Wine Country

I've been vacationing the past week in California with my family. We've been treking around the Bay Area and spending a few days in Sonoma Valley. The lure of California is strong. Since being out here, I've been so relaxed, enjoying the beautiful weather, looking at scenic hills with cows grazing, yellow flowers blossoming from row after row of vines. There's been so many times this trip where the beauty has literally made me catch my breath and stop.

This beauty comes at a hefty price. As we've been taking tours of wineries and eating in fine restaurants, I find myself surrounded by a group that I've rarely encountered in the past year in West Philly. My favorite part of the trip so far has been in Sonoma, when a local bar manager took my sister and I on a segway tour around the rural roads. While whizzing around, we passed joggers with their large dogs, residents of a town where it takes a pretty penny to live. We went to the back of a cheese factory and walked in on some the people who rolled the cheese. They joked around with us in spanish for a bit as they covered the cheese rolls with cocoa. I had so many questions I wanted to ask the cheese roller man. In a land of expensive houses, where does he live while working at the cheese factory? Where is he from? How long has he been here and is there any crossover between him and that rich lady with the big dog?

While driving on the beautiful country roads, I wish I could stop by the small shack on the side of the road surrounded by rusty tractors and spend an afternoon just seeing what the culture of a migrant farm worker looked like. We see the product, a $90 bottle of wine, but there seems to be so much more depth in the culture of wine country than just the fine things that I enjoy while vacationing.

stories

We carry stories of people every day. Sometimes we share them and sometimes we keep them within ourselves. Earlier in the week I had taken care of a woman as she underwent some invasive procedures to confirm that the cancer had spread to her lungs. Her husband and son remained at her bedside for most of the day, sometimes crying, sometimes silently holding her hand, sometimes gently covering her feet with the blankets. I remember thinking that she exhibited such grace while going through such difficult times. Her son came up to me today to thank me for taking care of his mother. They had placed her on hospice care and the past few days had been hard for the family. When I mentioned to him that I thought his mother exhibited such grace, he smiled and said, “Yeah, she really is elegant isn’t she? But then again, she’s my mom.” I’m always grateful for the “thank you” from patients and families because it reminds me that it’s worth it to connect past the basic necessities of the job but I also realized that those are the “thank you”s that I wish I didn’t have to receive.

I was encouraged today when driving a coworker of mine back after work. It had been a discouraging day for me. I had caught myself several times during the day inadvertently spouting sarcastic or dry comments about patients and their illnesses. I felt disconnected, one half of myself truly enjoying the people who I was caring for yet the other half saying insensitive and insincere things that I did not really feel. While we were driving after work, my coworker started sharing all the stories of the people who she’s working with. And then she said the words that I had been battling with all day but was afraid to say, “I’m always afraid I’m going to become numb.” It was so freeing to be reminded that others go through that and that years of nursing doesn’t mean that I’ll fully understand or know what to make of the things I receive in the hospital.

Wheelies!

My favorite new thing to do in the city is ride my bicycle around. After hanging out with my co-worker who works two jobs, is in school and does marathons in her spare time, I decided it's about time I get off my lard booty and buy another bike [plus I got sick of driving 10 blocks and having to pay $6 at park-and-ride when I could spend that on delicious food]. It's been surprisingly fun! A few things I've especially enjoyed about my little bike [and yes, it is little...boo it was the only one that fit at the shop :P]

1. Scrub pants + bike = holy scrub pants. Scrub pants + little reflective velcro band on leg = nerdy looking but oh so lovely scrub pants
2. I really like it when you go down a hill and the wheels turn so fast that you pedal and it doesn't have any resistence. i have no idea why it's like that...you'd figure the faster you move your legs the faster the wheels turn. is biking down hills kinda like an activation energy...once you hit a certain point there's no turning back and your extra use of biking energy just doesn't do any more work?* i have nerdy friends, I'll ask them :D
3. biking in west philly is kind of like playing Frogger "don't die don't die don't die!"
4. sometimes the pedestrians are scarier than the cars [those crazy penn kids dancing in the street and flailing their arms can clothesline ya like that!]
5. biking in the cold and ears flapping in the wind is a bad combination. ouchie.

*even when I'm old and well, old...there will always be chemistry jokes! but even with all this biking I'll never be able to lose any of the fatty folds in my intestine because of the conservation of omentum...
ha. ha. ha. get it? :)

Humanity in the Hospital

Sometimes I wonder what happens to the heart when you have to bounce back from seeing losses in the hospital. There are times I feel like being a nurse feels like I'm acting in an absurd play, to know the right things to say and the right times to say it. Even on an oncology floor where death frequently occurs, the process of placing a patient on hospice and helping them die still feels slightly unnatural and out of place. Even with the compassionate and understanding friends I have on the floor, it still feels out of place to say "I'm sad" and grieve the loss of a patient. It often makes me wonder what it's like with the residents, who often don't have the benefit of time and space to process the things that they're seeing or the collectiveness of staying in one place to be able to recap moments shared with a patient who has died. Does it grow numb after a while or is it a mechanism of survival to turn off and keep going? This week, after a whole day of conversing with the wife of a dying thirty year old man, she looked at me and said, "It must take a lot of strength to keep working on this floor and see this everyday." Her comment made me wonder what strength looks like. Does strength look like the ability to keep going? Sometimes it seems like so little is talked about amongst staff about how patients affect us. A coworker of mine once told me that all we can do is just provide for the need and move on. Yet, we let individuals affect and change us every day, should it not apply to those that we care for? After watching my patient and his family grieve over their loss, I came home that night and for the first time in a long time, cried over what I saw. It felt good. I felt human.

Vocation

It's taken me about one month to fill out a form for work. The form is a self-evaluation with examples from practice of my competencies as a nurse. It's HUP's way of awarding its nurses for what we do by providing a tier of clinical proficiency. In other words, a four dollar pay raise.

For someone who's cranked out a kajillion papers and projects, this four page application has been really difficult for me to do. My manager handed me the form and told me, "Cindy, this is your chance to brag about all the things that you do". The form wants me to list examples of how I fulfill different areas that exemplify competent nursing. Besides the fact that I have a hard time remembering what I did yesterday, finding examples has been really challenging. A huge part of it is because it's hard for me to think of nursing as competencies I have to fulfill. When I think of my job, I don't necessarily think of work. I don't think about the milestones I have to meet or clinical skills I have to obtain [although those are all things absolutely necessary to being a good nurse]. Simply put, I think of people. Try listing "likes people" under your skill set. Oiy.

That being said, filling out the form has made me think a bit about the word "Vocation". We sure spend enough time at our jobs, so what makes it so that it isn't so much "work" [as in labor] but a place we live life? A few quotes to tickle your mind:

"Vocation comes from the same root as voice, denoting the hearing of a divine call. Beyond knowing that God has a purpose for our lives, most of us spend little energy seeking out our vocation, especially in light of how the needs and the sufferings of our neighbors might inform how we use our gifts for divine purposes. There are plenty of people who are miserable in their jobs, for they have not listened to Gods call. And I would add there are many Christians who are not fulfilled in their spiritual lives becuase they have no sense of their gifts or purposes and they just run to the mission field to save souls rather than transform lives and communities using their gifts and those of the people they live among." -the irresistable revoluition, shane claiborne
"Many people mistake our work for our vocation. Our vocation is the love of Jesus." -Mother Theresa

home for the holidays

I begin this year in a sleepy haze of coffee induced happiness. A flurry of four days on the hospital floor has made for a welcome return to a quiet and empty house during the holidays. And in this state of Starbucks and cookie overload [if I ever become diabetic during the holidays, I blame Jesus getting born], I find I have much to be thankful for.

In a city often known for its roughness and harrowing crime streak, the city of Philadelphia has warmed me with its show of Brotherly Love during this holiday season. From friendly banter on the hospital floor, hearty pats on the back by interns who I've only met for 4 hours, phone calls from people who I haven't seen or spoken to for months, visits by homeless friends who offer their holiday greetings and come wanting to share a CD that has touched them, random invitations for homecooked dinners to midnight greetings and hugs from my neighbor Miss Chocolate, I find no lack of kindness. The quietness of the house reminds me that this city, even without my housemates, are full of people who remind me of God's presence and constant watch. Although Chicago will always hold its standings as "home" during the holidays, Philadelphia has found its place in my little heart.

A Happy New Year.