(My friend the doctor swears this actually happened to his patient.)

A man of late years was admitted to the emergency room with pain in his leg. They hooked him up to a few machines to check his vital signs, and noticed that his oxygen saturations were in the low 70s.

That’s like breathing nothing. That’s like being, well… DEAD.

But he was sitting up and talking to the nurses. All of his other vital signs were in normal ranges and he didn’t exhibit any signs of difficulty breathing. The staff panicked when they saw that number on the monitor, though, and scrambled to put the man on supplementary oxygen.

With the tubing placed and the oxygen flowing, the man’s oxygen saturations jumped up to a normal range in the mid-90s. And then all the rest of his vitals started going crazy. His heart rate went up. His blood pressure made a jump. And he was coughing and struggling to breathe… until they took the oxygen off him, and his sats dropped back into the 70s and all other vitals returned to normal.

HUH?

It emerged that the patient, a cigarette smoker of many packs per day for fifty years, had all the classic lung damage you’d expect. But he didn’t have emphysema or lung cancer. His crappy lungs had adapted themselves so well to the ever-increasing damage over the years that they were able to function in a less-than-optimal state and still sustain life.

That’s some crazy shit. But that’s evolution at its finest.

I bring this up because of that whole detox thing I’m interested in. Last week, before I was able to see my doctor about the herbal system, I decided it couldn’t hurt to start drinking more water and eating better beforehand. So I committed myself to 64 ounces of water per day, no more fried foods or candy, and no more soda.

Take a wild guess at what happened.

Not only did I have the major caffeine withdrawal (I expected that, of course), I had more stomach upsets and sleeplessness without fried food or caffeine. I actually felt DEHYDRATED from drinking that much water – my skin and lips were painfully dry. Every time I’d have a salad for lunch, even with dressing and some chicken on it, my blood sugar would drop in the early afternoon and I’d have to slug a bottle of orange juice just to get enough natural sugars in me to function the rest of the day at work.

Then on top of that, I got a cold. And I just couldn’t take the stomach aches AND the sniffles.

So I’m back on Diet Dr. Pepper and McChickens and peanut butter cups for now because my body simply cannot handle the cold-turkey quit of everything crappy that I’ve fed it. It just straight up REBELLED when I tried to cut out fried and over-processed foods and replace them with greens and fruit! The caffeine withdrawal I was expecting, that’s normal… but what about the rest of it?

Can you have a physiological addiction to grease and sodium like you can nicotine? I really want to know.

The doctor said the herbal thing is fine, so the new plan is to sloooowly cut out those foods over the next two weeks or so, and then do the detox system.

Besides, it would be pointless to start a diet before the Super Bowl parties anyway, right? Beer, nachos, beer, pizza, beer, little hot dogs in BBQ sauce in a Crock Pot, beer…

What’s your addiction? Have you ever tried to quit?

It’s my anniversary!

I’ve been with The Hospital for seven years this week! In honor of this momentous (to me) occasion, I bring you a reprint of something you’ve probably never read in the first place. This is from long ago when this was just a baby blog called “My Red Stapler” and I was a wee tot of 21 when the story took place. It’s about a weird thing that happened to me not long after I started working at The Hospital.

And it was an eye-opening experience….

Originally posted as:

Um, there’s a body by the elevator… anyone?

June 2006

I was only a few weeks out of orientation, working as a unit secretary. Not a lot of people actually died on the unit I worked in; if they are terminal, they know they’re terminal and they go home so they can die in peace, without us jabbing them with needles and force-feeding them green jello. Usually, the people who actually die on that floor are the ones who surprise us.

Mr. Patient wasn’t a surprise – we knew he was going, he knew he was going, and the plans were in place to discharge him the next morning with hospice. He just jumped the gun a bit. When his son came up to the desk an hour after my shift started and asked if he could see the doctor, I told him the doctors would be in soon on rounds. I had been taught from Day One that one does not interrupt the doctors in a discussion (as they were at that very moment, right behind me where Mr. Patient’s son could see them but thankfully not hear them, since they were talking about golf). He said again that he really needed the doctor to come to the room, and I explained again that the doctors would be in very soon, it was almost time for rounds, and could I get the nurse to bring him anything in the meantime?

He leaned across the desk and scowled at me. “Well,” he said loudly, “my dad just DIED and I think I need the DOCTOR to come in and pronounce him.”

Guuuhhhhh…..

The golf conversation screeched to a halt and I sat down, speechless as the doctors clamored around and looked at papers and asked questions and finally went to see the patient’s family. I knew there was something I was supposed to be doing… ah yes, there, in the back of my orientation manual was the checklist. Okay…notify physician, that’s done, call spiritual care, will do, call expiration tech…

“What’s an expiration tech?” I wondered aloud.

“He’s the dude with the body bags,” said the CNA, passing by my desk. “Bags and tags.”

What a job, I thought. I called spiritual care, the expiration tech, the nursing office, the clinical manager, everyone on the list – check, check, check. Spiritual care came and consoled the family, a social worker appeared to suggest funeral arrangements – it all went on around me in a blur as I went back to the daily grind of answering the phones, processing orders and scheduling exams.

About half an hour later, admitting called. “We have a patient for room 25,” the girl said.

“Um, 25 is still…occupied.”

“You discharged Mr. Patient thirty minutes ago.”

“He died so I have to take him out of the system. But he’s still in there. The family needed some time and the expiration tech–”

“Well, I’ve got a patient in the Emergency Department who needs a bed on your unit now, and that’s the only one open. You guys need to move that guy out of there, NOW.”

Click.

I told the charge nurse, and miraculously, the family cleared out and went into a meeting room with the chaplain and the social worker while the expiration tech bagged and tagged. Or so we thought.

The orderlies rolled Mr. Patient by my desk on a stretcher with a sheet pulled over the raised rails so the outline of his body was obscured from view. Away they went on the service elevator, just as a housekeeper showed up to clean the room. The expiration tech filled out some forms for the chart, handed them to me and left as the patient from Emergency rolled past my desk and into room 25. It was perfect timing.

A few minutes later, the service elevator opened and a confused-looking orderly pushed the stretcher-with-a-sheet-over-it back in front of my desk. Mr. Patient had returned.

“Why are you here?” I asked him. “Why is HE here?”

“Uhhh,” he mumbled. “They said the tags was wrong and to bring ‘im up, so I brung him.”

He shoved a crumpled transport log in my face. I ignored it. “Who said the tags were wrong?” I demanded, looking around desperately for a charge nurse, any nurse, anyone who had been here more than three months and was better-equipped than I to deal with a body in the hallway.

“The guy in the morgue. Could you sign this? I got another trip to do.”

“You can’t just leave him here!” I wailed.

“I’ll put ‘im back in the room,” the orderly said, kicking the brake off and starting toward room 25.

“There’s a patient in there now.”

“Where’s your empty rooms?”

“We don’t have any. Please, just wait while I call the morgue and straighten this out and then you can take him–”

“I’ll put ‘im here,” he said, pushing the stretcher into an alcove by the elevators. He grabbed the transport log from me, not caring that I hadn’t signed it, and disappeared.

Breathe, I told myself. Call the morgue and tell them that the idiot orderly just left a dead man by the elevator.

“His tag was wrong,” the man in the morgue said when I called.

“What tag?”

“His toe tag. He has the wrong tag on his toe. That one goes on the bag and there’s no tag on the bag so you have to do them over before we can take him. Identification purposes. Go look at it.”

“I am NOT looking at it.”

“Better call the expiration tech.”

Click.

So I called the expiration tech. I explained the situation frantically. “You’ll come up and fix it right away?” I pleaded. “He’s in the hallway, we have no rooms–”

“Those tags are right, it’s that guy in the morgue who’s all backwards,” the tech grumbled. “Go look at the body, there’s a white tag on the toe and blue tag on the bag, right?”

“I AM NOT LOOKING AT IT!” I said again. I couldn’t, physically could not go look at Mr. Patient’s toe. I’m the newbie, the secretary for chrissake, why should I have to go look at the toe? I looked again for a nurse – WHERE were my nurses?

“Call the guy in the morgue back, tell him–”

I mustered all my meager courage. “No, YOU come up here, YOU look at the tags, and YOU call the morgue back since YOU are the expiration tech and there is a body in MY hallway.”

I slammed down the phone and a nurse finally appeared. “I need to take Mrs. Brown to CT. Is anyone using that stretcher?” she asked, pointing to the corner by the elevators.

“Mr. Patient is,” I said wearily.

“But he–”

“Came back,” I finished. “The morgue sent him back and said his tags were wrong and there was no empty room to put him in and he’s there and I called the guy and he wanted me to look at the toe but I couldn’t go look, I really couldn’t and so I told him–” I was gasping for breath and trying hard not to cry. “And Mr. Patient’s family is still in the meeting room and if they come out they’re gonna see him and I told the guy and he wanted me to look at the toe, but I couldn’t because I’ve never seen a dead body before and I couldn’t go look at the toe and–”

The nurse was wide-eyed and furious, but as she opened her mouth to curse the expiration tech to the seventh circle of hell, the elevator pinged and he reappeared. Blind to our hysteria, the tech trotted over to the stretcher, unzipped the bag and placed a white tag on the toe and a blue tag on the bag. We watched, mouths agape, as he silently pushed the stretcher onto the elevator and he and Mr. Patient disappeared just as the red-eyed family emerged from the meeting room.

Once again, it was perfect timing.

The nurse and I could do nothing but shut our mouths and tend to the living.

E’s job at The Very Nice Restaurant affords him a certain number of perks, including free nights and major discounts on food and services at several Very Nice Hotel chains, including the Ritz-Carlton, the Four Seasons, and some others all over the world.

On the advice of several of his coworkers, we went here:

Let’s get something out in the open right now. My family grew up going on camping trips for vacations. I’m totally good in a tent with a sleeping bag and eating food that’s been cooked over a fire or on a little camp stove. So, try and imagine my eyeballs when I saw that we got to stay here:

Here’s our hotel, smack in the middle of this beachside lineup.

Suffice to say, I felt a little country-come-to-town wandering around that place. I was constantly asking E who I was supposed to tip (anyone who arranges things for you or gives you something you asked for) and who I was not to worry about tipping (anyone who brings you something you didn’t ask for, or anyone who assists you while you are in a bathing suit and obviously do not have money).

I took advantage of the free steam room and the seven-headed shower in the spa, enjoyed the complimentary L’Occitane bath goodies every day, and got an amazing pedicure. We had one meal at the restaurant and one meal with room service just because we were feeling lazy. But beyond that, we really skipped out on all of the fuss and were just our normal, beer-and-burger kind of selves.

Except the Bud Light was $7 per bottle and the burger was made of grass-fed, free-range, pilates-doing, inner-peace-having cow, and cost $18. Plus tips.

Seriously? We actually stopped at the grocery store before we got to the hotel and loaded up on bread, cheese, lunchmeat, hot dogs, yogurt, fruit, beer, soda, and chips. We even brought the mini George Foreman grill down there with us so we could make hot sandwiches in the room. Even at the Four Seasons, and even with 50% off at their restaurant, we’re still cheap.

There were red flags on the beach much of the time, but we had some beautiful sunshine, enough for good walks and a 20-mile bike ride down the island.

This pier was about a ten-minute walk down the beach from our hotel, and it goes out to where the water is about 40 or 50 feet deep. We saw  a school flying fish being chased by barracudas – tricky to photograph, but so gorgeous. Here’s my attempted shot of the flying fish – look in the lower left of the picture.

The Four Seasons is on an island between the Atlantic Ocean and the Intercoastal Waterway. We had to go over a drawbridge to get pretty much anywhere, and for some sort of growing-up-landlocked reason, this totally thrilled me.

The ocean side was full of hotels, and the waterway side was lined with huge homes – some probably bigger than the hotel – where the supa-rich docked their supa-expensive boats.

It can be an expensive town. Even the taxis are Lincolns and Cadillacs. No, not just the Four Seasons club car. I mean the TAXI you wave down on the street. And even it has complimentary candies and bottled water.

We took a day to go deep-sea fishing, and although it started out kind of gray-ish, it ended up sunny and perfect (minus the first hour, in which I was uncomfortably – but not barfy – seasick). Here’s our little boat:

And here is E reeling in a freaking 7-foot sailfish.

Flickr Video

That was completely amazing. We ended up letting the fish go (as you can see) because we weren’t going to eat it, sell it, or mount it. That pinkish thing in its mouth is actually the fish’s stomach! Sailfish, I kid you not, will spit up their own stomachs to rid themselves of a hook if they can, and then gulp it back down once freed.

There’s your trivia for the day.

(And no, I didn’t catch anything.)

Aside from the bike ride and the fishing, we really spent most of the time just wandering the shore searching for coral and shells, laying around by the pool if it was nice or in our room if it was not. We only did one night out on the town and it was okay, but we chose to spend our last night in Palm Beach eating a delivery pizza  and watching movies instead of going back across the drawbridge.

It was just better that way.

Neither one of us could get more than two bars of cell service while we were on the island. I didn’t even get to read my guest bloggers’ posts until Saturday because we chose not to pay extra for wifi in the room. Although it was pretty frustrating to feel so disconnected at first, I have to admit that it was kind of sad to look down at my phone at the airport and see all the bars lit up again.

And, in keeping with the frugal nature of our swanky trip, I didn’t buy a single souvenir.

But I think I’ve got the best one right here anyway:

And that was our vacation.

Hey, guys! It’s Stephany from Stephany Writes. I’m guest blogging today for Rebekah as she’s on vacay in not-so-sunny Florida. (Although I know that to most of your, 30 and 40 degree weather would feel WARM to what you’re experiencing now but to us Floridians….this. is. COLD!) Anyway, it’s my first guest blog and I’ll try to do a good job so Rebekah doesn’t hate me!

This is actually a old blog post I wrote in November 2008. It was about a month after I failed my final internship and the day I realized a lot about myself.

So, yesterday, I decided it was time to hang up my diplomas. I had a frame for my A.A. degree but was waiting to get one for my high school diploma. It’s much smaller than a regular-sized piece of paper so I needed to get the right size. And, you know, it’s been 2 1/2 years since I graduated from high school. It was time.

I framed my high school diploma just right, hammered in two nails, and made sure the diploma looked perfect. It did. So then I set to hammering two nails for the other diploma. I guess I’m not up-to-date on hammering techniques and didn’t realize that the movement of a hammer banging a nail into a wall would cause my other diploma to move and shift until it fell off the wall. The wood holding the frame together broke into 3 pieces.

I looked at it for a moment and said, “Man. That could make me cry.”

So I had a tiny, itty-bitty meltdown.

Fine. I had a huge, gulping tears “I have no purpose” cry. It felt kinda good. I’ve been holding in all my feelings for the past few weeks, pretending everything is OK. Sure, it’s fine that I failed my final internship and nobody thinks I’m ready to be alone with kids. A-OK. Hunky dory.

And I came to this realization: I don’t want to be a teacher.

I’ve had a blast in my classes. It was fun and then I got to my internship and while I adored the kids to bits and pieces, I wasn’t good at it. I rambled on and on about subjects, I never felt comfortable teaching, and honest-to-God, I never got a good evaluation.

All of my friends in their internships could whip out a lesson from scratch and have it be amazing. I would read their statuses on Facebook: “So-and-so had an AMAZING evalution, even though I had to make up a lesson from scratch.” And I was just like, “Seriously? The only way I could ever have an AMAZING evaluation is by practicing it thirty times before I did it.”

It wasn’t my path to take.

I think God needed to give me a wake-up call. Honestly, I knew teaching wasn’t where I was going to be 10 years from now. I’m a writer. I write. I love to write. I can write essays like it’s a day at the beach. I have so many ideas floating around in my brain that it’s hard to keep track. So why do teaching? I just thought it would be a good career before I got published.

Obviously, God nixed that idea.

So, I’m changing my major. I have to decide between English (emphasis on Creative Writing) or Mass Communications (emphasis on journalism or public relations). Obviously, I would want to do the first one because it would give me the best boost to become a published author. I don’t know if I want to do journalism or public relations. Journalism and public relations will probably give me a more stable job when I graduate but I already tried that with teaching. It didn’t work.

I’m going to have to take to the advisor in the College of Ed first to get the ball rolling to change my major. Then I can start talking to advisors on what to change my major to, either English or Mass Communications. I’m hoping to be able to sign up for classes for Spring but it might be too late. I hope it’s not. I need to be registered, otherwise my 6-month loan payoff period is going to kick in and I’m going to have to start making payments in June. Yikes!

I feel like I’m finally walking in God’s will now, or, at the very least, I’m headed there. I just need to keep praying that He’ll continue to direct my path. His way is a billion times better than my way – as we have seen! He’ll get me to where I need to be.

(I did end up choosing journalism over English. I’m hoping to graduate in December and I’m thinking seriously about pursuing a Master’s degree in English. But that’s all speculation. For now.)

Just to catch up on a few things…

Since July I’ve been in the application process for a new job here at The Hospital. A friend of mine in the marketing department clued me in to the fact that they were thinking of creating a position to coordinate The Hospital’s growing social media outreach projects, so I fired off an email to the director of the department before the job was even posted. I interviewed a few months ago and was asked back for a second interview, which finally took place in September because the creation of a new job role got tangled up in HR for weeks on end.

My first interview was with a panel of four people, and they really liked me. They liked my resume, liked my writing samples, liked my personality, and la la la. Of course I was really excited about the opportunity to get a foot in the door in the marketing department – without a degree in the field, that’s a tricky thing to do, but my experience in internal and external communications within my current department has helped me build a portfolio of sorts that’s at least halfway impressive to anyone within this organization. To an outside group, who knows – which is why finding this type of job at The Hospital was a plum chance for me.

But, after much hard work (and even a homework assignment!) preparing for the second interview, I found out (on moving day, natch) that despite nailing the second interview, I came in second place to someone from an outside agency who had more experience in the industry. The manager who called me was very apologetic and reiterated all the things about how they thought I was great and would be an asset to their department and if anything ever came open they would absolutely call me because they were all so impressed, just not the right fit for this job because of lack of experience, and so on and so forth.

But you know how it is. Hear that after a rejection and no matter how sincere the bearer of the bad news is, everything feels like lip service. And I was in the Hardee’s drive-thru line when I got the call, which didn’t help.

And of course this all took place on moving day, which you all know was SUCH a wonderful day to deal with – well, anything.

I drove to E’s house.

“I didn’t get it, baby.” He opened his arms and I snuggled into his chest and got all teary. “I’m giving myself ten minutes to mope,” I sniffed. “Then I have to deal with the rest of this crap and I can’t cry any more.” He said many comforting things and rubbed my shoulders and kissed my hair like the wonderful boyfriend he is. When my ten minutes were up, I forced myself to get back to the business of moving.

Maybe it was for the best that I got the news on a day that was already crappy. I had to suck it up and move on. Literally.

I understand their reasons, of course. I wouldn’t have wanted to go into a job for which I was ill-prepared and lacked the experience necessary to totally kick ass. I can’t ride on personality alone, and if I’m not qualified, then I’m not qualified. I can deal with that.

It’s a field I really want to be in. My boss knows that, and after I told her why I didn’t get the job, she said she was going to make an effort to help me get more experience within our department so I could build up my resume a bit more. She also offered to sign off on tuition reimbursement if I’d like to take a class or three in order to boost my academic credentials.

(Boss, I LOVE YOU. The only reason I want to go work for anyone else is because I know that if you won the lottery tomorrow, you would probably not take me to Bermuda with you and I’d be stuck here working for people not half as awesome as you are.)

That brings me to grad school.

I tried it once before and my first class in the Master’s in Project Management really made it quite clear that I did NOT want to work in Project Management after all. I do okay at it right now, but this is not where I want to be. This is not the kind of work that inspires me or even makes me a tiny bit happy. So I’ve been digging into info on graduate programs in the St. Louis area (online learning, not my thing) and found one school that has several Master’s programs in communications that all have the same core courses. So I could take one or two classes and then head into a program in Media Communications, Media Literacy, or Communications Management.

I was rolling this over in my brain when I got a call from the director of the Marketing Department last week. She called to apologize for not having been in touch since the interview (she was not the one who made that first call to me) and to reiterate how impressed she was with me and really wanted to have me in their department when something suitable became available.

I was truly touched. After a few weeks of mellowing out post-rejection, the same words didn’t feel like lip service anymore. They sounded more honest, more true – true enough to make me feel like even little inexperienced me could have a shot at moving into the field I really want to be in.

I seized the moment and asked her about the graduate programs I was considering. Would one of these be worthwhile, what do you think of the school, what do you think of a possible emphasis in this or that? She was so encouraging and seemed pretty pumped that I was seeking this out on my own.

Little Miss Initiative, that’s me. But seriously, who wants to get thisclose and get shot down again? The resume isn’t going to improve itself, you know.

“And I hope you don’t mind,” she continued, “but I took the liberty of sending your resume and application information over to the VP of [department]. I was speaking to her the other day and they’re thinking about creating a similar position to support their new [redacted] campaign, so I told her about you.”

YOU. HOPE. I. DON’T. MIND?!

Guuuuhhh.

It may become something, it may not. At the moment, the job in the other department doesn’t really exist yet, it’s just an idea they’re tossing around. But my name is in there. Yowza.

And graduate school starts in January.