since it's cold and dark here and there isn't any snow on the ground i thought i'd toss in a few pictures from a kayak trek of harriman fjord a few years back. we had lovely sunny weather and tons of glacier activity...scarey at times. those things can creat some impressive waves when they calve. but it was beautiful.
yesterday my niece had her twins. saw some cute pictures of them. they were both over 4.5 pounds so that is good and they looked healthy. all are well. so shannon is the last one waiting for baby. she still has some time though not much. that brings me up to 14 great neices/nephews. i spoke to claire my neice today to get more on kelly's babies. sounds like everyone is excited and the babies are great. 
joy brought in the leftover pumpkins they didn't use for thier contest so i made some bread tonight. it smells good. i attempted the seeds too , but those just got a bit too toasty. i've never really gotten into the taste of pumpkin seeds anyway, but seems like you have to try. 
sad stories in the news this week. in the summer some idiot shot a swan with an arrow. they had caught up the swan, removed the arrow and put it back in with it's mate. they mate for life and the two swans immediatly made a beeline for each other. sadly, the injuries to the swan have now prevented it from being able to make the flight south for the winter. it's mate kept circling, but she just couldn't fly well enough. eventually, he flew off with the other swans and she was left behind. so sad....! the seward sealife center went and caught her up again, but she'll no doubt spend the rest of her life in captivity. maybe they could put her out there for the summers?? hmmm. 3 nights of work done. one was overtime. they put a baby on sledd. he is just 1 1/2 years old. it's always so stressful doing sledd on these tiny things. there is just less room for error and we don't do babies much so we aren't trained for the young ones. so i just run the machine and i have another peds icu nurse in there to take care of the majority of the cares. lucky for me i got to work with joy and tiffany. the first night with the machine was a bit nuts as the machine kept alarming. turns out i just needed to switch the ports out on the hemodialysis cath. trouble shooting is not as easy with the peds tubing and my lack of experience. i was very stressed. in medicine they tell you to first, do no harm. it's hard when you aren't sure whether you can guarantee that. it was a relief to get him off the machine in the morning. he gets a different type of dialysis in the mornings and then goes back on sledd. so i shut it down after like an 18 hour run. it also meant i got to leave work a bit early.
that first night too was frustrating as the one doc is such a bother. she is totally moody and her moods change minute by minute. she'll bite your head off for no reason. i think ultimately the freak wants to be buddies with everyone, but her social skills are so horrid that nobody wants to be her friend. she treats all the nurses with no respect. anyway...i was primarily running the machine so i was working with the renal doc, who is great. he likes to have these graphics filled out so he can see the progress of the patient for the entire hospital visit more readily. i understand that...of course, the thing hadn't been filled out as they rarely do anything with that in peds. knowing he likes it and having respect for him i took the time to sort thru many flow sheets from different departments and after about 45 minutes i had some semblence of the in's and out's graphed out.
anyway...ms nasty doc comes in and starts going off on me for filling it out saying he knows he's in peds and he doesn't care about it. i had actually clocked out so i just turned and walked away. i guess she started heading to the trash with it and made the motion of ripping it up. joy convinced her to just leave it. i made a comment to the nice doc later the next night and he said she was all telling him how great the graphics were. total freak!! i just ignore her and only speak when she asks me a direct question. i know she knew i was ticked at her.
we all had fun despite being stressed...i think laughter gets people in medicine through alot. often families complain that they can hear the talking and laughter at the desk, i know it probably seems odd and unprofessional to an outsider, but our job really can be majorly stressful and we'd all go nuts if we didn't have some way to release the stress. last night tiffany and i totally got the giggles somewhere in the middle of the night. who knows what we were finding so funny, but we entertained everyone else around us. the sledd ran smoothly the next two nights. for me that mostly means that i work about 10 minutes on the hour doing calculations and reprograming. my day replacement was thrilled as she got to sleep in every morning and then get called in for overtime each day.
they had called me to run the sledd tuesday night. it was a strange morning though as i woke up, fed the dogs, crawled back in bed and then felt nauseated and started salivating. i totally just started puking. as i hovered over the toilet the phone rang. it was work in desperate need for my sledd services that night. as i had just puked i passed.
because of the stress underlying i woke up frequently and got very poor sleep worring about the baby and all that i could do wrong. that whole do no harm thing was really weighing on me.
we managed some bog walks and today we went to the dog park. anchorage has frozen up quickly. the lake is mostly frozen. blossom took a few short strolls out there which scares me and i start being a nut trying to get her back on solid ground. there was a guy out walking on the lake...not a smart one i'd say...it's still a bit early to trust the newly formed ice out there. i'd hate for blossom to fall in. she did find a few open areas where she could still swim around. dogs are impervious to the cold it seems sometimes. she was all happy, but i put her in a doggie time out for disobeying me. that really just means she got put back on the leash.
well...i'm very sleepy so i think i will crash. sorry...life was not dull for me at all this week as work was what it was...but it can be tough to bring what i do to life i think. it's a crazy world...though i did get a good idea for a book...a compilation of tales of medicine in the alaska bush. would be an interesting book to research and put together. as usual i will probably be far too lazy to make it happen. i think the tourists, especially those in the medical field would eat it up.
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