Oh, hai.

It's been. . .a month? Six weeks? Seven weeks?

God, who knows. All I know these days is getting up in the dark, working under artificial lights, going home in the dark, and praying for the sweet, sweet release of death.

Not really. But close.

In the time since I last caught up with you guys, I have survived The Annual Music Festival That Makes My Commute Home Even More Unpleasant, three more checkups with various CANSUH doctors (all clear!), and a staffing reduction.

Because when you win awards and have fantastic patient outcomes and get featured in advertising campaigns, with pictures and everything, that's how you're rewarded: with staffing cuts.

And it's rained a couple of times, which is kind of a big deal, because our county usually breaks up and dissipates large thunderstorms. I think it's a function of having so much hot air here every couple of years, when the Legislature is in session.

But anyway, yeah: Manglement decided that we were just too damned efficient and fantastic, and so cut our staffing by a third. One of our nurses is out taking care of an aging/sick/dying parent, so that meant that I worked, like, all the time. I barely had time to eat something that wasn't fast food, let alone write.

It's frustrating to be managed by a person who has no critical-care experience. It's equally frustrating to be managed by somebody who hasn't laid paws on a patient in, oh, at least fifteen years--and it's worst of all when those two people are combined into one. I feel sort of like a character from "Savage Chickens"--there's this robot with a board with a nail sticking out of it who comes around whenever somebody Important is about to tour the facility, but otherwise never shows up.

So we're all trying to focus on the positive. Two of our nurses recently had babies, which is always nice if you like babies, and I am, so far, not going to have to have more surgery to chop malignancies out of my head. Boyfiend's foot-drop has completely resolved. The cats and dog are making a habit of cuddling together, a la A Peaceable Kingdom. Nobody's tried to punch me lately. (Well, they tried, but they didn't connect. Much.)

I have a couple good stories to tell. I also have some eyebrows to pluck. You can tell, by looking at my eyebrow game, which takes priority today. Tonight, I will be dining on white wine and scrambled eggs and biscuits with sausage gravy, oh fuck yeah.

My trainer brought in a new piece of equipment today: the big yoga-whoozit ball:

Little did she know I'd already found my spirit animal.

My Boyfiend's Back.

I go back to work tomorrow after ten days off. Why, you ask, did I take ten days off in the middle of what is decidedly not vacation season?

My boyfiend's back.

Specifically, his two-level microdiscectomy and associated recovery time.

Boyfiend had worked really hard all late summer and early fall, getting the brewery where he works up and running (yes, Boyfiend makes beer for a living. It's a perfect match.) and had started, just before Thanksgiving, having some pain in his knee. He'd messed up the knee years ago in a bike accident (yes, he rides bikes. Yes, he has a fixie. Yes, he has a beard and skinny jeans and flannel shirts.) and we'd thought it was just overwork. . .

. . . until the day that that leg was so numb he nearly fell getting out of bed.

I'll spare you the fun and games involved with the diagnosis of his problem, except to say that about six weeks into it, I said, "Honey-Bun, Snoogums, Sweetie-Pie, this shit is for the birds. I've got you an appointment with a neurosurgeon at Sunnydale General."

Whereupon he had a myelogram and various other things done that made the surgeon say OMG WTF, and then he went into surgery, where the surgeon opened him up and said OMG WTF EVEN WORSE THAN I THOUGHT OH NOOOOEEEES, and then the surgeon fixed him and closed him up and he's been pretty much fine.

I told him before surgery that he'd take less pain medication recovering from the surgery than he did prior. He did not believe me. I was right.

So for ten days I've been on light nursing duty. Boyfiend is not a whiner, he doesn't moan for attention, and he doesn't get in the way. Mostly he's been sleeping and reading and eating entire pints of ice cream late at night.

Monday he'll get his staples out. Then he can begin, very carefully, to be slightly more active. It'll be months before he's allowed to throw kegs around like Hulk Brewer again (if ever he can), but at least he'll be further away from surgery.

I have to say: it's been nice, after years and years of taking care of back-surgery patients, to get to see one get better.

Hey la, hey la.

Me working yesterday, after the time change.

Bladder, why you do me this way?

Back in nursing school, I had an instructor. Everybody has one of those instructors--the ones whose classes make you yearn for the sweet release of death, or at least a nice case of vascular dementia. I don't remember what she taught, although it couldn't have been that important, since we only met twice a week.

She had three hobbyhorses that she managed to work into every class: homeopathy, the importance of cleanses (you know, take a lot of laxatives and eat only pureed grapefruit stuff), and the fact that the nursing shortage was caused by legalized abortion. Oh--one more I forgot--that all nurses hated each other and the profession and ate their young and so on and so forth. You can imagine what it was like to be in her class. I would sit there Tuesdays and Wednesdays for an hour and a half each time, gritting my teeth and smiling blankly.

Plus, she was one of those people who believed that gayness could be cured and God sent disease as a punishment. A real winner.

That was the instructor, now that I remember back, that not-so-subtly implied that I'd somehow cheated my way to graduation, despite having a really nice, shiny GPA and good clinical recommendations.

I always never wondered what happened to her after I graduated.

Yesterday my bladder started acting all funny: it would produce a rhythmic thump whenever I turned left and started using more oil. So I went, this morning, to one of those generic Get You In, Get You Out clinics to see if I could pee in a cup and get some drugs. And who should greet me when I walked in?

Yep. That nursing instructor, now an NP in GYI/GYO Clinic. Which, not surprisingly, is attached to a locally-run pharmacy that has all sorts of homeopathic and frightening christian-y literature on the shelves. You can get your oscilliconum or whatever it's called at the same time you catch up on the latest thinking about God's great plan to punish sinners in the apocalypse. Which is happening next Monday.

Fortunately, they also had Bactrim DS, so I had that going for me.

And she didn't prostelytize or suggest that I take whatever weird sugar pill du jour she favored. The only thing she said that made me shudder slightly and recall that bland, focusless smile was this: that I must not eat a lot of red meat because there were so few nitrites in my urine. (Bacteria in the bladder that are the cause of UTIs produce nitrites as part of their metabolism. One reason for not having nitrites come up on a dipstick is that fresh urine has entered the bladder and the bacteria there haven't had time to push nitrites into it.) She did mention how horrible nursing was for her, and how the "nurse curse" was the cause of my bladder troubles.

I smiled a bland smile and waggled my head noncommittally. Then I gave her twenty-five bucks and trotted down the hall to the pharmacy, where three days' worth of antibiotic was a whopping $1.50.

Wow.