Father,
Oftentimes, as I go to work and when I am at work, I find my prayer is that You would protect my residents from...myself. My own mistakes. My own inadequacies and inexperience. My busyness and in the midst of trying to juggle everything, having some details fall through the cracks. Somehow, praying these things also makes me realize how much I desperately need You to save me from myself and protect me from myself, my sin, my gravitation towards things that would only hurt me. I feel like my own worst enemy. "You can have it all // my empire of dirt // I will let you down // I will make you hurt..."

There is a coffee shop in a bookstore where I live, on the third floor, with a wall of windows overlooking people, lights and cars below. You can sit at tables by the window and look out and think, like Pooh in his "thinking spot" on a log in the Hundred Acre Wood. In scarf, skirt and beret on this rainy Friday night, I ventured out to soak in ambiance and drink cocoa, something I have not done in quite awhile. Books, people, wooden stools and leather chairs, coffee, biscotti, faint jazz music, lights filtering through streaks of raindrops running down windows...

...and all the noise. All the stress. All the questions. ...Fade for a time, and I feel very quiet and small, a single person in the middle of all these other people, no one knowing who I am other than a dark-haired girl sitting by a window drinking, reading, gazing, thinking. I am alone, and tonight I ebb and flow between being okay with that, and wanting to turn and find someone next to me. I think of the good little things that happen and set aside the struggles as much as possible, to live and love and let go. Tonight I will just be. I simply am. I am neither exceedingly happy or devastatingly sad. I have lived another day. I am glad of the small things that come my way, like pennies on pavement. I pick them up, put them in my pocket, and keep walking.

One of my residents was having an episode of shortness of breath the other day. I strapped a neb to him, asked him questions about chest pains and heaviness, and sat with him while keeping an eye on his O2 sats, pulse, respirations. All his vitals looked great, he wasn’t in any pain, and eventually he dozed off in his recliner chair. Once his neb was finished, I put him on 2 Liters of oxygen, and left him resting in his room. A little while later, I was walking towards the nurse’s station when he came scooting around the corner in his wheelchair. He caught sight of me, started waving, and called out, “Doctor! Oh, hi doctor!”

~

A lady was waiting for one of the other nurses on the floor to come and Ace wrap her legs. Ace wraps are like cloth bandages that you wrap figure-eight-style around someone's foot up to their knees, to help with things like fluid retention and circulation in their legs. They are a little tricky to figure out at first, but once you get the hang of them they're actually fun to do! You just have to wrap them tight enough so that they don't come undone on your patient in the middle of the day, and they end up having ribbons of cloth trailing behind them as they walk. Anyways, this resident's nurse was busy, so I offered to do it. After I finished, she looked up at me and cheerfully stated, "You did the best job wrapping my legs!" And I felt ridiculously happy.