Hospice Nurse Goes Thrifting for Wedding Dress

Key West is renowned for several things: it’s the southernmost tip of the continental United States, it’s the birthplace of key lime pie, and it was Hemingway’s home from 1931 to 1939. During these years, he wrote Death in the Afternoon, the Green Hills of Africa, and To Have and to Have Not. I know this not because I visited Hemingway’s house on Wednesday and got a guided tour, but because I use the Internet.

I did visit Hemingway’s house on Wednesday, if you count standing outside the high brick wall that surrounds his property and air-typing while your daughter takes your picture. We arrived in Key West around 10am. It was already steaming hot and parking was scarce. We drove by the house and could see it was overrun with tourists. I mean, who are all these people who arrive well before you at the places you want to see, even when you set out at 8am?

Apparently they were all people who were willing to purchase tickets to shuffle around Hemingway’s house in a pack following a guide. I’m sure it’s a great tour and I would have learned a lot. We’re just not the ticketed tour types. Plus as I told Jessie, reports are in that he wasn’t very nice to women. She asked how I knew this. I knew it from watching a fictionalized movie about him and Martha Gellhorn, but I improvised and said because he was married four times. Single eyebrow arch from the daughter.

Fair point. One of the things I wanted to do in Key West was shop for a wedding dress. If you have ever gone shopping in Key West, Key Largo, or indeed Miami, you will know that unless you want to get married in beach bling you are bang out of luck shopping for a wedding dress. I’m not looking to be married in white this time, or even ivory. Any color will do. But I also don’t want to be married in a paisley silk halter-neck with flounces.

And yet this was pretty much all we saw in Miami Beach on Monday. We made forays into a few boutiques on Collins Avenue. I optimistically tried on some flowing ruffly creations. They looked okay in Miami, but I knew that transported to the Hudson Valley in early October they would look exactly like what they were: beach bling. Jessie tried on some fun creations too: she looked spectacular, but she already has her dress for the wedding. We tried Macy’s. Surely the staid old department store would have something classier? Turns out Macy’s on Miami Beach is all about…paisley flounces. 

Undeterred, we hit some thrift stores on the Keys on Tuesday. I felt in my bones that I would find my wedding dress at Jolene’s Hidden Treasures and Boutique in Tavernier. The moment we walked through the door, the feeling intensified. The place was a trove of unique clothing, everything from stetsons to scarlet sequins. Jolene was bustling around in the back and called out to ask us if we were looking for anything special. My mom’s getting married, Jessie said brightly. Then we both giggled silently at each other. Jolene was on it immediately. I have the perfect dress for you! she cried, it just came in! I stood very still, waiting to see my dress.

She emerged from behind a clothing rack holding a giant white mass of gauze ruffles. It looked like a big meringue, circa 1980. Think Charlie’s Angels are all marrying the guys from Miami Vice. I smiled weakly. Actually I said, hoping I could keep the horror out of my tone, I wasn’t planning on doing the white thing this time around. Her face fell. She clearly thought she was going to see me leave with meringue dress.

We poked around for a bit and I tried on some interesting creations, but none of them were quite right. I’ll admit it: shopping for your wedding dress in a thrift store is a shade optimistic. I tried on a lovely pale green thing that swept down gracefully to the floor. But it had a thread pulled in the front and it looked a bit scruffy, even for me. Besides, getting married in pale green just seems a bit…pale.

Key West was no better. After we peered over Hemingway’s brick wall at his very shady and gracious house, we checked out a few dress shops. Sundresses with lace. Sundresses with sequins. In one store, I told the helpful assistant that I was looking for my wedding dress. What time of year are you getting married? she asked. Umm, I said, trying to think how to phrase it, kind of late next week sort of time. She looked at me pityingly and pointed to some sundresses.

So maybe I’m not getting my dress in Florida. Or my shoes, unless they’re going to be glittery flip-flops. To console ourselves, we headed to Fort Zachary, lauded on Google as the best snorkel beach in the area. There were two flaws in our plan: one, Fort Zachary was next to a naval base so our beach experience featured frequent low flying military craft and two, we forgot the snorkel gear.

It didn’t matter. Life on the Keys has a way of working out just fine. We sizzled gently on the beach for a bit and then swam out in the aquamarine waters where the Atlantic meets the Gulf of Mexico. Jessie waxed lyrical about how Cuba was just out there. I turned to where she was pointing. There was a little pile of rocks about a hundred feet out with a single bird perched motionless on top of it. What, those rocks there with the bird? I said in a silly English accent I learned from Monty Python. We both cracked up. 

I’m heading back to New York. They have dress shops in New York, I feel sure. Macy’s in Poughkeepsie will have classy gowns that flow about my body and have never been worn by others. I’m kind of sad that I didn’t find my dress at Jolene’s Hidden Treasures and Boutique. But I have a full nine days, only five of which are work days, to find my dress and shoes. How hard could it possibly be?

Where are All the Fish?

One of the main things the Florida Keys are famous for is big game fishing. But where you have big fish you also generally have little fish, and I had read before my trip to Key Largo that the John Pennekamp state park features America’s only living coral reef. Naturally, I was excited to snorkel.

Like most airbnbs I have experienced, ours featured pretty much everything we could want, including snorkel gear. In fact, like most airbnbs I have experienced, it was decked out nicer than my own home. Especially the kitchen. How come everyone’s rental property fridges are better than mine?

The snorkel gear, however, featured only one set of goggles. I slung them into our beach bag as we left for the beach, and I asked my daughter what she was going to do while I snorkeled. She laughed dismissively. We both knew who would end up trying out the gear first.

We got to the John Pennekamp State Park in eleven minutes. Everywhere on the Keys is eleven minutes away, and you don’t really need Siri because it’s all just one long road down the narrow strips of land, with tiny side roads. So you drive from your tiny side road onto the long straight road and then you drive eleven minutes north or eleven minutes south and then you are there. I still use Siri.

The park entrance was a tropical delight, mysterious and overgrown. I half expected a T-Rex to come charging out of the trees. There was an entrance fee, but we felt it would be worth it to snorkel on a live coral reef. The beach was pretty tiny and not crowded at all. Why was it not crowded on America’s only live coral reef beach?

We set out our towels down one end, between two peculiar-looking cannons, which turned out to be Art. The sand was really hard, think concrete, and within ten seconds of lying down I had been bitten numerous times by some tiny vicious bugs that looked like swarmy sorts of ants. Big welts started to rise up on my arms and hands. Time to snorkel!

We waded into the balmy water, and Jessie applied the snorkel gear. I told her how stupid she looked and floated on my back while she launched into her hunt for stupendously colored fish. A minute after her launch, I could hear her snorkelly voice coming up through the breathing tube. Mom. There’s no fish. Just stones. 

I turned over and peered into the clear water. Stones. I saw a flash of bright yellow, but it was a leaf. Chuckling quietly to myself I floated some more, while Jessie gave up on the snorkeling and went to put the gear back on the concrete beside our towels and the swarmy ants. I thought perhaps we had a couple of clues as to why the beach was so empty. But the water was fantastic and I was in the tropics and really, what were a few nasty welts when there was also the promise of mojitos in the late afternoon?

After our swim, I lay on my towel and listened to the ebb and flow of other humans on the beach. Americans on the beach tend to spend most of the time arranging their stuff, and very little time actually enjoying beach activities, such as lying motionless on the sand or floating in the water. A large family came and plunked all their stuff down ten feet from the cannon to my right. They spend a half hour unpacking their gear and putting it all on. Eventually some of them had enough gear on to wade out into the water looking for tropical fish. I silently wished them good luck. After a few minutes, I could hear their snorkelly voices calling out how there really weren’t any fish. 

But then I sort of zoned out for a while and when I next looked up, they were all out out by a distant buoy, swimming around it in a tightly packed school of humans. It looked like they were seeing some action. Turns out the buoy marked a fake wreck that had been placed near the start of the reef to give a fake home to all the tropical fish. Even though this smacked a little of a gated condo community, I couldn’t help feeling we just hadn’t persevered enough in our snorkeling endeavors. 

But by then it was perilously close to mojito hour so we packed up and drove the eleven minutes south to our airbnb, from which we could walk to Snappers, a tiki bar and restaurant on the water. Having a tiki bar within walking distance of your accommodations really is a genious move. As our hostess had written in her welcome note: “Snappers: walk there, stagger home.” I had already sampled their Key Lime Coladas, dessert in a glass. Their mojitos were just as spectacular. 

Sadly, my daughter is nine months shy of legal drinking age, so only one of us could order a cocktail. Being Irish, however, we have found a strategy to address this shockingly unfair situation. I order an alcoholic beverage and she demurely orders a juice that is the same color as my cocktail. She quickly drinks most of the juice and I tip half my beverage into her glass. That way, we both get a little buzz going and nobody needs to lose their liquor license. I look like a lush who guzzles cocktails in half the time of normal humans, but it’s a small price to pay. 

After our ten dollar mojito and some food, we decided it would be much cheaper and safer to drop by a liquor store and stock up on our own at-home mojito making kit. The airbnb fridge had tons of ice cubes waiting patiently in its pristine freezer section, but I hadn’t noticed any limes, rum, or mint. 

However, even half a mojito was enough to send us into an early evening stupor, and when we came to it just seemed like too much trouble to have to drive eleven minutes to a liquor store and another eleven minutes to get limes and mint. 

Tomorrow we are venturing south to Key West, the southernmost point in the continental US and birthplace of key lime pie. I think some writer guy used to live there too. The internet boasts of world class snorkeling on America’s only living coral reef. Maybe they’ll even have some fish. If not, we can always console ourselves with half a cocktail.

Hospice Nurse Accidentally Goes on Holiday Alone

I wanted to call this blog post Mom of Teen Finally Succumbs to Worry, but then I remembered my daughter is no longer a teen. Mom of Twenty Year Old just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Still, the point of this story is that as a mom I have always tried not to be a worrier. I’m just not the what if type. But sometimes, events stretch even my natural stores of chill. Saturday was one of those times.

I was sitting in La Guardia waiting for my flight to Miami. I was feeling a little concerned that I hadn’t had a text from my daughter saying she was boarding in San Francisco, or had landed in Miami and was shopping on Collins Avenue while she waited for me to join her. This was our plan. She was getting the red-eye Friday night and I was to meet her Saturday afternoon. What could possibly go wrong? 

Putting out of my mind all thoughts of how her car could have gone off the road or her plane fallen out of the sky, I decided her phone must have run out of juice. I texted her a couple of photos of my airport experience. No response. Then I called her. Straight to voicemail. Finally I caved and texted shopping on Collins Avenue already? check in with me. Nothing.

Now I was finally worried. I got a coffee so I could be worried and jittery. I checked my phone every 0.8 seconds. Finally…a call!

Her: Mom?

Me: Where are you?

Her: In bed. Mom, wait, my flight’s not tonight???

Her flight was not that night. It was the previous night. She had not been on it. Suffice to say that for half a minute, at Gate C44 in La Guardia airport, I lost my cool. You got the day wrong? How could you get the day wrong? Then I shifted into my calm-in-a-shit-storm mode and within fifteen minutes we had her booked on another red-eye flying out that night. She’d be joining me a day later than planned. No big deal I finished my coffee, boarded my flight and settled back to enjoy a day alone on the Florida Keys.

Travel just fills me with delight. It makes me feel like a citizen of the world. The plane banked over glittering Manhattan and I said an affectionate farewell to Central Park, the Empire State and Lady Liberty, icons of my new home. Then we cruised for three hours down the East Coast of the US. It was a route I had never taken. Miami from the air looked every bit the wealthy playground I had imagined. Collins Avenue stretched gleaming along the beach front and the cruise ships lined up at the docks like tiny white toys. 

Miami airport is pristine. The shopping is informed by Cape Canaveral and water sports. There was a long line for the rental cars and I was the only white person in it. As I drove my vehicle out of the parking garage, I was feeling like Intrepid World Traveler, able to navigate any system anywhere. Then I turned the corner towards the exit and my phone went dead. Oh no! Now I have no map, no Siri, I don’t know where I’m going…WHAT THE HELL??? A moment later, the dash screen lit up with google maps and the directions to my airbnb. The phone had just gone momentarily dark while connecting to bluetooth. Yessssss! Am intrepid world traveler again, handily overcoming all obstacles in my path! 

A mile down the highway, I’m taking in the endless palm trees and the sunshine and the new greens and blues when splat! splat! splat! It’s 91 degrees and sunny, but it’s raining. Not only that but the raindrops are the size of dinner plates and I’m turning the wipers up to top speed and back down because one minute it’s raining hard and the next it’s not raining at all. Different. Meanwhile, cars are zooming past me on all sides. Floridians drive really fast, and they weave. A lot. I’m still a fairly polite Californian driver, but a year of trips into New York City from the Hudson Valley have taught me to handle aggressive driving. When you drive into NYC from Hudson, there’s a certain point around Yonkers where the road etiquette switches sharply from sedate upstate to insane city. It’s like a gear shift. Comes in handy when you find yourself heading south from Miami on a Saturday afternoon.

Once outside the suburbs the scenery changes fast: it’s flat and low and there are no trees, only what look like mangrove swamps. There’s a sense of the ocean on both sides though you can’t always see it. And everything slides subtly back into the 1950s: the buildings all pastels and rounded corners, the famed highway with its bridges and shabby turquoise wall dividing the lanes. I can feel Hemingway’s prose rising to describe the place. He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and the lions on the beach.

After I check in to my airbnb, I wander down the gravel road to Snappers, a tiki bar and seafood restaurant on the water. Table for one. A Key Lime Colada and some fresh shrimp. I’m sitting five feet away from the ocean that stretches off east to the Bahamas and south to Cuba. Finding myself accidentally having dinner alone in the balmy air of Key Largo is just about the best way I could have imagined to recharge my depleted Covid hospice nurse self. There are no lions on the beach that I can see, but I’m okay with that.

Everyone has to miss a flight at least once in their lives, it’s a rite of passage to adulthood. And it taught me a valuable lesson: if you find yourself accidentally on holiday alone, always treat yourself to a Key Lime Colada. On second thoughts, make that two. 

Nursing in the Time of Covid

This morning I was working out in our basement, which gives me ample time to contemplate the accumulated rubbish of our year here. There’s the broken microwave, a barstool that doesn’t fit anywhere, and my old sturdy UCSF faceshield. Also a pair of thick plastic goggles that, when I wore them way back at the start of Covid, made me sort of feel like I was snorkeling in Hawaii. Without the warm water or tropical fish of course, and yet with a chance of drowning.

The sturdy faceshield made me think back on the early days of Covid, and I realized that the pandemic is now old enough for me to have a kind of nostalgia for the beginnings of it; a sort of warped yearning for the weirdness of the early days, the sharp awfulness, the quiet. I remembered putting that faceshield on in the windy parking lot of a California nursing home back when I got dressed in my PPE according to the instructions on a flimsy sheet of paper. The parking lot was cold. The wind kept threatening to whip my instructions away. My plastic bag blew down from where I had secured it, ready to hold my dirty PPE when I was done. 

This was back when PPE was being rationed out weekly in ziplocks. Back when Covid was tearing through the nursing homes and the deaths went unrecorded as Covid deaths, but we all knew. Back when I would come out from a visit and take off my gear slowly, carefully, according to the instructions on that flimsy sheet, and tie it all up in a plastic bag and walk it around to the trash bins in back of the nursing home and get in my car and carefully sanitize my hands and then tear out those little saniwipes and wipe down my keys, my phone, my steering wheel, the gearstick. Mostly I was thinking how crazy this all was and how could I possibly get sick with all the precautions I was taking. Sometimes I was crying from fear.

And here we are today: Covid was kind of over for a minute, but not really. Restrictions were lifted, but they’re back. Numbers were down, numbers were vastly underreported, numbers are flying up, numbers are inflated. Covid’s over, Covid’s here to stay. Option e: All of the above.

So how does a hospice nurse respond to the current moment? We follow the protocols that are handed down to us. They change every few weeks. I have three documents, decision trees about what to wear to a visit, depending on whether a patient is vaccinated, whether their family is vaccinated, whether they have been in the hospital, out of state, had visitors from out of state, if so which state. It’s dizzying to just write about. My trunk is full of different kinds of masks.

When someone is suspected of having Covid, or of having been exposed, they become what is called a PUI - a Person Under Investigation. So CIA! I personally think the term was invented by an FBI agent-wannabe. Then there are UVPs: unvaccinated persons. They don’t necessarily have symptoms or exposure, but we have to wear a special kind of mask for them anyway. Nothing says get the goddam vaccine like our special kind of mask.

And yet hospice goes on being hospice. People go on dying in the ways that they always have, and some new ways: because whatever you can say about death, you cannot say that it is predictable.

Last night before I went to bed I checked my work phone. I do this when a patient is close to death. With some of them, I cannot help myself, I check my phone before bed, when I wake in the night, and first thing in the morning. Last night I learned that my patient, a 45 year old mother of two, had died just after 8pm. There was a flurry of texts among her day team and the night staff. The death was excruciating, fast, brutal and chaotic. When I visited yesterday morning, her family did not even want to admit that she was dying, yet I could see that she only had hours to live.

She was from a different country, the family spoke another language, and they had very different rituals around death. It was a crash course for me in their culture, about which I knew little. To communicate with them, I had to use the language line on my phone. I spoke in English to a translator, they spoke to the family, the family answered, the translator told me what they said. Any conversation so parsed  would be tedious. I stood in their kitchen, it was my second time in their house. My side of the conversation went something like this:

Please tell them she is very close to the end of her life.

Please tell them I am so very sorry.

Please tell them that giving her food now will cause her more distress. 

Her body cannot tolerate food any more. Her body cannot tolerate fluids.

Please tell them I know this is terribly hard to hear.

The translator made my words into unintelligible sounds. The family listened, wide-eyed. They cried. They had many questions but really they were all the one question: what can we do now?

Please tell them that the best thing they can do for her is sit by her bed, touch her, tell her that they love her.

They did this. I gave her some pain medicine, and I left them there by her bedside. Outside her house I sat in my car for five minutes to gather myself and then I drove to my next patient. In the old days I might have taken a half hour to recover from this visit. But my caseload is so high, there is no time between patients for anything but trying to stay caught up with the mountainous workload.

The night nurse said that when the patient died, her mother threw herself on her body and cried hysterically. I tried to imagine lying across the body of my daughter.

Hospice goes on being hospice in the time of Covid. Mostly, people keep dying of the things they have always died of: cancer, heart disease, poor choices. Despite the virulence of the Delta variant, being vaccinated made a huge difference to the fear factor of my job. Boosters are on the horizon. And with vaccination rates slowly climbing, I’m wearing fewer and fewer paper gowns.

Nineteen months in though, burnout among healthcare workers is increasing. Nurses are quitting the field. I love my work, and I am clear I don’t want to do anything else. But I’m about to have nine days off, my longest vacation in two years, and I’m going to clear the trunk of my car of all traces of PPE. It can go in the basement with my sturdy plastic faceshield and the spiderwebs. And my work phone. I might put that down there too. Right after I change the outgoing message to I’ll be out of the office until September 27th and I won’t be checking voicemails…

St. Patrick’s Day is Coming. We’re All Irish.

Ask any Irish person a question and you will never get a straight answer. Is it raining out? Well yes and no. To be fair, rain is ubiquitous in Ireland, to the point that you’d forget what not raining actually looked like. But you get the point.

St. Patrick’s Day is less than two weeks away and already I’m seeing the signs. Giant green plastic sunglasses, outsized leprechauns, strings of shiny foil shamrocks, and other symbols of my national day that I never laid eyes upon until I came to America.

As the day approaches, I always feel a weird mix of Irish pride, disgust for the shiny leprechauns, and confusion. After all, I left Ireland when I was 22. Yet every year on March 17th I am expected to wear green, pinch people who do not, and, as the token Irish person in the room, know everything there is to know about my tiny island and its ten thousand years of human history. 

As an emigrant who has lived longer in her new home than her native land, I’m no expert on Ireland. But I can tell you this: we are a nation that has been kicked in the head for centuries and the way we deal with our cumulative trauma is by laughing at it. Black humor, trademark of the Irish. Nation of saints and scholars, alcoholics and child-abusing priests, and the most generous people on earth. Irish people would give you the shirt off their backs if you were in need, and at the same time they’ll cut you no slack if you’re being any kind of fool.

So here comes St. Patrick’s day, and I’m now living in upstate New York, a place with many more Irish emigrants than the San Francisco Bay Area, where I lived for the last  30 years. Apparently 12.9% of the residents of New York City claim Irish ancestry. And that was on Google so it must be true. 

The other day, I caught myself wondering what silly green Irish thing I could wear for my zoom team meeting on St. Patrick’s Day. I actually found myself lurking by a pair of green plastic light-up glasses in William’s Hardware. Sara! Get a grip! The next day, I spotted another pair of plastic glasses in Tops Market. These ones had beer glasses for lenses. Ingenious, no? No!

It is also my birthday around this time of year. In fact, this is my birthday weekend. This means two things: one, I get to eat most of a packet of Marich’s Milk Chocolate Sea Salt Almonds for breakfast and two, I get cards in the mail that say things like: Everyone gets to be young once. Your turn’s over.

I have never really cared what advanced age I have reached. When you are 29, you think 30 is advanced. Note to all 30 year olds: bwaaa haaa haaa. When I turned 50 I didn’t really care because it just seemed ridiculous. How could I have been on the planet half a century and still not know how electricity works? Or fire? Or saving for retirement?

Moving right along, I am now turning 54 and it’s still pretty silly, the whole age thing. But I do love birthdays. I just picked up two more cards in the mail. One features a favorite quote of mine by Mae West: I used to be Snow White, but I drifted. I’m sure the person who sent it wasn’t thinking of me specifically. The other is a Covid card. I owe you one proper birthday, it says, there will be cake, booze, balloons, party hats and dancing, with hugs thrown in. It is a whole year since my first Covid birthday. That was the last time we had a dinner party. There are now Covid t-shirts, Covid mugs, and I haven’t checked but you can probably get underpants sprinkled with little spiky viruses. In Ireland, they are busy laughing at really tasteless Covid jokes. And man, there’s material.

This is my first snow birthday. For 53 birthdays, I have managed to avoid living in a place with real Winters, but I finally tripped up and moved to one. The great thing about a place with real Winter is that the seasons are very starkly delineated. And there are many more than four of them. A friend who lives in Montana posted on facebook a list of the Montana seasons. They include I Can’t Feel My Face, Fake Spring, and Is That Snow? There was a little red arrow pointing to Fake Spring with the words You Are Here.

We in the mid Hudson region are also, it appears, in fake Spring. During the past week, temperatures climbed above zero for the first time in a while and the snow began to melt. First it turned into giant ice fields, but then it began to succumb to the above-freezingness of the air and the bitter sun. We all ran about the place banging on about how Spring is in the air. Almost here. Just around the corner. One day it was 50 degrees. I took off my coat in the car and even opened the window to feel the fresh Spring breeze on my face.

The next day it was freezing cold. Not only that, but it was also windy. And muddy. With ice fields. And that, my friends, is how you know you have been duped by Fake Spring. 

But next week the temperature is going to climb to 60 degrees for four straight days. There are buds on the trees, and birds flitting about. There are strange unidentified bugs in the barn. Fake Spring bugs! I don’t care if they are fake. I don’t care if the wind is whipping at the screen door and making me wish I had not thrown my heavy coat into the back of the closet like that. It’s my birthday weekend, St. Patrick’s Day is around the corner and Tops Market has these really cool beer glass spectacles. Because really, in the end, we’re all Irish.

 

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.