Ends

My favorite part of my job is hospice. This puts me in a tiny minority of pharmacists and healthcare providers. Almost all of healthcare is busily striving to extend life at any cost. Hospice is focused on letting people die with dignity and comfort. My hospice patients are one of two sorts: admitted with months and months left to live or only hours, maybe a day at most. I wish it were always the former sort of patient so families could have the time for healing and the patient wouldn't get more futile treatments. Friday we admitted the latter sort of patient and Sunday the patient needed more pain medicine because the patient surprised us all by surviving that long. The whole family was there with the patient when I walked in, drinking coffee and eating the cookies I've seen at every death vigil in a facility, yet nobody seemed to be tasting any of it. There's something transcendent about a good death where the family gathers to support the dying person one last time, then is together to lean on each other for support after the death.

My spouse and I are probably unusual in that we have told our girls exactly how we want our end of life care to look, where we want our memorial stone to be, and that we want to be cremated. We have told my sibling and my parents as well. My in-laws laughed and then hid when we tried to start that conversation. If I could have one wish, it would be that everyone considered their death and told their loved ones what treatments they want and don't want. We should all get that good death, surrounded by loved ones, with no more pain. May we all be so fortunate.

Miracles and disappointment #MicroblogMonday

Awesome news: Remember last summer when I was dizzy and had all that physical therapy? I went from "can't really walk" to human in 6 weeks after being dropped just so. About ten years ago I bought a bike, a really nice one, hoping to embrace the biking my spouse loves so. I quickly discovered that my balance on the thing was awful and I kept crashing. After maybe twice with nearly broken bones, I parked the thing and ignored it. Last fall I thought it might be time to see if my newly better balance would improve my bike riding so I asked my spouse to take it in for a tune up. 4 weeks ago I insisted we order a bike rack and haul both bikes in to be tuned up, 2.5 weeks ago they actually went in, and yesterday we picked them up. I tested out my bike riding the block to the car and had ZERO balance problems. Victory! 

Less awesome news: We didn't have the chance to have the Kid's birthday party near the actual day because of spring break and health shenanigans, so we rescheduled it. After a few weeks of debating inviting a few versus her entire class and all 4 neighborhood friends who aren't classmates, we went whole hog and invited everyone. An elaborate Mars cake was constructed for the Ready J.et Go party, games planned, house prepared. Nobody came. The Kid invited her stuffed animals and they played musical chairs in the living room. Nobody cried during the party but it was close for three of us. Her friend whose party was the same day but an hour earlier gave her a present though. I didn't think it was possible for me to feel worse than I had before about uprooting the Kid for my career and I was wrong.

The wild #MicroblogMondays

I scheduled a repeat pregnancy loss visit with a new OB/gyn last week. We decided to see what happens and if a next pregnancy happens, then that's super (if not, then in a year we get used to this family size). Little Monster is sassy and bosses the kid around and it's strange and they are both huge. Our cat bruised hir spinal column and had a few weeks of intermittent inability to use back legs on purpose, but now it seems to be all better.

I kind of want everything to change and nothing all at once. The changes are abrupt and incremental all at once. I never imagined there would be a time like this, where there might be a third child and where our cat is slowing down and getting to "senior cat" life. It has been years of talking about child three and debating and then suddenly, the shift happened and we decided to see where life takes us and that RPL testing we haven't done but probably ought to is a reality.

Life is startling when what was immobile and unchanging is suddenly (but not so suddenly after all) new. Things here remain quite wild and yet I wouldn't want to be anywhere else.

Public decency

It's interesting to think about what we share and what we don't. I am an avid user of the app/website goo.dreads and I set a reading goal at the start of the year to read 40 books. Then in November I realized I hadn't really watched my progress and had logged only 25 books. I quickly opened my reading app and browsed the contents, realizing I'd read 20 books in the previous month or two alone and if I just listed those, I had exceeded my annual goal.

Then I looked twice at the covers of the books. Mostly naked or shirtless guys, some partially clothed women, almost all romance novels. I decided that the more NC-17 sorts of books would stay off the public list because...  I really couldn't tell you why my romance novel habit is so embarrassing that I won't list all the mediocre smut I read publicly. I suppose it's a way to protect my anonymity and maintain my privacy. The particular sub-genre I read a ton of this year is perhaps more mortifying in the light of day than just some R or NC-17 romances.

It makes me wonder why the shame around sex sticks in my mind so well. Or I'm not even sure if it's shame or not, but it probably is. The other folks at work were having a borderline nsfw discussion and I certainly could have added to it in a suitably raunchy way, but I just smiled and said nothing. On the one hand, perhaps that's boss-like to avoid saying inappropriate things. Mostly I suspect it's the result of the closet I am still kind of in. My policy on my sexual orientation and gender identity is that I will tell if someone asks but I don't volunteer information. My relationship looks hetero and cis so nobody questions and I don't tell. A chunk of it is that public, face-of-the-company employees get held to a higher standard than everyone else and I don't want who I am to impact things in this small town if I can hide and keep being me in private and respectable in public.

I also wonder what life would be like if we were totally honest. Would it hurt us all or would we be better for it? Why do we have moral standards anyway when the taboos being broken through different sorts of sexual relationships aren't hurting anyone (thinking of teh gayz and the polyamorous folk, maybe polygamy, non-cis gendered folks specifically)? Who is kept in power by all that moral high ground they claim and why is it so beneficial to have (or argue that you do)? People are so weird sometimes and then needlessly cruel to each other.

Leap

I have made a lot of giant leaps based on intuition in my life. I'm not sure if that's good or bad or what, but it is fact. I knew within ten seconds of meeting my spouse that it was love and that I was all in, for better or worse. We were engaged 6 weeks after we started dating. Before I hung up my coat on interview day, I was sure about where I would go to pharmacy school. And this job, this move, that was a huge leap. I saw the job description and went "aha! The perfect job, aside from not being the most perfect job that I didn't get! It actually requires all of my skills and no nights and short weekend hours!"

The strange thing to me is how much I have second guessed this job. I know I questioned myself previously either as or just after taking those big leaps, but I don't remember this level of disquiet and insomnia. Granted I think it's normal work insomnia that seems to just be part of my life as a pharmacist - the mistakes wake me up at night, usually the little ones that repeat themselves in a dream loop until I'm wide awake.

Tomorrow we take another leap. My spouse and I decided on a Really Big outdoor scenic adventure (that I'm henceforth abbreviating RBA because I love three letter acronyms) for next summer and we start training tomorrow (well, later today). I have no idea how this trip will be possible but we need the goal to get us into gear. We plan on a week-long bike trip with big daily mileage goals to see everything. I am starting to work on my balance, my bike goes to the shop for repair, and my spouse is tasked with gathering an equipment list and training plan. There will be a chart or three. It's daunting to know how far there is to go and yet to know it's possible.

I liked what Josie's mom said the other week (excuse the bad paraphrase): being overweight is hard, working out is hard, eating right is hard, eating junk is hard (on your body); choose your hard. Today I choose to work hard toward a week of playing hard and relaxing away from work. Tomorrow I will choose it again.

The case of the red lentil pasta

When I first got this job, I had a week of training in another city at another store. The company put me in a hotel, a pretty nice extended stay with a pool (that I didn't use because I was sick either from the antibiotics or the infection that raged on despite the antibiotics) and my own dinky kitchen. This meant I cooked. One night I was at Giant Red Box store getting laundry detergent and dinner. I was perusing the dinner-in-a-box choices and discovered a kit for mac and cheese that has some veggies and green lentil pasta. The price was within my dinner budget so I decided to try it. Only the next day when I was raving about its deliciousness did I realize it was gluten free. 

So then I demanded my spouse try it. While viewed as tolerable, it was not much favored. I decided to try red lentil pasta, because why not? It might be awesome. And it totally is awesome. Om nom nom. BUT! The best part? Little Monster is forever stealing my food. I always make extra just in case. Tonight she liked my red lentil pasta with Parmesan cheese so much she needed her own fork. So instead of cereal for dinner that my spouse served the girls (no judgement, cereal happens, I get that today was busy and such), Little Monster also got fiber and protein and a bit of fat from my pasta. Victory!

On the food front, I have no real hope of the Kid expanding what she eats, although today she did try a cinnamon roll and ate it. That's not technically a new food since she ate them until maybe 18 months ago so it's a return to an old food. Still! baby step maybe. Sigh. Yesterday LM discovered her ribs and noted how much bigger and poke-ier her sister's ribs are than hers.

The here and now

At long last the Kid really reads. She didn't feel confident she could read well enough up until just lately when it clicked that she could do it. I could pretend that I have no idea where she gets the "it must be perfect or I won't even start, it's too hard if it takes more than 2 tries, fear of failure paralyzed me" mentality, but clearly it's her parents modeling that in some behavior or other. It sure isn't in what we tell her or how we praise her efforts (and she often points this out and uses great effort as a reason why something must be kept FOREVER) so we adults need to look over ourselves and root out the perfectionism. Her favorite books are Wayside School gets a little stranger and Calvin and Hobbes. She got really into a patent law discussion recently when we tried to explain it after a strip where calvin's dad starts telling him the story of the Extra Awesome Tool Patent or some such. 2nd grade. Whoa. I mostly kick myself for not having taken a job that meant we could have stayed put because this school is so inferior to her previous one. She may learn something this year but it's hard to say. We do multiplication at home, they do single digit addition to equal something under 20 in school. Her outfits tend toward bright and with patterns regardless of whether the patterns match each other. Unicorn socks are much sought after but we just have the one pair, 3 sizes too big because I guessed wrong at the store.

Little Monster is going through the most terrible part of being two. She has strong opinions about everything, including that the only song in Just Dance that can be played is Istanbul (not Constantinople) by They Might Be Giants and that the color of her controller's light change at least twice a song. Screaming and tantrums occur every few minutes because she is so MAD. Naps are mostly gone but sometimes that means a sane bedtime near 8pm so that's all right. She loves her purple "fizbee" and her toy bulldog and white rat. The rat looks real enough that I often start and think a dead rat snuck into my bed or onto the driveway before I look again and see its fluff and tag remnants. She keeps changing her identity from Donnie (fav ninja reptile) to Little Monster, Esquire (her full name with all its syllables, no nicknames or omissions) and then to Princess Something (Sofia, Elsa, McStuffins, Mer-da, Anna, Baymax, etc.). She must be going through a gross motor growth or development spurt because she crashes and leaps to her crashing scraped-up sadness often. Last week she was being raced down the block in the stroller by the Kid and she got tipped forward onto her face. I think a front tooth moved in addition to a tiny chip but it didn't bother her too much so we let her be. The girls now can only go 2 houses from home and never across the street for LM and absolutely no stroller. Today she first refused bandages for her dripping blood scrapes, then demanded them, then cried and hid when we tried to put them on her at all, with hitting and writhing when the bandage got within 6 inches of a scrape. Most nights she sleeps on our floor and still has the accursed baby plug (aka pacifier) and someday that will change but not yet. I can't bring myself to make her give up that last baby vestige.