Hospice Nurse Narrowly Avoids a Chilly Demise

The other day  I visited some patients for another nurse. This happens at hospice: sometimes one nurse will be in a frenzy of overwhelm and another will be tra-la-la-ing about. So they ask tra-la-la nurse to go visit patients for frenzied nurse. Usually, it’s really routine visits that frenzied nurse knows won’t make tra-la-la nurse hate her forever.

Thus I was assigned two patients off my usual route. The first had a name so Italian it provoked my really bad fake Italian accent that I do not seem to be able to help adopting when I get patients with very Italian names. Do not wahree, Carmella (not her real name), I intoned in my extremely fake Italian accent as I drove through the unfamiliar streets to her house, I am comming. Ccchhhelp is on thee wiyyy. 

One of the issues with seeing other nurses’ patients is that, while their regular nurse knows exactly how to find their really hard-to-find house, you do not. Nurses often add helpful directions in the patient’s chart, but sometimes, well, they’re just not helpful enough. Carmella lived in a little apartment down an alleyway off the main road. Her nurse had added directions: Best to park on the street, walk down the alley, and her apartment is on the.

On the what? I parked on the street. I walked down the alley, muttering under my breath about having to walk down dark alleys in crappy parts of towns I don’t know as part of my job. I got to the end of the alley. There were six doors to apartments. I took out my computer, balancing it on a snowy staircase to log into our charting system and see if I had misremembered the directions. Nope. Walk down the alley, they said, and her apartment is on the.

I picked the most together-looking doorway, employing the principle that it looked the least likely to house gun-toting trumpies who might be enraged by a hospice nurse ringing their doorbell on a random morning. A little old gentleman answered the door. I told him who I was looking for. He looked confused and frightened. I showed him my hospice badge. Look, I’m not a gun-toting trumpie come to shoot you for stealing the election! He motioned me inside. I made a mental note to add right to the directions.

After that visit, I had to cross the Mid Hudson Bridge to an emergency that turned out not to be an emergency after all. This almost never happens at hospice when you have really anxious people who are totally stressed by the impending death of their loved one and think that someone giving a tiny moan when they wake up is an emergency. I’m not being judgie here. I was okay switching up my day, crossing the Hudson and driving through a worsening snowstorm to this emergency. Okay, maybe a tiny bit judgie.

Then I headed back over the bridge to see another patient for frenzied nurse. This visit was a breeze, except the caregiver made me wear shoe booties in the house, and there were hardwood floors. Shoe booties and hardwood floors do not really make for a dignified hospice nurse visit. Sliding around a little, I did my best with the patient and made my exit into a very snowy world. Be safe out there! the caregiver said, as I picked my way gingerly down her snow-covered stairs. You too! I called, acutely aware that even to my unpracticed eye, the snow flurries that had been forecast looked more like a serious snowfall.

 

On the way home, I played music that I turned up ever louder as the roads got snowier. Where were the plows? Usually as soon as the snow starts the plows and salters are thrumming dramatically up and down our roads immediately making the world safe for individuals like me who have no idea how to drive in snow. But the snow kept falling and I was not encountering any reassuring vehicles with giant metal scoops on the front. My driving speed deteriorated to a meager 20 miles per hour and I still felt like I was driving in three inches of compacted snow. Because I was. 

Then I encountered the hill on Hollow Road down to where our house is. I started out great. 20mph at the top of a hill. What could go wrong? Halfway down, I tried the brakes. My trusty Subaru immediately started to fishtail. I tapped the brakes, like I’d been told to do by so many snow aficionados in the past six months. Unless you have experienced it, there’s no way to know what swearwords will come out of your mouth as your 4-wheel drive fishtails on a hill in compacted snow. I’m Irish, and even I was impressed.

But the tap-tap-tap braking worked and I made it home without ditch-diving or smashing into any oncoming vehicles. Nor did I slide across the 4-way-stop at Center and Hollow where three other vehicles were waiting their turn. I didn’t even really move into the other lane. Much. At all. As I slid to a slippery park in our driveway, I was acutely aware that I had purchased a bottle of old vine Zinfandel to have with the salmon I planned to cook for dinner. Could be dinnertime would happen really early tonight.

Turned out, I was right. The kids came up to the cabin at 4:30 because their mom and dad were busy. Forget the salmon, we had a hearty meal of mac’n’cheese, sausages and a couple of stray tomatoes for the health aspect. After a few games of tractors-meet-dinosaurs (Aron) and dressup-in-lace-and-fur-and-velvet (Elisah), we went back down to their house because Aron was no longer wearing a diaper and there’s only so long that this situation can be a tenable one with a two-year-old.

We snuggled on their couch and Elisah asked me in her intensely animated fashion D’you want me to tell you about the most special amazing magical world that I’ve invented? I thought back on my snowy fishtailing experience just a couple of hours before, my near miss with a ditch-dive, my chilly brush with death. And I told her fervently that yes, indeed I did.

Hospice Nurse Faces Ice Storm Without Deicer

You may think this is a blog post about how I am facing an ice storm without deicer, but in fact it is a blog post about my alien cat. Please do not stop reading. I actually have the world’s most marvelous cat. I rescued her from a patient who, for obvious reasons, needed to find her a new home. The first time I visited the patient, this cat came up to me on the couch and butted her head quite hard against mine in a way that clearly said human, look at me, I’m the world’s most marvelous cat and you should adopt me.

I wanted to take her home at once, but my patient had not at this point mentioned she was trying to find a new home for her. This fact emerged on my second visit, when the cat rolled over on her back at my feet, presenting herself to me as available for prolonged petting. My patient said I’m looking for a home for her, you want her? And thus she became my cat.

Angel Cat is marvelous at all times except first thing in the morning, when I think she might be an alien. I wake to find her staring intently at me from the foot of the bed. If I lie completely still I might get another couple minutes of rest, but as soon as I move any muscle, she deftly walks up my body with her pointy feet and breathes into my nose. Then she headbutts me, jumps off the bed and careens round the house knocking things over. After this brief break with reality, she curls up in a ball by my face and is once again marvelous.

But the ice storm, you exclaim! It is coming, my first ice storm ever. Previously, I have only seen them in movies, such as Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm, in which a seemingly wholesome family begins coming apart at the seams over a tumultuous Thanksgiving break. Yes, I am quoting from IMDb. Our ice storm is predicted to begin around 10pm and all day I have been receiving stern warnings from work. Make sure your patients have backup oxygen and enough medications to last them! To last them how long? The ice storm is only forecast until 3am, when it should start raining. Best to have a strong scraper in your car, a fellow nurse wrote, and no harm carrying some deicer.

I read this as dicer. Being a recent transplant from California, where we never have ice storms, I wondered but did not like to ask what dicer is. Eventually my poor Californian brain decoded it as de-icer. I don’t have any, but I was glad I hadn’t asked. This happens to me a lot.

When you move from a warm climate to a cold one, you get a crash course in Winter. Our first here is apparently a doozie. Last year the ploughs were only out a couple of times. This year the entire Hudson Valley has been blanketed in snow for the whole of February. I must say, I’m kind of thrilled to be on Central Hudson’s storm warning mailing list. It’s exciting to learn about the dangers of black ice, the difference between an Ice Storm Warning and a Winter Weather Advisory, and how to stop your windshield from freezing as you drive.

This happened to me today. It was sleeting, but my windshield wipers just spread the sleet into a thin layer of water that immediately froze. My Subaru helpfully flashed up the word EYE-SIGHT with a big X through it, as though I needed to be told that I could no longer see out of my windshield. I resolved the issue by turning the wipers up, then down, then up again, resulting in various degrees of visibility and not a few swearwords. Crash course indeed.

Despite Central Hudson’s informative emails, I have not yet figured out the difference between an Ice Storm Warning and a Winter Weather Advisory. I’m too busy looking up snow terms. The Inuits are famously rumored to have a hundred words for snow, and English, I have always assumed, just a paltry few. This proves untrue. The Inuits only have about fifty terms, and English about forty. At least, that is what the Farmers Almanac claims. About ten of their snow terms are really lame, like snowfall and snowdrift. But did you know that penitents are tall thin spikes of hardened snow? A barchan is a horseshoe shaped drift, and sun cups are shallow bowl hollows formed by patches of intense sunlight. Move over, Inuits!

Meanwhile, Angel Cat just jumped up on my desk and, putting her nose up really close to mine, stared intently into my eyes. Having extracted all the information from my brain, she jumped down and wandered into the bedroom, where she will casually transmit it to her alien friends over the course of the ice storm.

Hospice Nurse Turns to Life of Crime

Nobody ever claimed that Siri is the sharpest tool in the shed. I was dictating to her in the car the other day. I told her to text George. She asked me whether I meant a woman I worked with thirty years ago, a former boyfriend, or George. I told her I meant George. What would you like to know about George? I wondered briefly what Siri might know about my partner that I didn’t, but I repeated that I just wanted to text him. What would you like to say to George? I dictated my text. In the middle of it, Maps Siri told me to turn left in a quarter mile, so the text came out hey babe, in a quarter mile turn left. It would have been easier to mail him a letter.

This is not to say that I could live without Maps Siri. Without her, I would spend my days driving around trying to find my patients in a perpetual state of lostness. Plus I changed her voice to Australian Siri, which is cool. Now when I miss a turn, she says Fair go, mate, fair suck of the sauce bottle, next right is better than a ham sandwich!

This morning, Australian Siri helped me find a farm out in the middle of nowhere. The farmer was selling a Wurlitzer piano for a hundred bucks. It looked decent in the pictures, but you have to sit at a piano and play to know. As I sat at his piano, the farmer told me apologetically that it hadn’t been played for about thirty years and could probably do with a tuning. I played a couple of bars. Politely refraining from telling him it could do with being hacked up for firewood, I suggested he offer it free to a good home. Then I backed my Subaru out his long, half-ploughed driveway and drove the hour home. You gotta love farmers.

People keep asking me how I’m doing in the snowy New York Winter. I’m really doing fine. Our house is warm, except for our bedroom, which is actually an enclosed summer porch. It’s colder in our bedroom than outside, because our bedroom takes the cold and traps it until it condenses into ice. I call our bedroom Siberia. This is quite a funny joke if you examine it closely, because I just checked Siberia on my weather app and it’s -18 degrees. On Friday night, it will be -14 degrees in Clinton Hollow where I live. I should have picked somewhere colder. Where is colder than Siberia? Please do not have it be our bedroom.

There are advantages to having a bedroom in Siberia though. If you accidentally do too much shopping and the groceries don’t fit in your fridge, you can store them in your bedroom. And that is the only advantage I can think of.

Despite the fact that parts of our house are colder than our fridge, I recently enticed my daughter to come visit. I rented us an airbnb on Cape Cod for her quarantine. Neither of us had ever been, and after five months I was yearning to see the ocean. Plus I figured Cape Cod would be deserted in the Winter, and I was right. We were the only people on any of the beaches. Minus four degrees could have had something to do with this. One day was so cold we ran along Race Point Beach in our masks and five layers of clothing laughing hysterically and shouting We’ve come on holiday by mistake! 

This is a quote from Withnail & I that has come in handy more than once in my life. But in fact, Cape Cod was quite magical with no humans about. There was an abundance of lobster shacks (if only we could have sampled), an array of empty wild Atlantic beaches, and we even drove to the northernmost tip and through the ridiculously quaint Provincetown, which is a hamlet of under 3,000 that reportedly swells to 60,000 in the Summer. No wonder they looked daggers at our California plates.

It is true, after six months in New York, I still have California plates on my car. This is not just laziness. I drive a grey Subaru Forester. So does everyone else in the Hudson Valley, unless they drive a Jeep. When I come out of the grocery store, I would never find my car were it not for the white plates. Thus, my laziness has saved me hours of my life wandering aimlessly in parking lots. I am past the deadline to register my car in the Empire State. It’s exciting being a criminal.