In this room

I'm packing in preparation for vacating my room at the B&B for the summer.  The exam that will conclude my first year of nursing school takes place on Tuesday, and I leave for home on Wednesday.  I'll return to this room at the end of August to begin my second and final year of nursing school (at least for now - I'll have my AAS degree when I leave this room at this time next year).

In this room I've eaten way too many bags of dark chocolate, popcorn and baked pita chips and not nearly enough broccoli.  I've developed a deep appreciation for the Food Channel here, watched a number of Los Angeles Lakers games, and played silly Facebook games.  I've witnessed record snowfall, spectacular northern lights, and moose from the window in this room.

Most importantly, I've learned in this room.  Learned how to hear heart and breath sounds through a stethoscope, find the pulses in my feet, draw medication into a syringe, wrap a wounded limb, identify a number of diseases, write a proper nursing diagnosis, and craft a decent case study. 

I've learned how to love my husband more deeply here.  I've been away from home for most of the past year and he has not once complained.  He goes to work every day in part to put me through school, takes care of our house and animals, and never, ever whines about having to shoulder keeping the home fires burning alone.

I've learned how desperately I need my sister in my life.  She is the only person on the planet who knows me so well that she can find a way to talk me down from the proverbial ledge no matter how close I am to toppling.  She is my touchstone.

I've learned that my cousin Georgia accepts me exactly as I am and loves me anyway.  I can count on her, and she supports me unconditionally.  Just before I started school she gave me a greeting card and in it wrote, "enjoy every minute".  I look at that card every day and it reminds me that I wanted this, and that instead of bemoaning the workload I must celebrate it.

Last but not least,  I've learned that nothing is more rewarding than pursuing one's passion. 

Thank you, Mom.  I miss you, but I know you're watching me from wherever you are and you're glad I'm spending the money you willed to me on this amazing, exciting, glorious life I'm living in this room.

For Michelle

You won't read this tonight, and certainly won't have time tomorrow.  You and your daughter will be driving to the outpatient surgery center in Fort Worth early in the morning so that you can check in for your double mastectomy.

It was about five weeks ago that I saw your instant message to me on Facebook.  It read, "I found a lump in my breast".  We spoke on the phone that night and you told me about how you had been sitting on the couch watching television when you found the lump, which you said was about the size of a grape.  You promised that you would make an appointment to see a doctor the following morning.
I remember hanging up and then hanging my head.  It didn't sound good to me.

A week later we spoke again.  You had been to a doctor and had a mammogram.  The doctor told you that he wasn't going to mince words.  He said that he'd been looking at mammograms for a long time and that yours looked like you had cancer.  A biopsy confirmed that diagnosis.  You said, "What the hell?  I have breast cancer."  I said, "Yes, you do."

More testing.  You have the "bad kind" of breast cancer (as if there were a good one), the kind that grows fast and spreads fast.  They saw no signs that the cancer had spread to your lymph nodes, so we crossed our fingers then (they're still crossed).  You met with your surgeon.  She said that a lumpectomy was too conservative and advised you to have a mastectomy - just the one breast.  With your delightful sense of humor you were able to talk about how, after the surgery, you'd still have one of your "girls".  Your boyfriend loves your breasts, you said, and we agreed that he would still have one to admire.

Two weeks ago you told me that you'd decided against breast reconstruction - you don't want additional pain and discomfort.  I told you that I thought I would make the same choice.  We are, after all, seasoned women on the wrong edge of middle age and if our men don't want us with flat chests they need to find other old women to sleep next to.  A couple of nights later, you told me that your surgeon had called to say that she thought a double mastectomy would be your safest route.  I asked you how you felt about that and you told me that you didn't want to spend your days and nights worrying about whether or not your particularly aggressive form of cancer was germinating in a second breast, and had decided to go with the doctor's recommendation.  I believe I would make that same decision.

I can't be in the waiting area tomorrow with your daughter and boyfriend because I am in nursing school in Alaska and you're in Fort Worth, but my spirit will be in that operating room with you when they put you under, and with you in the recovery room when you wake up with your chest bandaged.  The doctors will be testing your lymph nodes before the actual surgery, so with luck we'll finally uncross our fingers when they tell us that they found nothing worrisome in those nodes and that your double mastectomy removed every trace of malignancy.  We'll hug (gently) and then I can tell you what I've wanted to say ever since you first told me that you had found that lump, but have been too afraid of bursting into tears to do so.

You're a beautiful, feminine, smart, wonderful woman.  You wear sparkly shoes and have striking eyes and gorgeous hair.  You're strong and willful and so very, very funny, and I've had some of the greatest laughs of my life with you.  I've cried with you, lived with you and shared secrets with you.  I count you as one of the great blessings in my life.

Tonight after I called to tell you that I love you and that I'll be thinking of you all day tomorrow I got down on my knees (which I do rarely) and I said, "God, I usually don't ask You for things for myself, but tonight I am begging You to let Michelle get through tomorrow with no lymph node involvement, no complications.  Please.  PLEASE."

Paging Noah

Yesterday the seemingly eternal sub-zero cold snap broke here in Anchorage.  As I drove home from class last night , I marveled at the temperature reading my Jeep showed on the dashboard: 38 degrees F.
I entered the B&B, walked down the stairs to my room on the ground floor and heard something unusual.  It sounded like a waterfall.  I thought, "Wow, the warmer temps melted all that snow on the roof...that's some big runoff."  I changed into my jammies and went into the kitchen to grab something to eat.  That water was loud.  I mean really loud.  I walked toward the corner of the living area, from whence the sound was coming, and suddenly I was standing in a puddle of very cold water.  "This isn't good", I thought.  The floors in that room are beautiful glossy hardwood.  Exploring the deck just outside the living area wall I saw no water cascading from anywhere above.  I came back inside and started pushing furniture toward the center of the room and away from the expanding puddle.  Once I had saved several nice pieces, I raced upstairs and called the B&B owner's daughter who lives here in Anchorage (the owner is in Las Vegas - she isn't crazy enough to live here during the winter).  The daughter, Martie, said that she and her husband would be over to assess the situation after they had dinner.

I was really worried about that hardwood floor.  Collecting bath towels from each of the five suites upstairs I began sopping up water.  I got close to the source and noted that it appeared to be coming up from the floor itself.  Very shortly I was out of towels and thought to look in the sauna the owner uses as storage.  There I struck pay dirt.  She had visited J.C. Penney at some point and there were maybe 40 new towels in there.  More sopping.

Martie showed up about an hour later with her husband Steve, who is (thank God) a plumber.  I showed them the pond and piles of soaked towels in the living area.  Steve went to work trying to figure out what in the world was going on while Martie and I continued sopping and mopping.

All kinds of interesting things happen when you live in Alaska.  Last year my husband neglected to "winterize" our motor home and the water that was in the pipes when we parked it in the driveway froze.  When spring came, they broke, and leaked.  It was nasty.  This year the owner of this B&B forgot to shut off the valve that controls an obscure pipe that runs from the bathroom of a second floor suite to the back of the house and ends in a spigot before she left for the winter.  Sometime before I got home last night, the ice that had accumulated in that pipe thawed enough, and the pipe burst.  The valve was open, the water was running - and it was running down the inside of the wall and across the ceiling of the suite on the other side of the living area from my suite.

Steve shut the valve and the water stopped running.  Even so, there were gallons of it soaking the insulation in the ceiling of that other room.  We watched in horror over the span of about three hours as large pregnant looking bubbles formed on the ceiling and walls in there.  We poked at them with knives and water poured out of them, further soaking the carpet.

I've washed and dried all the towels (had to put them on a spin cycle first - they were very heavy).  Six loads.  There are three men from the disaster crew in the other bedroom now, at 1 am (24 hours after the flood).  They have what one of them called a "shop vac on steroids", dropcloths, hatchets and other tools.  They're tearing the ceiling out in there and trying to salvage the carpet.  They seem like very good guys, so I may just go to sleep while they're still here (they'll probably still be here when I wake up, for that matter).

I've spoken with the owner several times today.  Each time she has told me how very glad she is that I am here, and that she can only imagine what would have happened had the pipe broken, say, on a weekend while I was home in Kenai.  The fellow in the other room with the hatchet told me that we'd have had two to three feet of water down here if that pipe had gushed for a couple of days.

When I lived in California, I ran from forest fires.  Now I have survived a flood.  From this point forward, I'll be scanning the horizon waiting for and watching for the locusts.

Misfits

While I'm in school, I live in a B&B in Anchorage.  It's a gigantic three-story house with a front yard that has been cemented over to create parking spaces, and it's in a very nice residential neighborhood within 3 miles of the college and hospital where I go for clinical rotations.

My room and its private bath are on the bottom floor.  Also on the bottom floor is a large living room and full kitchen that I share with the occupant of the only other bedroom on this floor.  His name is Mark.  He moved to Alaska this past October, having spent the first 27 years of his life living in more temperate climes.  Mark is smart, tall, handsome and pleasant when our paths cross, which isn't often.  I wouldn't even know he lived down here save for the fact that he leaves dirty dishes and crumbs in the kitchen and uses my dishwashing soap and towels. Mark has been here all day (I know this because his car is parked in the driveway), as have I, and I haven't laid eyes on him.  As far as I know he hasn't cooked anything (there is no new mess in the kitchen).

An orthopedic surgeon and his wife live on the second floor during the winter.  They're very pleasant people.  He replaces hips and knees at a nearby hospital and has climbed Everest  She manages the house while the owners spend their winters in exotic places like Africa, France, and Israel.  She is detail oriented and very interested in the lives and habits of the other occupants of the house.  Yesterday she informed me that Mark has not washed his sheets or clothes since he arrived in October, and that his room is full of dirty clothes, trash bags full of trash, and computer gaming equipment.  She says that she believes they'll have to burn his sheets when he moves out (apparently he is using "house sheets" - I brought mine from home because I'm sorely addicted to high thread counts).  I was unaware that she patrolled our rooms while we're gone and wonder what she thinks when she peeks into my room, which is full of books, binders, bags of food items that I'm unwilling to share with Mark, and Angry Bird stuffed animals that my husband has begun buying for me.  I think I'll leave a big pile of plastic dog poop on the floor just inside the door of my room the next time I go home to Kenai.

There are several other transient winter residents living here off and on, and the granddaughter of the owner makes regular appearances with her two small children.  She does her laundry here and uses the internet while she ignores her children who want to follow tenants into their rooms.

We're an odd group.  At least two of us are night owls; I can hear someone wandering around above me until at least 2 am before I fall asleep.  We are mountain climbers, busybodies, computer gamers, bicycle riders, students, surgeons and hoarders.  We are US, Canadian and UK citizens, junk food junkies, gourmet cooks, bridge players, movie buffs, single mothers, married couples, neat freaks and slobs.  Somehow we blend in slightly off-key harmony.

Tilt, earth, tilt!

One of the aspects of living in California that I despised most was the weather.  It was always hot (to me); I am most comfortable when the temp is between 20 degrees and 60 degrees F.  On the days that my steering wheel was too hot to touch I'd wonder if I was in hell.

Fast forward three years and northwest 2,500 miles.  Alaska is a place of extremes, but where I live it hasn't been extremely warm.  Not once.  We're experiencing our third consecutive week of sub-zero temperatures now and even I, the Ice Queen, am growing weary of the cold.

I took my Jeep to the dealer here in Anchorage this morning, as I had a 10:15 am appointment to have the service department tell my why my ride is leaking small amounts of oil (again).  When I arrived, the service department told me that whomever had scheduled me for today must have been hallucinating when he said there was availability.  The harrowed man behind the desk explained to me that when the weather is this cold, everybody's car acts up.  He said, "I have a stack of order forms for people requesting service as far back as December."  He then asked me if it was gushing oil or just dripping.  Gushing=emergency and maybe we can get you in by Tuesday.  Dripping=Lady, bring your car in next Thursday and we'll try to get it done, but plan on spending all day in our waiting area.  We have WiFi.  I thought he was going to cry, so I refrained from complaining about having driven 8 miles to reach the dealer only to find that I had no appointment.

During my winter break from college, I rode my bicycle about five times.  Each time I rode, I discovered another body part that absolutely had to be shielded from sub-zero wind chills.  I am now fully equipped with ski pants with suspenders, a beanie that covers my ears, a face shield with a neck covering, ski goggles, special socks I ordered from Canada, air-activated toe warmers, and the requisite gloves and heavy jacket.  My bike traveled back up to Anchorage with me several days ago, but it's languishing in the garage because it's too cold outside to ride until afternoon, and my classes start at 2pm and run until at least 5pm (it's dark at 5).

The moose residing near my home in Kenai have less to dine on during the winter because their veggies are buried under a couple of feet of snow.  One night early in January I was in my bedroom watching television and heard a commotion on my front porch.  I thought, "Who in the he** is at my door at this time of the night?"  Upon investigation I found a moose standing on the porch trying to reach some bark on our tree.

It's cold. 

Ho ho halleluja!

My mother made Christmas a stellar event when my sister and I were young.  She purchased and/or made numerous gifts for us (and kept track of every cent she spent in order to be "fair"), decorated the house, cooked a delicious meal and made the day very, very special.  Rarely did anyone get drunk (unless it was me), and I don't remember even one nasty fight occurring on a December 25th.

If I shut my eyes today and follow my memory back to, say, Christmas of 1975, I feel warm, cozy, loved, safe, and happy.  I look around the memory room and see my father in his recliner (with a beer), my mother in the kitchen (with a gin and tonic), my sister and her first husband (they were trying to get pregnant and I can hear her squeal with glee upon opening a box containing a check that would pay for one infertility treatment), my first husband (whom I subsequently divorced about a year before he died desperately young at 23 years of age) and the family poodle, Trinka, preparing to beg at the table.  Trinka did love her turkey.  As a matter of fact, that year she managed to climb onto the kitchen counter after dinner and before the dishes were done to pick at the turkey carcass.

I remember this because that one year we happened to tape record "The Opening".  The opening was the lengthy process of  each person receiving one gift taken from under the tree while everyone else watched, and it was always fun. I could hear the Christmas carols playing in the background.  I had that tape and listened to it a number of times as an adult before losing it somewhere during the depths of my alcoholism (not surprising as I actually misplaced a clothes washer and dryer during the same period of time - I honestly cannot remember where those appliances went during one of my frequent moves).

Somewhere in my thirties it came to me that once I left home I was disappointed every Christmas.  My father was dead, my mother was involved with a man I despised, I had been married several times, had no children, my sister lived far away, and what was left of my family of origin rarely got together for Christmas.  When we did, Mom was difficult to deal with, her partner was a raging asshole and had to be the center of attention, and I was drunk or stoned (and disappointed).

Somewhere in my early forties I began exploring Buddhism.  I was sober by then and searching for a place where I fit spiritually.  I was also married to a man who doesn't remember birthdays or anniversaries (he just doesn't) and likes to hold on to his money (which is probably a good thing because I seem incapable of holding on to mine).  I always have a Christmas tree, though, because I love the lights and  inherited some gruesome family ornaments that remind me of Christmas of 1975.

This year, my husband was asked to play Santa at Walmart, where he works.  Walmart is a pretty big deal here in the town of Kenai, Alaska, and I try to be supportive of him in his workplace because he has always been supportive of me in mine.  On the Santa day, I actually put on some makeup, tried to tame my hair a bit, and donned a red scarf before grabbing my camera and making the icy drive to Walmart.  I got there shortly after the Santa event had begun and started taking photos.

As I watched my husband interact with children (he has perfect Santa facial hair - that bushy white beard that I'm always nagging at him to trim) I found myself smiling.  I took photo after photo.  The cute little Native Alaskan kids, the cute little black and white and Asian kids, the kids who cried, the kids who had to be coaxed, the kids who handed Santa crumpled, carefully (and illegibly) written gift lists.  Those kids looked at him like he was really Santa.  My heart warmed and warmed until it felt like I had Christmas music playing in the background, my mother in the kitchen, my father in his recliner, my sister, a turkey in the oven, Trinka begging for treats, and a big Christmas tree loaded with gifts around me.

This year, my husband gave me the best Christmas gift I have ever received, and one I could not have imagined possible.  Thank you to my dearest, long-bearded, thrifty, stubborn, funny, smart, supportive, genuine, honest, quirky husband Santa.  You returned to me the joy of Christmas.

A bundle of miracles

I took my last exam of my first semester of nursing school today.  I didn't do as well as I had hoped and ended up with a course average of 90.6%, which in this program is a "B".  I spent a few minutes mourning the loss of my straight "A" average, ate a bowl of ice cream, and started thinking.

Wake up, Nurse Ratched!  You're a recovering alcoholic/addict and drank/smoked/used drugs from age 14 to 38.  How many brain cells do you suppose you destroyed while you were out there having a "great time"?  It's a miracle you have any left at all - and you are disappointed that you had enough to learn 90.6% of the enormous amount of information presented in your first semester of nursing school.

You're 56.  This is an asset when it comes to life experience, however, let's be real here and admit that you don't have the stamina of a 30 year old anymore and frankly, those 40 or so extra pounds you're carrying around aren't helping any in the energy department either.  It's a miracle that you were able to keep up with your younger peers and rise at 5 am to attend clinicals (not to mention hustle up and down the halls of the hospital).

Hey, remember that couldn't hear anything through a stethoscope three months ago.  Today you identified specific abnormal lung sounds and a heart murmur in the simulation lab and a couple of weeks ago in clinical rotation you heard what emphysema sounds like in a human being.

Now let's talk about the husband.  He's working full time (because you asked him to) and bringing home the health insurance too (because you asked him to) while you go to school.  He takes care of the house and your four cats while you live half-time in Anchorage and never complains that you're gone too much.

You know you were afraid that you'd get the clinical setting and be afraid of "blood and guts".  You were sure you wanted to be a psychiatric nurse (partially because you're a bit nuts yourself) and were very worried about barfing when you saw open wounds.  Turns out you love open wounds....seeing the healing process and the way the body works to fix itself.  That day you got to see a skin graft was the best day of your life.

So you didn't get an "A".  Look at all you got instead.  A bundle of miracles.