middle of a nap, i feel like i have to race a nurse to get to him first. when i want to hold him, i want to pick him up off wherever he happens to be sitting without someone hovering over me saying "do you need help?" i realize this may sound ungrateful and rude. i realize these people are just trying to do the best they can to help out. but it gets really REALLY old really fast. i don't think you could ever imagine what it's like to have nursing in your house unless you have it. and 16 hours a day. that's 2/3 of the day, of your LIFE, that these people are in your house. i wouldn't even want my best friend in my house that much, let alone a stranger i never met who happens to have RN behind their name! the vent, the medical supplies, the medical procedures, the oxygen, the tubes and wires attached to my baby, i can handle all of it. what i can't handle so well is ALL THE FRIGGIN NURSES UP IN MY GRILL ALL THE DAMN TIME!

okay. good. glad i got that off my chest. so hopefully this reduction of nursing hours will do me some good and keep me out of the looney bin, which is where i was headed. and hopefully my brain can stop torturing me with these saline and toilet paper dreams!

a pretty funny book

actually, anything with the name McSweeney's or Dave Eggers on it is usually pretty entertaining. this is a funny book of random lists, including "desserts to avoid at last meals," and "embarrassing things that happen while using a lightsaber." i just brought it to work with me tonight (good thing, because it's not very busy in the ER at the moment) to start reading. here's a good one i just came across:

THINGS THEY SHOULD DO:

     they should let people sleep in restaurants

     they should show people how to kill ghosts

     they should not let children kill pigeons

     they should give blind people free flowers

     they should bring back dinosaurs for military purposes

     they should design a motorcycle that runs on urine

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ha!

i think i could write a companion book of lists pertaining to all the ridiculous shit that occurs here in the emergency department. double ha!