Conference, schmonference. The only thing of note during conference time on Friday was that it was freaking FREEZING in there. During the morning inbrief, a nice man saw me shivering and let me borrow his blazer. I got a cup of coffee just to warm my hands, and I didn’t take a sip. I was wearing a button-down shirt and a linen skirt, not a bikini. But brr!

So I did what any reasonable girl on Michigan Avenue would do. I skipped out of the fifteen-minute break/networking session and trotted across the street to the North Face store in the Hancock Building. I bought this:

It looked nice over my white button-down, although with the patch on the sleeve and the skirt I was wearing, I felt a bit like I was ditching class from my private school. Maybe I should have gotten this one instead.

It might have been even more appropriate. That and ski pants.

But I escaped without losing any digits to frostbite, and headed out into the fierce Chicago sunshine to go get ready to meet more of the blog posse.

I will pause here for a moment and explain the title of this post. I have a coworker who refers to my blogger pals as my “imaginary friends” since all I do is type and Twitter to you guys and have never met any of you face to face before this trip. NS, look! You’re finally being mentioned in a post! EAT THAT!

“Jess said she’d be wearing a blue shirt,” I said. “I think I know what she looks like, but not the others.”

“Yeah I saw the pictures she posted from BlogHer,” Jenn added as we scanned the plaza. “But why was she wearing a cheeseburger bag on her head?”

Even without her distinctive headwear, we found Jess. Three more lovely lady bloggers joined us – it should have been four, but noooo, Jamie just HAD to go to Lollapalooza and send eleventy-three Tweets that had us all checking our phones and envying her. I was the newbie in the group and I hadn’t read everyone and everyone hadn’t read me, but it took about three and a half minutes for me to feel like I was catching up with old friends that I hadn’t seen in awhile, rather than meeting new people that I’d be afraid wouldn’t like me.

This does go back to my theory of the Six Degrees of Blogroll. In the same way that we’ve always chosen our friends, we choose what we read. As we’ve all grown and gotten out of high school and college cliques, sororities, and organized extracurriculars, the friend-market becomes almost as tricky as the mate-market. I have no idea how to “make friends” with a girl, really. My only new female friends post-college have been from work. You can’t just go pick up friends at a bar.

But when you read a blog and you recognize some sort of friend material in that blogger, you read again. And then you click on that person’s blogroll and find someone who the blogger you like likes, because that person exudes the friend vibe to the blogger you like, and it’s the same vibe you get from that first one. So you read another blog. And click another link, and read another blog, and realize that one or two of them have been reading you and added you to a blogroll. The Six Degrees of Blogroll becomes a circle of friends who have met and friends to be made, and when you meet, you hug.

Among the six of us we didn’t finish one deep-dish at Giordano’s, and we took our takeaway bags down the street to a pub called Elephant & Castle* for a few beverages. Conversation ranged from jobs and politics to relationships and the relative size of one’s ass. At one point late in the evening it was down to three of us and a tableful of empty glasses, earnestly discussing the problems of age-centered blog ad networks, the hostile takeover by the mommy-bloggers, and certain people having crushes on other certain people. It was bliss.

So in conclusion, without sounding like a lesbian, may I ask: WHERE ARE ALL THE SINGLE GIRLS IN ST. LOUIS?!?!

And Chicago? Labor Day, bitches. I will see you then.

————

*Giordano’s also does not serve Bud Select.

**Which also does not serve Bud Select.

I am 5’3” and I weigh 120 pounds. Yay me. And I am just as entitled to worry about my health and appearance as you are. The problem I have with you is that you don’t seem to believe that I am just as entitled to TALK about it as you are.

Today I was on the elevator with two of you, my coworkers, heading to lunch. You were talking about how you wanted the ribs or the fried chicken but should probably just have the mandarin salad with lite dressing and a glass of water, and what would I be having?

I informed you that I like the cheeseburgers at this restaurant, and was considering ordering one.

You both narrowed your eyes at me. Whatever, you said, at your age you can eat anything you want, cheeseburgers, all of that, you don’t know what it’s like to have to watch your weight.

Yes, I pointed out. Yes I do.

One of you looked me up and down and said yeah right, it wouldn’t hurt me to put on a few pounds.

I pointed out that I am a perfectly healthy weight right now (I owe that to my Depo shots, without which I would still be a gangly 105 pounds soaking wet) and I intend to stay that way. So yes, I am watching my weight. Exercise, I say, that’s where I really need to step up. I may be skinny but I have terrible muscle tone.

Again, you sniffed and rolled your eyes.

What is your problem, people? Is it so wrong of me to say that I want to take care of my body and I realize that I could have healthier habits? Just because my problems are not the same as your problems gives you no right to be rude about it. And I tell you this: you are rude. Rude, I say.

You’ll see, you say, gray-haired and ageist. You’ll see, when you get older and you’re not 100 pounds anymore, it won’t be easy.

Ladies, it’s not easy for me NOW. I have to fight to keep weight on while I’m trying to keep my hypertensive diastolic under control. That in itself is a quandary, because steamed veggies are great for my blood pressure and don’t help me maintain my weight. I don’t like that my muscles aren’t what they used to be, so I exercise and you sniff that I don’t need to get any skinnier. You’re right, I don’t. Until I started my Depo-Provera shot and gained 15 pounds, I was pale, anemic and basically had no immune system. And back then you said I was anorexic and bulimic. You said it was my fault. You were never happy with my body and you never will be until I start wearing clothes in double-digit sizes.

Guess what? I have a little pudge on my tummy and I don’t like it. I should probably do some crunches. I have cellulite on my butt and my thighs and I don’t like that either. Maybe I need to get out the weights and do a few squats. There are things I can do to be healthier, and do you really want to discourage me from doing them? Does it make you feel better about yourself to be rude to the skinny girl, to belittle her problems because they happen to be the opposite of your own?

Sometimes the grass sucks on this side of the fence too.

I eat cheeseburgers because I like them and I need to keep my weight up, I exercise because I need better muscle tone and it helps lower my high blood pressure (My cholesterol, by the way, is quite fine). And you tell me to enjoy it while I can, because I am surely doomed to one day be as fat as you perceive yourself to be.

Leave the labels out of it: fat and skinny and obese and scrawny and plus-size and anorexic and all the others. Good health is the best goal for all of us, whether that means gaining weight, losing weight, maintaining weight, working out, watching what we eat, or building our self-esteem in what we are. I don’t want to be skinny and sick any more than you want to be overweight and fighting your own set of health issues. So we have a common goal and we both struggle. Don’t tell me we’re so different.

Healthy is beautiful.

—————————–

I cross-posted this one on BlogHer and got a nice e-mail from one of the Community Managers. That made me happy.

Lindz had the best post in my Bloglines today, and her subject matter, in a roundabout way, inspired to tell you about this part of my job.

One day a week, I am an honorary member of the surgical pathology department. I help with what are called “frozen section” specimens, the kind that require a rapid, intra-operative diagnosis so the surgeons know how to proceed with the operation. The bulk of these are cancer cases, in which the surgeons are looking for margins – basically trying to find out how close they are to the edge of your cancer without taking out anything you could still use. We do a lot of biopsies to see if anything is cancerous in the first place – lymph nodes, chunks of curious growths and so on, in order to make sure that as long as they’re in there, the surgeons get what they need to get the first time.

I got to carry a couple of prostates today. Not my most interesting specimens though, but that’s how Lindz’s post  came into play and made me think about those, and the fact that sometimes it’s a little weird that I might be walking out of the OR suite with something in my hand that you didn’t quite expect to lose.

Most people know when they go in for a procedure that the surgeon is going to remove lymph nodes, a liver lesion, an ovary, a ureter. I got all of those today. When i take the specimens out of the OR to the lab, I sign off on the Tissue Exam Request and check out what the procedure is. Today those prostatectomies were both expected (one was even being televised; more on that in a bit) but there have been times when the patient’s record indicates that she is just having an ovarian tumor removed and I end up walking out of the room with an entire ovary and a uterus because there were a few surprises in there.

I get called several times in succession for some cases, depending on whether the patient had a good margin and the operation can end, or if they had a poor margin and more tissue has to go up for tests. And sometimes the docs just open a patient up and say “Well. Holy cow. THAT didn’t show up on the film we took two weeks ago,” and hand me half a kidney, five lymph nodes, and a left ureter.

The ickiest (and yes, that is a professional medical term) case I’ve ever worked pathology for was a below-the-knee amputation on a patient who had bone cancer. I took half a leg to the lab so the pathologists could figure out in a matter of minutes whether I would need to go back and get more. I didn’t. I think the patient and I would both have been very upset if I’d had to make a return trip.

I’ve worked around blood and guts (guts really IS a medical term, and a type of suture) for several years now, and I like to watch cases and see what’s going on. Since I never go onto the sterile field, I watch the laparoscopy cameras overhead when I get to the suites early, before the specimens are ready. I’ve watched a heart stop beating and start up again after an artificial aortic valve was implanted. Today I almost smacked into a cameraman when I went to pick up a prostate in the room where a local news station was filming Dr. B using a robot to perform the entire operation. It looked like he was playing a video game until one of the residents turned around and handed the nurse a piece of the patient.

Pathology isn’t so bad, really. After a thousand anatomy book diagrams and photos, after dozens of looks inside open incisions where everything is intact, it’s kind of interesting to hold a little plastic cup and see nothing but a lymph node inside. So that’s what that looks like, I tell myself. And this thing, this is what pops out those annoying little eggs every month. It’s so tiny!

I know what my legs look like, though, and I’ll keep those on. Ick.

If any of you saw my frantic Twittering today, you’ll have figured out that my office flooded this morning. Happy Friday the 13th!

My office is on the 3rd floor of one of the oldest parts of the hospital complex. On the 6th floor this morning, some electrical contractors futzing with stuff in the ceiling accidentally set off a sprinkler. I was gone from my desk for about 5 minutes, and when I came back my officemate was frantically throwing binders into the hall and covering everything with garbage bags. KP was frantic; her scrubs were soaked and her hair was wet. It was not just seeping, it was running through the ceiling in about eight different places.

It was actually kind of cool.

We corralled the friends in the office suite and started passing things out into the hall – binders, picture frames, anything that wouldn’t fit in our cabinets. I was standing on my desk pulling boxes down from the shelves. We covered the computers and phones and printer with the garbage bags and started spreading bags on the floor to keep the carpet from soaking it all up. In about ten minutes, the ceiling tiles on one side of the office looked about ready to cave in, and the drips were moving across the room toward the wall to another office. Soon everything was running down onto the file cabinet and we moved into the next office, hauling things out and garbage-bagging the rest.

“What the heck happened?” everyone asked.

A maintenance team showed up and told us about the sprinkler on the 6th floor. With help at hand and as much of my stuff moved and covered as possible, I walked up the steps to see how bad the floor above us had it.

Their ceiling was wet. That’s it.

Up again to the 5th floor. A little damp, and some seepage from the ceiling.

On the 6th floor there was standing water and chaos as patients were evacuated and monitors screeched. I walked back downstairs and asked how on earth we got drenched when 4 and 5 got less than a drizzle.

“Wait, I heard there was standing water up on 4,” said my boss as he balanced on KP’s desk and tried to hold up the ceiling.

I told him what I had seen and he shook his head in disbelief. The maintenance guys shrugged and started in on the floor with the water extractors. As the rain slowly subsided, people from housekeeping, Environmental Health, Security and Facilities Maintenance plodded in and out of the suite, asking us questions and having us look for damage to report.

“Um, our ceiling died,” I pointed out as someone climbed up to peel the soaked tiles from the frames. The tile that looked the worst just disintegrated in his hands.

“I mean personal articles,” said the lady drily.

“My clothes got wet,” said KP.

She looked at us funny.

“Did you SEE that stuff?” said KP, pointing at one of the rusty-colored puddles that had formed on a trash bag.

“The sprinklers,” I added helpfully, “do not use filtered water.”

“Okay, so… clothes, then.” She made a note on her paper.

Both of our computers survived, but KP’s phone refused to work and we feared that our big printer, having borne the brunt of the initial shower before being bagged, might be a dead loss. When the tiles came down, it began to reek in there. Like I said, it wasn’t filtered water… having traveled through two floors of who-knows-what in the walls it had gotten disgusting, and above the tiles it smelled like something had died. The carpet was already beginning to emit some sort of rank odor. We sifted through the mess (how did water get into a CLOSED file cabinet anyway?) and mopped up our stuff with towels and blankets pilfered from the linen carts in the recovery room and the ORs, sighing every time we discovered another folder that had soaked through or heard our feet make squishy noises on the carpet.

I packed up my laptop and a few essentials in my little rolly case and headed up to the IS office where I knew they had a few empty cubicles, and spent the afternoon as a squatter. When I wandered back down to change out of my scrubs at the end of the day, the floor trim had been ripped off the walls and a giant fan and HEPA filter were sitting in the middle of my floor. A trash can was catching one last mysterious drip.

There are two lessons to be learned here. One is to never, ever think that printing a copy of something and putting it in a file is “backing up your work.” The other is to believe that even when your life seems like it sucks, even when you find yourself feeling like you’re unable to face another day, you should still get up and go to work. You might end up with a good story to tell and a smile on your face.

“Canceled?” KP says aloud. “What’s canceled?”

I look across the office at her. “Huh?”

“I just received an email from Network Support that one of my work orders has been canceled. But it doesn’t tell me which one. It just has a number, not the order description.”

She opens up the online Network Support work order system.

—–

Please enter your network ID in all capital letters, even though you can use lowercase everywhere else on this system.

Please enter your NT password.

Please wait.

Please select an existing work order from this list that contains every work order you have ever created, in 6-point font.

Please ignore this pop-up box. And this one. Click here if you want to see your order status. Click here if you want to close the program without accomplishing anything.

Please wait.

Your order status is “Canceled.” No, you may not have an explanation. I said no.

—–

“I don’t understand,” she says. “It says the order was assigned to Mike. I talked to him yesterday and he said he was working on it.”

“Do you have his pager number?”

She shakes her head. “I guess I have to call the main line.”

—–

“Thank you for choosing the network support automated system. The time is now 10:47. We are experiencing system outages with our microwave and nearly everything else. Please press 2 if you are having problems with your ‘Enter’ key. Please press 3 if your computer is not plugged in and you need immediate assistance. To leave a voice message for an analyst, press 4. Otherwise, remain on the line and an analyst will be with you when he gets back from the bathroom.”

Music.

“Did you know that you can email your request to Network Support? Send a message to “Network” underscore “Support” at H-O-S-P-I-T-A-L dot O-R-G. Otherwise, please continue to hold and an analyst will be with you after these messages from our sponsors.”

Music.

“Due to the fact that our microwave is now fixed and everyone has taken a snack break, we are experiencing a high volume of calls. Please hold, and an analyst will be with you sometime.”

Music.

—–

“Network Support, this is George, may I have your name please?”

KP almost drops the phone in shock, but she recovers nicely and identifies herself. George asks how he can assist her.

“I got an email today that says one of my work orders was canceled. It says it’s canceled in the computer system too, but I talked to someone yesterday and he said he was working on it.” She gives the work order number.

“Let me look that up for you…yes, it does show that the order has been canceled.”

“I know that. Why has it been canceled? The email and the online system don’t give any reason.”

“Well ma’am, those emails are automatically generated when a work order is closed out from one part of the support team and given to another.”

“I don’t understand.”

“In this case, your work order was originally assigned to Mike in CPU Services. But today it was transfered to Susan in Laptop Services since we didn’t actually realize that the Item ID you gave us was not for a CPU. So when CPU Services gave your work order to Laptop Services, the system auto-generated that email.”

“But it’s not canceled.”

“No ma’am. The system just sends those whenever a work order is complete from one support team.”

“Even if another team is working on it?”

“Yes ma’am.”

KP sighs. “Thank you.”

—–

About five minutes later, KP’s email alert dings. “You’re not going to believe this,” she says.

“What?”

She reads from her screen. “You have been randomly selected to participate in a brief online survey to help increase employee satisfaction with the quality of customer service from the network support team.”

“You’re joking.”

“Not only that,” she continues. “It’s asking me to report on my experience in my recently closed work order.”

“The one that you were just on the phone about?” This is almost too good to be true. “Let ‘em have it!”

She clicks on the link in the email. “It’s locking up my browser,” she says after a moment.

“Forward it to me, I’ll try it in Firefox instead of IE.” A moment later it pops up in my inbox and I click the link. And I kid you not, this is what I saw:

Well, honestly.