Hospice Nurse Admits, Fairly Loudly, to Being Single

As a hospice nurse, a favorite part of my week is my team meeting. It happens every Thursday from 9am until we are finished. When we finish depends on numerous factors, principal among them how many patients died during the week. We also talk about the patients who were admitted, and the ones who need to be recertified. But I’m happy to say that the majority of the time is devoted to the folks who died. We talk about who they were. We describe how they died, how their families coped, and how it was for us. We process difficult stuff, sometimes we cry, on occasion we laugh. Death, it turns out, can be strangely funny.

After we talk about the deaths, our team spiritual counsellors do a little ritual, honoring the patients who died and anyone else we know of who died or has an anniversary or is just having a hard time. Honestly, you have a toothache, you should just tell one of us, we’ll have twenty hospice folks sending you love at 10am on a Thursday. Then we have a moment of silence and we honor ourselves too and the people who care for us. That’s usually the part that makes me want to tear up, but I’ve learned to just ride it out. 

Last Thursday, our counsellor decided that since it was almost the end of the year, it would be a good idea for our ‘spiritual moment’ to involve everyone summing up their experience of 2018 in a single word. He put this idea out to the room and then opened it up for anyone who felt like sharing. I usually share, but I generally wait till a couple other people have gone first, so the mood is sort of established and there’s a flow. On Thursday, almost the moment he finished his sentence, I shared. The word that described my 2018 came so immediately and vehemently to mind that it just sort of jumped out of my mouth. SINGLE! I said. It was a bit of a shout, honestly. Everyone looked at me, a little shocked at the volume of my word. I put my hands over my eyes for a moment, as though that would excuse the loudness. We all laughed. Nobody was too surprised, I guess, and that felt good. Being seen by your team is a happy thing.

Other people said their words. They were good words. When I thought about single in relation to them, I sort of wished that something a little more spiritual had come out of my mouth, a little more balanced and optimistic. But there’s something to be said for honesty and spontaneity, and if I’d thought it through for a little longer and come out with something a little less manic, it might just have been less authentic. So there’s that.

After a couple of hours of this meeting, the windowless room gets smaller and smaller and I have to head to the kitchen for yet another cup of coffee. Of course I need more coffee like a hole in the head, but my trip to the kitchen is usually a thinly disguised quest for food. Don’t get me wrong: people bring food to team all the time. Bagels. Assorted cream cheeses. If anyone has been away, they bring food from their vacation: Hawaiian turtles or some weird little cookie from an exotic place. But the trip to the kitchen has the added advantage that it gets me temporarily out of the shrinking room. Sometimes I meet other coworkers while I get my coffee and can have a laugh before heading back to the death talk. Sometimes there’s cake.

Last week there was a giant hamper of food. It was from a local cemetery, but that does not deter hospice workers. Chocolate covered peanut-butter pretzels from the graveyard, yum!

When I got back to the meeting, I amused myself between patient reports wondering what my word for 2019 would be. You might think it would be the opposite of single, but you would be wrong. I think it is FUN. That takes the pressure off, as I have had a ton of fun on my own as well as with partners so either way I should be covered. And fun is finite. In my job, I have been around lots of folks when their fun ran out on them. So I think it’s a good idea to have it while you can.

It’s almost the New Year. Everyone is banging on about how awful 2018 was, and how 2109 just has to be better but that’s what we said about 2018 because 2017 was such a shitshow, and before that we had 2016 and let’s not even go back there in our memories. Ever the optimist, I am feeling excellent about the coming year. Not just because statistically and in all other ways it has to be better than 2018, but because I feel this way about every new year. To try and express my many hopes and dreams for 2019, I have prepared a lengthy speech, and here it is: Thanks for reading my blog. Happy New Year. FUN!

Hospice Nurse is Given Headless Mermaid

There’s this singer called Caamp. I don’t know anything about him, except he sings a song called 26 that Jessie and I have always felt is about her and her boyfriend.Well I found out yesterday that I’m in love, it begins. How could he have only found out yesterday, we have wondered? And yet he already wrote a whole song about it and it’s really good? I don’t know what else to say, he goes on, but thank you Lord for that sundress on that Saturday walking barefoot down the beach. That’s clearly Jessie right there. 

Later in the song he suggests that he and his love move on up to Alaska get married just for kicks, get a job stacking bricks, stay home with the kids and I’ll bring the bacon back home to you girl. I’m not crazy about the getting married just for kicks part. And when she suggested the brick-stacking job to her boyfriend he wasn’t really stoked about the idea, but we both like making the best of this world which is how he ends the song, and we particularly like the jaunty tune the whole thing is set to. We play it a lot and we sing along and look at each other and grin.

It’s not that I listen to songs all the time and feel that they are about me or people I know but now, even though Caamp surely doesn’t know me, he has written a song about me! 

I hadn’t even heard it until this morning. I was going back to work after my one day off for Christmas and it was not a day that began auspiciously. For a start, I scraped a neighbor’s truck with my car as I backed up my road, making a turn I have made a hundred times before. Then, after I parked to write my I’m really sorry please don’t say the repairs cost seven thousand dollars note, my car wouldn’t start. Then when it did, my texting wasn’t working so I couldn’t read a possibly important incoming text from my supervisor. 

But being a hospice nurse gives you a wonderful perspective on the relative importance of the things that happen to you. Annoying as a scraped truck was, it wasn’t a six-month prognosis. Still, it was the day after Christmas and as I drove through the quiet streets of Fairfax, I couldn’t help feeling a little bit sorry for myself because everyone in my extended family that I hung out with yesterday and everyone I was seeing in the quiet streets of Fairfax with their kids and their dogs did not have to work today, and I did.

Then Caamp came on Shuffle and I heard him singing about how I shouldn’t throw my heart out because I’m good for another round, and my ears perked up. How did he know this? All of the times, he sang to me, you’ve tried and failed, they hurt like hell deep inside, but you kept your pride. By now I was just getting on the freeway, a moment I love because of its sharp acceleration, and I was singing along with the chorus and I was feeling pretty damn good. Don’t count yourself out baby, I sang, pretty loudly as I was on the freeway now, you’re good for another round. I resolved immediately to tell Jessie about my new favorite song and play it for her because she has this narrative that I only ever like sad sack depressing songs. The end of Caamp’s chorus does go Cause it’s just love, only love, and it hurts, but I reckon that’s not depressing, it’s just saying it like it is.

I went to see my first patient and that was an okay visit. Nobody died. Next up was one of my favorite patients. You are not supposed to have favorites, but come on, some dying folk are just more wonderful than others. This guy is wonderful in so many ways and he cracks me up every single time I visit him. Today he stared hard at me and then told me kindly that my eyeballs looked pretty good, which was a big relief. But I can’t tell you anything more about him because of the HIPAA law. I can tell you that his caregiver has a very sweet and adorable two year old who spends most of my visit giving me her toys and sitting on my lap playing with my retractable badge. She’s amazingly gentle with it. Even though her mother remonstrates with her all the time to get off my lap and leave me to do my work, she has no intention of getting off my lap and I have no intention of letting her. In fact, one day I’m just going to take her home with me, see if they notice. 

Today, the day after Christmas, she had an unusual bounty of new toys to deliver into my hands. Her favorite, not surprisingly, was a purple star-shaped wand, which she told me made her a pwintess. I asked her if she could do magic now, but she just handed me a headless mermaid and some tiny plastic farm animals, clambered on my lap and began gently pulling my hospice badge in and out. It was right around then that my patient told me my eyeballs looked pretty good. All that was magic enough for me. Who needs a wand?

As I drove to my next patient, a tough visit usually, I played Caamp’s song three times to gear myself up. We get reimbursed for mileage at hospice, so I have to calculate how many miles from one patient to the next, but usually I think of the journeys in terms of songs. This drive was three times Song for a Friend.

It was a tough visit. More for her than me. When I was leaving, she told me to be safe out there. I didn’t share with her that I had already banged up a truck today. You don’t want to add to their troubles. 

When I came home and was charting on my patients and documenting phonecalls and preparing for my team meeting tomorrow, I played some more Caamp songs to see if any of them were about me. There are some lines in Strawberries that go: Be my light, sunrise laughing cause we stayed up all night, be my map and we’ll leave with all the treasure we can grab. That sounded pretty good to me. And then the last line goes Be my heart, I’ve got you in the end I wish I had you from the start. Maybe he does know me?

Single Mom Deals with Fractured Internal Organ

Once upon a time, a while ago, I broke my heart open and I told someone what was inside. He was kind to me, this someone, gentle with my broken open heart. He said he was moved and flattered. He said if he were not going to try to make things work one last time with his girlfriend...and then he said a few more things about that.

Since then, I have been trying not to wait around and hope. But being a hopeful sort of individual, it is difficult for me to just throw in the towel. It’s not in my nature. Plus I liked that towel. However, I’m trying to do other things beside wait, because of the old adage that a watched pot never boils. 

The other day, I found myself parking in the parking lot of a local supermarket. I walked past the depressed-looking Salvation Army bell-ringer in the Santa suit and through the automatic doors. It was early in the morning and I realized I had taken a 15-minute detour from my route to work in the hopes that a certain sad-looking supermarket checker would be on duty (this is not the guy of the first paragraph, this is me moving on). I had never before thought about the work schedules of the local grocery clerks. I would probably now be late for my first patient. As I walked through the doors, trying to think what groceries if any I really needed, I had the thought: What the hell are you doing? Some thoughts are louder than others.

In my defense, the sad-looking checker is really sweet and kind. And as he checks my groceries, despite his lingering air of melancholy, he also seems to be saying we must not take ourselves too seriously here. I like that. He wears a name tag and I like his name. He’s ten years too old for me and I wonder what led him to become a supermarket checker. But I have found myself going for groceries more than strictly necessary lately. He doesn’t work very much. I have a lot of food in my fridge now.

The shortest day came and went. Long on dark and short on light, this brittle wintry time, but enough light to see. Although from the above you may think my vision a little compromised, and although I don’t profess to even a rudimentary understanding of the workings of my heart, I feel that I am seeing fairly clearly. I shouldn’t wait around too long, for example. I see that. On the other hand, I tend to get distracted and drift off course, and I sometimes need a nudge. No better person for this than the teen daughter. That’s why we were gifted with them, the teens, no?

Mom. What have I done now? Apparently Old Spice shampoo is only for men. Why can I not use it too? Because you smell like a man. This is a bad thing? Then there is something wrong with the Christmas wrapping paper that I purchased. Apparently it is not fancy enough. There are five different kinds, but none of them meet the fancy standards. And where’s our ribbon? We have that plasticky ribbon that you can make curl with a scissors if you have that skill, which I was somehow born without. But that, also, is the wrong type of ribbon. It is rewarded with a frown. I try the argument that it’s not worth spending a ton of money on wrapping paper and ribbon when people just rip it off their gifts and throw it in the trash. This is a lame argument that does not hold up to teen inspection. I wrap all my gifts in the unfancy paper. I like how it looks.

We also don’t have any tissue paper. We had tissue paper, but now, at 9:07pm on Christmas Eve, we are out. Could somebody reading this please run out and get some? Because apparently this is an emergency. 

Throughout the tissue paper emergency, I remained impressively calm. I have learned that most domestic emergencies involving teens eventually pass by, especially if you show initial shock and horror at how terrible the emergency is, while secretly sipping wine and waiting for the situation to downgrade from red to orange to yellow alert. Sure enough, my daughter locates some paper that is even better than tissue paper. Better yet, it’s some paper that I purchased at a yard sale years ago for a dollar that she has now discovered is in fact superior to regular tissue paper because it is tissuey yet has designs on it. 

I realize this may be a tedious topic to read about, but the happy ending to this story is that with a combination of the designy tissue paper and the curly ribbon that she naturally knows how to make into impressive ringlets, her gifts end up looking extremely pleasing indeed. And not just to me, with my horribly low gift wrapping bar. But to her. She steps back and surveys her handiwork artfully arranged beneath our dying Christmas tree. She even photographs one of the gifts. When I question her about this, it turns out she is photographing it because it is a gift she wrapped for a friend of hers for his girlfriend. Because guys, you know, they’d use newspaper. Or forget to get a gift altogether. So she picked out the gift, wrapped it, and is now sending him a picture of it so he knows what a great job he did. 

Turns out, although it’s no surprise to me, my daughter is a number one standout friend to male and female friends alike. This is only one of the many reasons I like her. Plus she went around all the gifts under our tree and she noticed how many of them were from me to her, and even though some of them were wrapped with subpar wrapping paper, she was thrilled. We are going to have a good Christmas morning together. Next Christmas she will be on her gap year, and probably somewhere exotic like Belize or Byron Bay. And maybe my fractured heart will be in the careful hands of some mystery stranger. I hope he doesn’t really care about what kind of paper his Christmas gift is wrapped in.

Night Bloom at the Conservatory with the Funeral Crasher

Much is made at this time of year of the Solstice. Longest dark, rebirth of the sun, the space that we think of as nothing, blah blah blah. Me, I hold on fast to the two extra minutes of light we’ll get tonight, and again tomorrow, and on until the glorious return of Spring and then, even better, Summer. I know I’m supposed to hunker down by a cheery fire, knit soup out of root vegetables, and look deep within myself. But I just keep hoping that maybe the universe will figure out how to do without Winter next year. I know I’ve hunkered in July before.

Last night I was at the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate park. Somebody had the genius idea of lighting this exquisite building up every night for a month and playing restful rainforesty type music. Your ticket allows you a half hour to wander entranced through the steamy rooms exclaiming at the artfully lit tropical plants and feeling transported to another world. For the most part, I like the world we are in very much, but after a long week of ministering to the dying, I just wanted another world for a half hour.

Golden Gate park was veiled in swaths of mist and lit with the one-day-off-full moon. Early for our ticketed time, my girlfriend and I wandered around, feeling like we were in a Dickens novel. We made it as far as the giant lit tree at the Panhandle entrance, and she regaled me with her tale of driving up from L.A. once to attend the Berkeley funeral of a writer she admired. Not that she was invited. When she found out her heroine had died, she called a friend in San Francisco and said hey, wanna crash a funeral with me? It was comforting to me to be reminded of how nutty she is. I hope somebody cares enough to crash my funeral.

It got me thinking about that movie with Emily Blunt where she’s crashing some party in a fancy hotel and runs into the mens’ bathrooms to escape her pursuers. I tried to tell my friend about it, how she overhears a guy running for Senator of New York who has locked himself in a cubicle to rehearse his acceptance speech. I couldn’t remember the name of the movie, or the name of the actor, but I knew there was another great actor in the movie, so I tried to remember his name. He’d been in a fabulous movie about transvestites, but I couldn’t remember the name of that movie either. The senatorial hopeful had written and directed a movie years ago with another guy whose first name I knew was Ben. We started there. Took us a while, but eventually we got Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Terrence Stamp and, after a lot of effort, Priscilla Queen of the Desert and Goodwill Hunting. We just needed to lie down somewhere then, but it was time for Night Bloom.

In the foyer, an enthusiastic docent named Drew gave us a quick background on the Conservatory. My favorite part was how it had miraculously survived both the 1906 and 1989 earthquakes intact, but lost the majority of its delicate single-paned windows in hurricane force winds one fateful night in December 1995. Tasked with revamping a historic building, the contractors learned that they were legally obliged to rebuild with the same materials the building was made of. This, they discovered, was old-growth redwood. They had to spend six years collecting enough fallen or endangered trees, but the newly refurbished Conservatory finally opened in 2003. I looked around the white beams and stained glass of my favorite building with renewed respect. Love of a building is a uniquely fierce sort of love.

As I ambled through the Lowlands Tropics, my favorite room because it’s the steamiest, a thousand pinpricks of colored light played on the ferns and palms. I could not help thinking how romantic it would be to come to Night Bloom on a date. I could see there were many couples lurking among the carnivorous plants. There was also a guy in tights and a thong doing a photo shoot. He was striking some very unrainforesty poses. I tried very hard not to stare and apparently I was more successful than my girlfriend, who reported sotto voce that he was not very well hung. While I was surreptitiously trying to check what she meant by this, a staff member with a very fancy looking camera asked if he might take our picture. We flicked our hair back and smiled our red-carpet smiles. You don’t have to be wearing tights and a thong to be in a photoshoot in my world.

Outside in the cool misty night, my girlfriend and I swung lazily in the plastic crescent moon swing seats that are part of the whole crazily Alice-In-Wonderland exhibit and reflected on how we are both serial monogamists. She had some single years in her twenties. I could not ever remember more than six months on my own until I left this last marriage. (Yes, I just wrote the words this last marriage. Who am I?!) We reflected on how sweet it can be to be single when you really enjoy your own company and have more than two dollars to rub together. And I wondered aloud if my unrequited love thing is a subconscious way for me to stay single for a bit. No, said my girlfriend with irritating clarity, it’s just keeping you stuck. If we’d been in the same plastic crescent moon swing seat I’d have smacked her. Not even if he leaves his - I began. No, she said firmly. Girlfriends. Even if they have a history of crashing funerals, they were actually invented to save you from yourself.

Loving on my Fridge

In my previous post, I confessed that last New Year’s Eve, I wrote my intentions for the New Year on small pieces of red tissue paper and burned them ritualistically in my firepit as midnight approached. A girlfriend who read this helpfully texted me saying you do know that you are supposed to burn the things you want to let go, like old relationships, and write your intentions down and stick them to the fridge?

Clearly I did not know this. If I had known this, I might not have spent the entire twelve months of 2018 single. That’s 365 days. 8,760 hours. 525,600 minutes. I could calculate the seconds but I think we are all done here.

My fridge has a lot of pictures stuck to it. A photo of me and my brothers when we were kids. Snaps of my daughter and her friends. Postcards from Italy, and a picture of the Burrow Beach near my dad’s house in Dublin. Still, there could be room for an intention or two. I am actually thinking that since I’m so late coming to this concept, I should gift-wrap my fridge in paper with the words Find Love printed in tiny font on it. It could make getting cream for my morning coffee a bit of a trial, but I figure if you do not suffer a little to find love, it may not be so worth finding.

Since New Year’s Eve is rocketing towards us, I am trying to get my 2019 resolutions list in order while there is still time. To assist me in this taxing endeavor, I just ate a whole Toblerone bar meant for my daughter’s stocking. Yes, she is seventeen and still gets a stocking. But I don’t think I am supposed to eat the chocolate I had bought her for it. I feel like a bad mom, and a weak person. And yet, somehow, that it is not my fault. It’s a dark time of year. There is delicious triangle-shaped chocolate with chewy bits hiding in a bag at the back of my wardrobe. I’m alone on my couch trying to make my New Year’s resolutions list, and realizing that I have now been single more than a million minutes. I can buy her a replacement Toblerone.

It reminds me of when she was a little innocent one and I used to tell her that the Halloween Fairy would leave her a present if she would just eat a few pieces of her Halloween candy and then leave the rest in a plastic bag up on the lawn of our house. Late Halloween night I would go retrieve the plastic bag from the lawn so the raccoons wouldn’t get it. When Jessie woke on November 1st there would be a sweet little gift by her pillow, delivered directly and by hand in the middle of the night by the Halloween Fairy. Other moms had told me about this great tradition. Saves on dental bills, they said. But then I would single-handedly consume her Halloween candy over the next week. I was grateful to those moms, but I sort of hated them at the same time. I was just plain relieved when she was too old to go out on October 31st collecting sugar.

I can foresee one problem with sticking my new year intentions to my fridge. People come into my house. They get things from the fridge. Some of my intentions are a bit private. I can envision a moment during a dinner party where some guest is getting milk for their tea and says loudly Why do you have Field trip to Good Vibrations written on your fridge? Maybe I could write them in some code? An obscure foreign language that only I speak? But would they then be unintelligible to the...Intentions Gods? Or is it the Intentions Fairy, and if so, are they related to the Halloween Fairy? I feel concerned that I am losing control of my material here.

So. 2019. Forget all the work out 7 days a week stuff. My New Year’s resolution list for next year includes a crazy bike ride in northern Italy called the Stelvio; European odyssey to visit lots of family and old friends; finishing the book I’m writing. But also, and I know I won’t be alone here: gift-wrapping my fridge. 

Riding Fool Seeks LTR

The other night was the Marin County Bike Coalition’s Christmas party, and I was excited about going. It was at a pizza place in a mall, and I was still excited, because I naturally thought there might be some handsome biking dudes hanging around in spandex eating their pizza and looking for a long term relationship. 

I went with my three friends and two of their kids. They turned out to be the only people I knew at the party. This is mostly because although I’m a member of MCBC, I never go on their rides, as they always seem to be on weekday mornings. Hello? Work?

So I stood around waiting for pizza and sipping some wine and I could not help noticing that the average age of the biking dudes was about ten years old than I had hoped it would be. This was probably because all the younger single biking dudes were out on dates and not hanging around the mall waiting for free pizza and listening to MCBC board member speeches.

Anyway, in the end, I just stuck close with my friends and we had a great time and the pizzas had things like arugula and potatoes on them, and that was weird but kind of tasty, and they were free, which was cool, and on our way out we picked up little free tire patch kits from Dolan Law, and now my blog is inadvertently advertising a law firm. I did talk to one stranger, but all I said to him was one Hawaiian and one plain cheese please. He said okay, which I thought at the time was a good and hopeful sign. Maybe code for something? Like you look like the kind of woman who yearns to be taken out for lobster.

When I came home, I messaged my biking buddy in Ireland about my evening. Being Irish, and thus genetically unable to sugarcoat things, he responded so you went looking for a dude and came home with a free tire patch kit? I thanked him for making this rather glaringly obvious observation and we moved right along.

Later, I was messaging another Irish friend of mine and I told him about the New Year’s Eve party I am throwing. Lots of single guys? He said. I thought about my guest list. Not one. There are no single guys coming to my New Year’s Eve party and I’m throwing the party, so I got to choose who was invited! I am beginning to suspect that I am going about my quest for love the wrong way. I am not sure how to put this right, but I am open to suggestions.

New Year is one of my favorite holidays. Being a hopeless optimist, I cannot help feeling that the next year is going to be not only better but vastly different than any that have come before. The close of the year is a great time to make resolutions and I am a sucker for them. I make ridiculously long lists of the things I’m going to do differently and new in this sparkly parade of 365 days coming up. This is in spite of the fact that at their core, my lists always contain the same few items: less sugar, work out 5 times a week and travel more. 

This year, my list also includes find love. This would not make it significantly different from my list last year, when I actually wrote that intention on a piece of red tissue paper and burned it in the firepit on my patio on New Year’s Eve. Maybe I shouldn’t have burned it? Is that where I’m going wrong? I thought the burning thing was a nice ritual, but now I am thinking of the phrase going up in smoke, and how it may not be the smartest metaphor for your hopes and dreams.

Last New Year’s Eve was a bit of a downer. I was not yet up for throwing my usual party. I did not get invited to anyone else’s party. It was just me and my daughter and her boyfriend. We lit the firepit, made ‘smores and played with sparklers. It was actually really sweet and I felt fine until they sloped off to her bedroom to watch a movie around 11pm, leaving me to write intentions on little pieces of red tissue paper and watch them curl up in smoke. Then I felt a little less than fine and it occurred to me that next year I should probably throw a party.

I’m excited about my party. But as a strategy for meeting guys, it has some flaws. Well, one flaw. This could be remedied if I encourage the friends I have invited to also bring single guy friends of theirs. I could mention this in my host message party reminder. But subtly, I don’t want to be too obvious, lest I come across as fixated. Feel free to bring a friend, I could write. Mid-50s, at least 5’8”, should like road biking, no wedding rings. Is that too prescriptive? I could leave out the biking thing.

Concerned girlfriends have asked me to focus on what I am looking for, to make it intentional, and I know that they are right. Make a list, they told me. In fact, they made the list for me one night at The Broken Drum when we were discussing my quest over beers. We were there for a long time and things got a bit hilarious. The friend with the paper and pen was a little over-enthusiastic, and the list grew until it covered one entire side of a sheet of paper. I know that my initial list items - no alcoholics, no mental illness, must have shelter - set the bar a little low. But the end result list, filling up two whole columns and even going off into the margins, went a little the opposite way. How could I ever find someone who met 172 criteria? I needed to whittle this list down.

Happily we accidentally left the list at The Broken Drum, so that took care of the whittling. But I still remember some of the items and I think they are worth keeping in mind. Sense of humor. Very near the top. Kind, smart, funny. That would be my summary list if my singles ad was only allowed to have three words. Financial ducks in row. After that, things got a bit nitpicky.

So as we head into 2019, my intentions are clear: the sugar thing, the working out, the travel. And more law firm advertising in my blog. No, wait, Find love, that’s the one.

A Post with Both Slippers and Gangrene in the Title

I was intending to write about hospice nursing, as it has been a while. And gangrene has been on my mind (this will be explored later, don’t go away). But I also wanted to mention something about how when you are single and live sort of alone - that is, alone with a teenager - you can fail to notice basic things that might be pointed out to you by a loving partner if you had one.

I am thinking specifically of slippers. Yesterday, I threw out my slippers. I’ve had them for years. So many years that I was having real difficulty walking around in them because the soles were flapping off both of them. But I’m from thrifty Irish stock, and slippers are not really things you just go out and buy yourself. They are things that you get for Christmas from a family member, sometimes even a spouse, and then sit around feeling devastated because all the love of your life can think of to buy you for Christmas is slippers.

So it was kind of tricky for me to get to the point of throwing them out. And yet the moment I took them off my feet and stuffed them in my trashcan was an extremely liberating one. It was a moment that said Hey Sara! If your slippers are so old they are preventing you from walking around like a normal person, you can just throw them out! I actually laughed out loud. Alone in my home. Please don’t mention this to anyone.

The thing is, now my feet are cold and I have no slippers. I know they can be purchased new for ten bucks in CVS but, you know, there are many other things I could do with that money. I could slip it in the red plastic bucket of the Salvation Army guy who plaintively rings his bell outside United Markets. Or I could get two pints of Haagen Dazs. 

That is probably more than adequate on the slippers topic. Still, we also have gangrene to talk about. Lucky!

Gangrene is on my mind (not literally, ew!) because of something that occurred recently in my work as a hospice nurse. I don’t want to gross you out with the details. You could be eating your dinner as you read this. But it got me thinking about the times I have dealt with awful wounds in my patient population. I had friends over to dinner the other night, and since rotting flesh was in my thoughts, I naturally brought it up in the course of conversation. Not during dinner, that would be abnormal, but when we were sitting around having our post-prandial tea and coffee, I happened to mention some wound care I had been doing for a patient’s gangrenous foot and my friends, who were both sitting opposite me on my couch, sort of blanched and held on visibly tighter to their teacups and one of them said in a sort of high voice, do you see that a lot?

It was at that moment that I realized afresh: you are not normal! hospice nurses, hospice workers in general? None of you are normal! I had this realization, which I have had before in my life a few times, and so I quickly pulled it together. I apologized for introducing such an unsavory topic during our after-dinner tranquillity. And then I could not help myself and I added somewhat excitedly yes! I see it sometimes! Quite a bit! More than you might think!

And this was in spite of the fact that I had no idea how much they might think I would see gangrene.

Then I launched into a description of a leg I had once taken care of. My friends hung onto their mugs a little tighter and their expressions said please stop but I did not because I am a hospice nurse and I lose all social perspective when I think about gross wounds. Then one of my friends asked me whether gangrenous flesh has a particular odor. Since they actually asked this, in real life, on my couch, I feel like it’s my duty to answer the question in my blog. And the answer is hell yes. Furthermore, although I have tried to think of a way to describe the odor, I cannot find any way to do it. Most things you smell in life, you can describe them to friends by starting a sentence with “it’s like...” But the smell of gangrene is not like anything else. It is just like itself.

My real purpose in mentioning all of this is to say that whenever I take care of someone with terrible wounds, it just makes me feel how hugely lucky that it’s not me with the wounds. I am not exaggerating when I say that it is sacred work, to care for the dying, for people whose bodies are just worn out with the business of living. And when awful things happen to the body as it exits this world, hospice nurses need to just deal, and take the best care of it they can, and feel grateful for their own health. 

As I told my friends, I have seen some things you would not describe to your dinner companions. Uh-huh, they said. And the way I deal, I told them, is that I just sort of power through it, as though everything I am seeing is completely normal. Because otherwise you can freak the patient out. But when I come out of those visits, I sometimes sit in my car and I say out loud That was NOT NORMAL! Sometimes expletives are involved in my expression of how abnormal what I just saw was. Then I put on loud music and drive too fast on the freeway. Large amounts of coffee are usually also involved.

At our weekly team meeting, we get to process some of the things we have seen during the week. Not just the deaths, but the weird wounds, the fungating tumors, and the challenging family members. I will say that I have never been reduced to tears by a wound. But phonecalls with family members have left me shaking and crying in my car. Dressing a necrotic leg has never led me to second guess my chosen career, but angry hurting people have. 

But to get back to the slippers, I am feeling better about not having any. Because I could not walk in them, and because tonight I met my good friend at the gym, and she had been home all day and she was wearing not just a pair of slippers, but a mismatched pair. And they were both left feet. So it made me feel really functional and on top of my game, because even though I have no slippers, I was wearing matching footwear. Friends can be helpful that way.

Let’s Go to a Singles Meetup Dance! Or Stay Home and Stick Our Heads Down the Toilet?

This is my third Christmas being single. I’m feeling that it should be my last. I was telling this to an old friend of mine the other day. He is my first publisher and writing mentor, and a Dubliner to boot, and he has known me since I was sixteen, so he generally has some direct and pithy advice for me when I put my conundrums before him. My conundrum was this: I really want to meet someone, but how can I write a book about looking for love once I meet someone? His advice: If Mr. Right comes along, simply keep him in the attic until you have done the pre-press interviews.

There is only one problem with this approach. I don’t have an attic. I live in the bottom half of a house. I do have a pretty nice basement though, so I deftly modified his advice to include a basement. My basement is dry and full of a motley assortment of items, which Mr. Right could definitely fashion into a sort of makeshift home. There’s furniture. There are blankets. Many camping items. Plus a jar of my spare change, should he need to venture out for snacks. There is also my washer and drier, so he could even do my laundry while he waited. This idea is really taking shape.

Actually though, there is more than one problem with this proposed scenario. If he really is Mr. Right, presumably I will be very attracted to him. One would hope? So how easy would it be to lie in my single woman bed in my single woman bedroom with Mr. Right maybe less than comfortably situated on all my old blankets in the basement just ten feet away? This problem is consuming me right now. Way more than the problem of finding Mr. Right, which is maybe ass-backwards.

Another problem I could foresee, and I don’t mean to be pessimistic here, is the bathroom. This is a girl house. Our bathroom is tiny. We both need to take showers at around 7am. What if Mr. Right also needed to shower at that time? You could reasonably expect him to wait on his shower, as we are a teen student and a working mom, and he is living a life of leisure in our basement. I’m just saying. Could be a problem. Plus there’s the toilet-seat-up thing, but I might have to contend with that after he emerged from the basement, so I’m just not putting it on the list of things to be concerned about right now.

I suppose there are some vaguely possible problems involving Mr. Right’s own life, his job, and all his responsibilities. We have WiFi though, and there’s even a light in the basement, so I don’t foresee any of those things being too much of a barrier.

Anyway, regarding the singles meetup dance thing from the title, I know I said in a previous blog post that I am allergic to anything with singles in the name, but I’m having to rethink that philosophy. You cannot really be single in this world and desirous of meeting someone and yet not do anything that involves singles. I mean, how chicken is that? So I signed up for the singles meetup dance on the 29th. I did! First, of course, I found a single friend who was willing to come with me. And she’s driving us. And she knows how tentative I am, so I can’t hide in my bathroom when she comes to pick me up. She is a fairly forthright woman, I like that about her, and she will seek me out. We are going to the singles meetup dance. I’m dressing up, that’s decided.

If there are no men there (it’s Marin...) or they all have 70s mustaches, we have decided to become lesbians for the evening. Not with each other though, that could make the drive home a bit weird.

If the singles meetup dance goes well, as in I don’t spend most of the event outside the venue pretending to be a smoker, I may try some other singles events. Or I may just stay home writing love notes and slipping them shyly under the door of my basement.

Let’s Go on a Meetup Yoga Hike!

After my brief foray into online dating this Summer, I decided that meetups were a better way for me to go. Most meetups have the advantage that they are random groups of couples and single folks, friends, and strangers, all with some interest in common. I went on a couple of meetup bike rides, and a meetup hike with dinner after. I met some cool people. They met me. 

Since I am allergic to anything with Singles in the title, I have not joined any singles meetups yet. There is a singles meetup dance on December 29th. I am trying to get up the courage to think about considering possibly perhaps going. Maybe. Or not. It could be that I drive there, sit a while in my car, and then drive home. Time will tell.

Meanwhile, once you join one meetup group, the Meetup app seems to think you want to be bombarded with emails about every single group and activity within a hundred mile radius. Thus it was that while I was preparing to go in to one of my patients yesterday, a message popped up on my phone: New Meetup Group: Yoga Hikes. I was a bit distracted, thinking about my dying patient and all, but still I had to grapple with this concept for a minute. Yoga hikes? How can you do yoga if you are hiking? Conversely, how could you hike if you were also, simultaneously as it were, doing yoga? Do you hike to the yoga? Yoga, then hike, then more yoga? I am also kind of allergic to yoga, but I know enough about it to understand that the concept has a lot to do with staying in the one place and centering yourself. And hiking? It’s all about striding around and going somewhere. I quickly gave up trying to understand this strange marriage of hobbies, and went in to see my patient.

The yoga thing: I tried it. Everyone was banging on endlessly about how it changed their lives. So I went to a few different classes. I tried hot yoga. I tried cool yoga. I tried really really gentle zen yoga where most people fell asleep. I tried really annoying yoga where a 25-year-old instructor ruined my shivassanas with her 25-year-old life advice. I kept thinking how I really didn’t like yoga. But who doesn’t like yoga? It’s like saying you don’t like the Dalai Lama. So I kept trying. Because people kept telling me it was just that I hadn’t done enough of it. I didn’t like it in the beginning, they would assure me, usually with more than a hint of smugness, but I finally got it. And now? It’s changed my life!

Finally, I decided that I really like my life the way it is. I feel perfectly grounded and centered, and it’s completely okay if I don’t like yoga. I don’t much like being told where to put all the different parts of my body, or for how long. Nor do I like being told to inhale through my nose then open my mouth and exhale slowly making a HA sound. I don’t want to make a HA sound. And I really hate downward dog. I like the Dalai Lama though, so we’re good there.

I also like hiking, so after work I had to check out the yoga hiking meetup thing. Turns out you hike somewhere and then, just when you’re having a really great time swinging your arms and chatting with your meetup buddies, marching along and taking in the view, you have to stop at a flat place, unroll your yoga mat and start...doing yoga. Imma skip that meetup.

I do have a pretty bad yoga confession, now that you’ve got me started. I’m all about live and let live. If other people want to do yoga, go right ahead. But there’s something about seeing people walking round town in their LuLu Lemon yoga pants with their yoga mats slung over their shoulder that just sort of irks me. Usually when I see them I’m driving off to visit my first patient. I’ve just spent an hour setting up my day and making sure nobody died overnight. I’m on my second coffee and playing music, and I’m feeling pretty good. And then I have to stop at every pedestrian crosswalk in Fairfax to let the yoga folks cross. I know they’re about to spend 75 minutes on the clean wood floor at Yoga Mountain clearing their energy and aligning their chakras. And I really want to just let them. But sometimes, I also want to rev my engine while they’re in the crosswalk, see if they drop their yoga mats.

It’s the same at my gym. If I walk in and there’s a dance class going on, that’s cool. The music is usually some sappy Hawaiian thing, and I long ago gave up trying to follow dance instructions (I am really bad at this, see yoga complaints above), but I’m happy to stick in my earbuds to drown out the crooning and get on the treadmill. But if there’s a yoga class going on, I immediately feel annoyed. I have to pass through the class to get to the spa and changing rooms, so I can’t avoid hearing at least thirty seconds of yoga instructions before I shut the changing room door on them. 

It’s not so much what they say. I think it’s hugely important to connect with your inner stillness and feel yourself root into the earth. It’s the tone of voice. Yoga instructors generally seem to think that their instructions won’t sink in unless intoned in a cloying, fake-spiritual sort of voice. It’s the kind of voice I have to shut a door on and go get in the hot tub. I almost always connect with my inner stillness in the hot tub.

As well as being a failed yoga practitioner, it may not surprise you to hear I am a failed meditator. This is the subject of another blog post, but I just want to mention a great video I found on the Internet that did help me meditate for a bit, even if I was constantly giggling during the experience. It’s called F*ck That: An Honest Meditation, and it’s by a guy called Jason Headley. Gradually let the horseshit of the external world fade from your awareness, he intones, in exactly that fake spiritual voice I was mentioning. My kind of guy. Maybe if he was on the yoga hike, I might give it a whirl.