Today I would rather be here, wandering along the beach, listening to the sound of the waves gently touching the sand.  It's been a tough week.  We have long term patients at work, many patient's I've known for years.  One of my favorite patients came in this week for a scan.  I've known her for five years.  She has a wonderful smile and laugh.  She loves life, especially spending time with her grandchildren.

She was looking and feeling awful when she came in so she ended up on a stretcher.  We joked a bit, I got her a blanket and then she said she thought she was almost done which made both of us cry.  She's only sixty years old and she's had cancer for the past five years.  She has a seven month old grandson who won't remember her.  I suggested she leave a letter for him but she said no, she wanted her other grandchildren to tell him about her.  When she left I gave her a big hug and I thought about how much I hate cancer.

Yesterday I found out another one of my favorite patients has opted for assisted suicide on Saturday.  Fortunately I was in a stairwell when I was told this so I could cry in peace.  This patient is a man who is only a year younger than me;  he has a three year old daughter.  He's kind and gentle and just such a lovely person.  He's been coming to us for awhile as well and now he's an inpatient nearing the end.  Today he came down to us to have his central line checked because somebody thought it might be leaking.  He was pretty well medicated, maybe even a little high, but not in pain.  I overheard him explaining to the x-ray tech that he was going for MAID, medical assistance in dying, on Saturday so we just needed to make sure the line was working.  He told the doc too.

Yesterday when we took him upstairs on his stretcher he was singing.  Today I told him that it was a honour to take care of him and that I was so glad I had the chance to meet him.  He said, "I'm so glad we met too Sherry."  I smiled and didn't tell him that wasn't my name.  I'm okay being Sherry for him.  He made me smile and I will raise a glass of wine to his memory when I go out for supper on Saturday.

Today a young man paralyzed from his tumor pressing on his spine came back to us;  he was with us last fall for months.  He was a huge guy, six foot five, three hundred pounds.  It always took five of us to move him from the stretcher to the table.  He's lost almost a hundred pounds, the cancer has spread to his brain.  He doesn't have much time left.  His daughter is sixteen months old now and walking;  last fall she was still a baby.  She won't remember her daddy.

There are more.  People getting sicker, new patients taking the place of those who have gone.  A never ending carousal of cancer.

I will spend the weekend working in my garden, digging up weeds, mulching, moving plants, digging in the dirt.  We're going out with friends for supper on Saturday.  I will walk the dog.  I will try to remember to be thankful for the time I have here.

I've been on estrogen and progesterone for the past five years because I kind of lost my mind when menopause first hit me five years ago.  But you're only supposed to stay on it for five years and my time is up so I've been decreasing the dose for the past few months until this past Monday when I took the last patch off.

So now the hot flashes are back in full force, enough to make me want to vomit last night.  We took the dog for a walk and it's hot as hell here.  When we got back home to our lovely hot house I sat down and had a hot flash which heated me up enough to feel sick.  It passed but it's a very unpleasant feeling.

I also feel foggy and maybe a little irritable, maybe a lot irritable.  I have a problem with my temper anyway which I try to keep in check but when my hormones are out of whack it feels like trying to rein in a dragon, a fiery, pissed off dragon.  So there's that.

Otherwise life is fine.  I need more exercise but keep finding excuses to not exercise when the best thing for me would be exercise.

I'm training a young nurse to work in our interventional radiology suite and found it difficult to focus yesterday.  She had lots of questions which I tried to answer while also assisting the radiologist.  Mistakes were made, by me.  Nothing to do with the patient, just with me not paying attention to what was going on because I was distracted.  I kept handing the rad the wrong instruments.  He's an extremely kind man and when I apologized to him later he said not to worry.  We're a team.  I helped him when he first started and today he was able to help me.

So I'm not losing my marbles but I am having a hard time dealing with distractions, something the big guy would agree with as we had a long conversation about this last night.  He's not wrong but it's hard to hear the truth.  Neither is this a new problem with me, I've been like this my whole life.

I'm off today so I'm taking the dog for a nice long walk before it gets too hot.

I have a knack for pissing people off.  It is my super power as it were.  Two days ago we had a young boy come in for a conformal brain MRI.  The only time we get children is when they need brain radiation and it's never good.  They don't survive.  It buys their family time and maybe improves symptoms.

This little guy is seven, one eye looking the wrong way, probably because of where the tumor is.  His parents and big sister were with him.  The only good thing about children is that they don't know they're dying at this stage, but their parents do and it often feels like a funeral procession walking down the hallway.

I had to start his IV for the MRI scan.  His parents had been told by the staff downstairs in radiation that he wouldn't need an IV.  The staff downstairs were wrong.  The mother was upset because she could have put emla cream on to numb the little guy's skin before the needle poke but she was given the wrong information.  The little guy was stressed because he didn't think he would be getting poked.

I checked with the MRI techs and it was going to be about forty minutes before the little guy was going on the table so I found a vein that looked good and his mom put emla on his skin and I told them to come back in thirty minutes for the IV start and the emla should have helped numb the skin by then.

Then  I called downstairs and left a message for the staff who told the family that he wouldn't need an IV.  I told them he was going to need an IV, that they had given the family the wrong information and had caused a lot of stress for a little guy.  I was not rude but I was assertive.  Two of the MRI techs heard me leave the message.

Later, after the IV start, after the little guy vomited due to stress, after the MRI scan, a message was left on the nursing phone by one of the staff downstairs.  She was obviously angry and said she didn't appreciate the message I had left.

So I went into MRI and told the supervisor that if there was any fallout from this incident, that I was to blame.  He didn't care.  Radiation had sent the patient up without any warning, the whole thing was a shit show, he was frustrated with radiation.  I said that I had a knack for pissing people off and laughed but I also felt bad.  I was advocating for me patient, I was giving information and felt I had been misunderstood.

One of the young techs, also a psych major, said that when people have such an angry response it's usually because they know they are at fault in some way and it was a way to deflect blame, to protect themselves.  I'd never thought of that but it makes sense.  I'm pretty sure I do the same thing without thinking.

I then told her about my sister and my mum dying and my sister's anger with me.  She wondered if my sister did in some way feel responsible for my mum's death and for how poorly she treated my mum in the last year of my mum's life.  I don't think my sister was responsible for my mum's death but I do hold her responsible for hurting my mum's feelings.  My mum felt like a burden when she died because of what my sister said to her.  My sister told mum she should be in a nursing home, not an option I supported.

So perhaps my super power is pissing people off because I hold up a mirror.  It's not my intent to piss people of but I do strive for the truth.  I know we all lie to ourselves, me included, but I do try to look at myself honestly which causes me all kinds of stress because as a human being I am a messy individual with conflicting ideas, believes, values and intentions.  It's not easy being human.