The Power of Yell

I grew up in a loud family.  My parents are both from New York City, and I have 3 siblings.  Oh, and my Dad is both a surgeon AND a preacher.  So he DESERVES to be heard, just ask him.   I still find myself reminding my grown sister that we are in the same room and she could lower her voice and still be heard.  I once brought a college roommate from different origins home for the weekend, and after two days of (I thought) normal family life, she said to me on the return ride to the dorm, “now I understand”.  I later visited her family (of librarians) and felt the same way.

But you can be loud, and not be angry.  You can laugh loudly, tease loudly, and speak loudly.  Or you can yell because you are angry.  Or, as my children tell me, you can yell without raising your voice.   It’s the underlying anger that gets you.  The nastiness, the irritation, the unsaid insults.

It’s amazing the impact that being yelled at can have on your day.  I have a temper.  My husband has a temper; and not surprisingly, both of our sons have tempers as well.  In the past few years, as the boys have hit adolescence, we have had an increasing number of conversations about yelling.  Quite often, the first words I manage to fit into a discussion are “don’t yell at me!”  Or the boys say, “Mom, why are you yelling?” And before we have begun to honestly evaluate whatever it is we are dealing with, we are all angry.  The boys get cranky and hormonal because they are teenagers.  I get cranky and hormonal because I am menopausal.  We snap at the next thing that crosses our paths, and before you know it, everyone in the house is cranky and snappy.  Once I've been yelled at, even by my 13 year old, chances are I'll be yelling at everyone else, even the cats.

Yelling at someone makes it hard to be heard.  When the surgeons yell that I have “just killed a patient”, or “clearly don’t know what I’m doing”, I not only become angry, but I lose all respect for them and become unable to hear the criticism they are leveling, which may in fact be valid.  Maybe I am passing the instrument in an unhelpful way, but when you treat me like an idiot,  I become defensive, and surly.  “Really?” I want to shout, “ it seems to me that the one who’s unsure about what to do is YOU! Otherwise you wouldn’t need to yell at me! And since I can still hear the pulse ox, clearly the patient is still alive!”  Yelling bars communication.

If my son walks into the room, and his response to:  “how was your day?” is a stormy “Crappy! Why do you care?” the likelihood that a civil conversation will follow is remote at best.   Likewise, when I visit the boycave downstairs and find the place strewn with the detritus of snacks past, and can’t bring myself to say “good morning” before I point out that dirty dishes and bar wrappers are not, in fact, decorative; the inevitable reply will be angry also.

Sometimes we do yell because of something else entirely.  The bus ran late, a shipment of parts didn’t come in, the cat vomited in my shoe, the pharmacy failed to mail order our meds again; whatever vagary of normal life has pushed us over the edge is getting passed on to the person nearest at hand. Or we’re exhausted:  I do work stupid hours.  Propel has diabetes: if his blood sugar is too high or low, he can be crabby.  Sarsaparilla is hypoglycemic: if he hasn’t eaten recently, or not had enough protein, he can be crabby as well.  But these are explanations, not excuses.  We need to control our tempers.  We need to value others’ feelings, especially those who are around us, and close to us.

The older I get, the more I realize there is a limit to the amount of bile I can absorb on any given day.  I need to be careful about whose angst I choose to allow into my life, and I need to not increase the burden of nastiness in anyone else's.  If I were inclined to making New Year’s resolutions, this would be it:  to reduce the toxic bio-burden in my house and my workplace, and to deflect the toxicity the world offers me by gently declining the company of those who would share their nastiness with me.

Boisterous is an adjective I am happy to claim.  I live my life large and out loud.  But I don’t have to yell.  Unless I’m at a football game, of course!

Dry Gin Martini, MD.  ready for a Harvey Wallbanger.

If you have never been a child...how do you teach a child to be a child? - A New Year's Resolution

I have spent my entire life pushing myself to be a better version of my initial destiny.  I have rollercoastered in and out of the gutter but have pulled myself up by my boot-straps to be more than I thought I would ever be - even 5 years ago.  I am a work in progress.  I struggle with parenting most of all.  I am a self professed control freak, I like things the way I like them.  Children aren't really good at living within a specific box - the unexpected is the normal. 

Unlike my children, I did not know childhood.  I was 2 when my parents split, 4 when I moved away from my father across the country to CA (never to see him again - he passed when I was 12), and 5 when my mother and I (after moving approx 15 times since our move to CA about a year earlier) wound up living in a homeless shelter. 

I have woken up in places where rats were scurrying across my feet, where roaches the size of silver dollars were tiny.  I know what it's like to be hungry (really really hungry).  I have lived in places where school days were cancelled due to shootings and investigations on campus.  My mother being clinically crazy, made life unpredictable: one moment happy and smiling, the next chasing me around the house with a butcher knife.  My childhood was chaos, so I learned to control what I could. 

I controlled my grades, with no help from my batshitcrazy mother:  I was on the honor roll from the getgo.  I controlled my household from approximately 7 years old on:  I knew our budget, paid our utility bills, grocery shopped, and did my mother's tax returns.  I didn't have many friends because I hated the unexpected.  Girls are hormonal and obnoxious, especially at a young age, and I had no patience for them.  Living in an area where bullies (read gangs) were quite prevalent, it worked to my advantage that I towered over everyone by at least a head until high school (6ft tall by 12).  I never had an issue with fighting or bullying.  I kept my head low, minded my own business, and did what I could to suck in as much knowledge as possible.  Everything I read and heard had shown me that knowledge was the ticket out of this place!

Now that I am out of the ghetto, living in suburbia - 2 kids, 2 cars, a nice home, nice things, always food on the table, trips taken periodically throughout the year - I find that my controlling ways have manifested into other things.  I can't just go and be free and ignore the little things that bug me.  This is my new New Years resolution:  to let things slide off my back a bit more, to let other people take the wheel - no matter how much it irks me.

But I digress, the largest manifestation of my struggle with control is in parenting - it's less about the structure and rules required for kids to be guided into adulthood (STRUCTURE?  I am great at that shit!) and more about letting go, being fun and creative.  My childhood being filled with so many adult issues at such a young age left me with little to no imagination for easy and fun activities to do with my kids.  I don't remember being a child, most of it blocked, but much of it just wasn't childish.  Jameson Whiskey (my husband) on the otherhand, remembers his childhood vividly.  He is creative with the kids and can think of awesome, silly games at the drop of a hat.  I envy that.  I want to enjoy tickle-wrestling with my kids, or a game of hide and seek, or running around the culdesac dancing and singing and being silly, but I really don't.  Is there something wrong with me? 

As my kids get older, I know a change is needed.  I don't want them to grow up before they have to nor am I jaded into thinking they will never grow up.  Being raised poorly really only gives me the picture of what I don't want for my kids, but leaves so much unanswered as to what is right and wrong.  My goal this year is to let go - in every aspect of my life, including with my kids.  I don't want them to remember me as the mom who couldn't have fun. 

Granted we DO plenty of fun things - but rarely am I actually in the mix.  In a few weeks we are revisiting a local indoor water park resort (a trip paid for by the hotel due to issues with our last stay), I am looking forward to letting go, riding many-a slide, and acting altogether silly - I see a lot of xanax in my future!

Here's to a fabulous fancy-free New Year!  I'll drink to that! - Mimosa, M.D.

If Bumbles can bounce, why can't boys?

My job is an odd one.  I can’t talk about the details ever, because that would violate patient privacy, and yet the generalities resonate throughout my and everyone else’s life like a gong.  

You can read about what I do in the papers, and hear the stories on the news.  In the course of 30 years, I’ve seen things that would curl your toes, straighten your hair, and change your religion.  The guy who got hit by a train/forklift/plate glass/rebar.  The one whose ponytail got caught in a paint mixing machine.  The unspeakable things humans do to one another in fits of rage.  The end result of the curious notion our society holds about guns. Improper uses of sex toys/vegetables/household objects.  What happens when you drive drunk/tired/elderly/angry.  How physics works, especially the laws of motion, mass and gravity, Every. Single. Time.  Why you really, really, really shouldn’t do drugs.  Especially injectable ones.  12 reasons to hate the Fourth of July (hint: they’re all essential body parts).  Why I believe Darwin’s theories should be allowed to run their natural course.

The most important thing to learn if you want to keep working in a trauma center is how to separate oneself from one’s patients, to lock one’s private self in and let only one’s professional self show.  Many stupid people tricks provide amazing surgical challenges, and keep my job interesting.  Since I work in a teaching hospital, I get to learn, and watch others learn, from the best.  Most of the time, humor saves the day.  If you can find what’s funny in the situation, you are free to do whatever it takes to make the case bearable, and to get the job done.

Sometimes, though, reality breaks through.  When I was pregnant with my each of my boys, I was working at Children’s Hospital, which is a terrible place to be pregnant.  Every new disease I saw, every birth defect, every child gone wrong sent me into a tailspin.  Was this genetic?  Environmental? Could you test for it?  Did it develop in utero?  Could you see it on ultra sound?  I came home at the end of every week, exhausted, frightened, worried. Migraines became a Friday occurrence.  Each of their healthy births made me gleeful as few parents are.  10 toes!  10 fingers!  They can breathe!  Their skin does not slough off!  Look!  Poop!  Oh, he can swallow!  Isn’t that sweet?  The oddest things made me rejoice.   Because, really?  Perspective is a wonderful thing.

After I returned to the trauma center, other things would set me off.  Freak accidents are the worst, of course, but my paranoia surrounding lawn mowers bordered on the extreme.  I still lecture the neighbors about the dangers of ladders.  When a child came in who happened to walk behind his/her parents’ SUV as they backed down the driveway, I would come home and hug my babies so hard they woke up and questioned me.  As my boys age, different things keep me up:  the new driver who got drunk and killed her sister, in the passenger seat; boys long-boarding behind cars, kids playing with cigarette lighters.  The sheer terror on the faces of parents as they look down the tunnel of a far different future than they had ever imagined is one of the hardest things I have to face.  Because I know it could be me.

Sometimes my patients are mirror images of my kids.  Sometimes they have the same eyebrows, are the same grade in school, like the same music (we ask, because we like to have a comfortable environment for pre-anesthesia) or play the same sports.  Sometimes it’s just the age.  Every parent of an infant goes home to cuddle their wee one every time a shaken baby comes in.  It’s not possible to be unmoved.

 I can dissociate myself from an adult yahoo who chose to bull ride a barrel full of fertilizer based explosives, or was drunk driving with a suspended license.   It’s much more difficult with a teenager (poor impulse control, thy name is teen) who made a stupid choice once and will go handless through his life to pay for that whim.  To me, the “hold my beer and watch this” set is far different from the “Gee I wonder?” set.  Maybe it’s because I so often have a house full of wondering dorks, many of whom I have spent years yelling at to “put the towel down and back away from the window”, and other bits of silly advice.  Maybe it’s because I have hopes that these boys will someday grow out of their stupid behaviors and become sensible.  Or maybe it’s just that I live in fear that one day I will recognize one of the faces that wheels into my room.  Whatever it is, it’s powerful.  There is no doubt about it, kid trauma is more difficult.  There is definitely a part of me that wants the teens to have a second chance, and I think no one can stomach the notion that bad things happen to children….

Recently, I had a case that shook me to the core.  The kid’s head was round, just like my son’s.  He was my son’s age, and had Type One Diabetes, just like my son.  The stupid thing he had done was unfixable for the most part, and will complicate an already complex existence.  I couldn’t help wondering what his blood sugar was when he made the choice he made. But what really got me was his bravado.  He kept trying to calm his Dad.  He clearly felt the weight of his consequences, and knew that his parents were going to take a huge hit, and he felt guilty.  My son would have done the same.  The resident kept saying she thought he was in shock, but I knew better. 

When you grow up with diabetes, you grow up fast.  You realize the consequences of not eating right, not taking your insulin, not doing your exercise, almost as soon as you can reason at all.  What you choose to do with that knowledge depends on your maturity level as a person, and varies throughout your life, and through adolescence, particularly.  But the base knowledge is there.    This kid knew, as my son knows, that we are mortal.  That is something a lot of teens don’t realize at their core, and many adults even, are surprised to learn.  When I said to him “bummer, dude”, he replied, “you play, you pay”, though he was blinking back tears at the time.  Responsibility is such a difficult thing to teach as a parent.  It’s funny how the kids with the most issues learn it the fastest.

Dry Gin Martini, MD, and sober as a church mouse.

Absurdly Normal

Sometimes I wish I lived in a house of average IQ’s, where personalities and habits are standardized by Pavlovian training. Alas, this is only sometimes, when all I want to do is close my eyes and sleep but my husband wishes to lecture on the subject of the way to measure the density of the Earth in two ways. First, by using Galileo’s method of measuring acceleration caused by the Earth’s gravity field (which is by the way: the speed of a ball descending on an incline plane, using musical scales as a measurement of time) and then using Newton’s Gravitational Constant (I’m not explaining that one.)  

I wish normalcy when my son, Koolaid, cannot relate to other children because one he’s scarily intelligent. Two he has Autism Spectrum Disorder(on the high functioning end),therefore, he sometimes lacks basic social skills.  

Cocoa, the middle child, is our public face but  as soon as she enters our house, she is as weird and unruly as the rest of us . She is a perfectionist: A thousand crumbled paper mermaids lay at my feet because the tail must be just right. She likes to tie things to other things. I see a career in it or a lot of therapy  in her future. Possibly both.

Shirley Temple, my youngest, makes me wish we were normal most of all. When you ask her what she wants to eat, she’ll say disturbing things like, “Elves. Elves sound delicious” and will insist that Elves are the only thing she wants to eat. I’m partly to blame here. I constantly give crazy answers to their questions in hopes that they will leave me to my Syrah in peace.  

Dear normal people, does your daily life include conversations such as these?

Overheard at home: 
Koolaid:"I'm going to shoot you with my laser!"
Cocoa: "Can't immune."
Kooliaid: "I'm going to blast you with my bomb!"
Cocoa: "Nope immune."
Koolaid: "Well, how can I destroy you?"
Cocoa: *sigh* "I've had my shots, so I'm immune to everything."

At the grocer store: 
Clerk: "Are you being good for Santa?"
Shirley Temple: "Santa is dead!"
Clerk: "Uh, what?"
Cocoa: "She means the real Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of children."
Clerk: "Oh jeez, I was beginning to think she was scary."
Koolaid: "She IS scary but that's not the point

Tequila Sunrise, Cocoa, and Koolaid argued for an entire weekend about if mermaids exist. Cocoa is pro-mermaid. Tequila and Koolaid are definitely not. To end the debate, they asked me. I thought about it for a minute and said, “Well, we don’t know if there is life on other planets. If there is, it is a possibility to have a race of merfolk on one of them.”

Blinded them with science.

Ralph Ellison said, “I knew that it was better to live out one’s own absurdity than to die for that of others.” This is what I reflect upon when I all I want to do is be normal.

 

p.s. Tequila Sunrise worked out the density of the Earth. The answer is: 5.5 grams per cm3  

It's Midnight. That's My Only Excuse.

Before you have children, experienced parents tell you “it’s harder than you think!”  They smile a smug smile and relate stories of sleepless nights, and potty training, and the Dreaded First Day of Kindergarten and how they cried as their child got on the bus/walked into the classroom/waved goodbye/cried for mommy.

Those things for me?  The first two were….tiring.  The third one became my secret shame-I was simply happy for some child-free time.  Helped that my kids liked daycare/preschool/kindergarten.

What’s hard?  Having your son kicked out of daycare for being “too active” and NOT UNDERSTANDING that constantly hitting and kicking everyone around him was NOT OKAY.  Having everyone around look at you as if you’re the problem, you simply aren’t disciplining him well enough. Seeing the sweetheart inside him and WILLING it to take over the brat part.

Then you take him in for diagnosis and realize you wish it were as simple as not disciplining him enough.  Then words like “disorder” and “therapy” wouldn’t have to be thrown about like the toys your son is hucking at the wall and you.  Then he throws him arms around you tell looks into your eyes with his full of love and you see the sweetheart again but the little twerp just REFUSES to behave….no, sorry, CAN’T behave because he has a disorder which may lead to a much bigger one if not “turned around and worked on diligently now”. 

And that makes you feel more tired than the eight months that he didn’t sleep for more than 45 fucking minutes at a time.  He is not called Dr. Pepper here for no reason.

Then as soon as you’ve finished a round of therapy for him, and everyone is talking about how much better he’s doing, and you’ve found a new daycare where his teachers love him and he loves them and you feel like you can take a deep breath? 

Your daughter ups her Jekyll and Hyde act that has been brewing for years, and becomes “socially delayed”.  This is the same daughter who you’ve always so proudly talked about (get real, you bragged about) being “so social!  Friendly to everyone!”  Now she can only hold a friendship long enough for the other child to discover that Fresca can be a bit dramatic.  Which is like saying a blazing forest fire can be a bit toasty.  And as she vacillates from a laughing sparkling beautiful little girl to a raging demon child to a sobbing pile of misery-and back again- you realize you simply don’t know what to do.  So you try to talk to her, you get her a therapist, and you hope that with time, and a little effort (but not too much, please, 'cause that would be HARD) she’ll be just fine.

Then her teacher asks to have a meeting with you, and says she feels that your daughter also may have a disorder.  An emotional one.  Because she seems literally unable to control her emotions, or understand how they affect other people.  Oh yay!  We already have one kid with a behavioral disorder, wouldn’t want to repeat that, now would we?  Let’s not be boring, so an EMOTIONAL one it is!

Add in the fact that you are getting divorced. 

Add in that the teacher has also told you that you are “too intense” and that she “can see where Fresca gets her way of speaking” and you KNOW that’s not a positive thing.

Add in two step-siblings for her.  Who, of course, come with a step-dad.

Add in that this is only 2% of the entire story.

And here’s the hard part (again).  Because you realized years ago that you aren’t the Amazing Parent you always thought you’d be.  In fact, you’re kind of mediocre. Occasionally, you suck.

No, I lied. The hard part is next.  It’s where you realize it doesn’t matter that you’re mediocre at best.  It doesn’t matter that you’re actually kind of lazy too.  Because  you’re the Mom.  And you might fail.  And you might fail again.  But you absolutely cannot quit.  And despite everyone who says not to worry, that they’ll grow up just fine, you KNOW that some people simply do NOT grow up just fine.  In fact, many, many people grow up damaged beyond repair.  Many, many people grow up always hurting and never happy and forever lonely.  And there is simply no guarantee that your children won’t.

The hardest part for me?  That I can’t just DO something, make it all better, and be done.  It’s a process that will take years.  I HATE processes that take years and come with no guarantee.  Especially ones I am in charge of.  Who decided I was capable of this?! 

It’s an old, old joke, but true- they make you get a license to drive, hunt, and catch a fish.  They make you wait until a certain age to do said driving, drink (not that that is well managed) and vote.  But any woman who is old enough to bleed can have a baby.  No tests involved before you cart that baby out of the hospital into the Wild Blue Yonder.  They do check to make sure you have installed the car seat correctly.  That, apparently, is the only necessary indication of your parenting abilities.  Yes?  You have properly clicked the seatbelt around this piece of plastic/metal/Styrofoam?  Excellent!  Here is a Living Breathing Being of your very own!  Try not to kill it.  Oh, and feed it only organic foods, teach it to be openminded and kindmakesureitknowsyouloveitalwaysmaketherightdecisionseverydayforthenexteighteenyearsBYENOW!

So here you go.  Bumbling along.  I wish you luck.  Send  some my way?

Yep, that’s it.  No proper ending here.  That’s the point.  That’s the hard part.

Oh, and by the way.  Do NOT read What to Expect When You’re Expecting.  That book will give you panic attacks about all the wrong things you are doing to your Precious New Embryo, things like eating entire GRAMS of sugar.  Trust me.  Just don’t.

Lemon Drop, M.D.  

Hip, Hip, Hooray!

The thrill you feel when you turn 16, 18, or even 21 are the last times in your life when aging seems remotely attractive.  As you watch years slide gracefully (or run pell-mell) by, you realize that aging sucks, actually, and there’s nothing you can do about it.  Being an adult is actually one of the universe’s cruel jokes, and you've been had.  

This realization becomes ever more intense as you watch your parents age.  “There”, you realize, “go I”.  It’s not the same as when you first noticed that you had your father’s eyes, or your mother’s laugh.  Not even when you realized your child had the same tendency to exaggerate that grandpa does, or started blaming things on skipped generation genetics.  No, now you find yourself sidling up to your parents and asking personal questions, like “Mom, when did you start going through The Change?” and “Do you dye your hair?”  Health histories are like Gospel.  “So, did Uncle George have the Cancer or a heart attack?  I just can’t recall.  Please tell me no one had either Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s.”  Fortunately, as folks age, the one they remember clearly is health history: theirs, all friend’s and relative’s, the neighbor’s, the checker at the market’s, pretty much anyone they talk with for more than five minutes.  They can not only recite it, they can argue about the details:  “No, no, I am telling you, Gertrude had the Rheumatiz before she got the Lumbago! It was Lila who had the brain tumor that almost killed her!”  “Silly, you have it all wrong!  Lila had the pneumonia!  Marge had the brain tumor and it DID kill her!” “Oh, that’s right.  Lila’s pneumonia went septic and she got soft in the head.”  “ Right, but it was Buck they had to stop feeding on account of the dementia.”  “That’s right.  That Hospice is a right scary place.”

At first, these conversations are just one more reason for your eyes to glaze over and make you wish you watching football.  Then you begin to realize that they are a window into the future; not only your parent’s, but your own.  And that some of the decisions they are discussing will someday fall on your narrow shoulders. 

My husband’s mother, Boone’s Farm, was raised to be a polite 50’s June Cleaver style Hostess and Model Wife.  She Found Herself in the 60’s, without even knowing she had been lost, as so many people did.  Unlike the masses, however, she decided she liked the decade so much, she might as well stay.  She remains there to this day. After divorcing Reposado’s father, she married Box Wine, her EST instructor, and a former smoke jumper; and together they joined the Peace Corps, spending a couple of years in Sierra Leone.  Upon their return to the States, they went back to nature, and built a log cabin in the boonies where they could celebrate their art, fabulously created from found objects.  They worked at meaningless jobs in the state prison system to pay the bills until retirement. 

Boone’s Farm has massive joint degeneration, and a strong determination to still do yoga.

She just had her first hip replaced.  You have to understand, that when you have never left the 60’s, the Man is never to be trusted.  The Man includes most of modern medicine.  Box Wine, for instance, declined the dopamine agonists that most Parkinson’s patients begin to take immediately upon diagnosis.  He had heard about this wonderful grapefruit therapy!  Acupuncture was said to work wonders. If you drink corn silk tea at the light of the full moon, while meditating with aqua crystals…. Well, you get the idea. 

 Boone’s Farm does take her blood pressure pills, though she has gone through every iteration of them imaginable, because, “they just don’t agree with her.”  Still, she hears what she wants to hear when she talks to the doctor.  If he says “it is possible to have both hips done within a reasonable time frame,” she hears “you can have the second hip done in two weeks.”    I went to all her pre op appointments with her.  Both Box Wine and I were concerned that if anything didn’t go well, she would have a difficult time, since they live, well, out there, and his Parkinson’s means that she would be on her own.  She usually helps him with movements.  Her insurance company refused to even discuss the idea of home health until “she could be evaluated post op.”  She “just had a good feeling about this surgery and knew that it was going to be okay”, so we were silly for wanting to make any plans.  Long conversations ensued about things like rolling up rugs. Yes, you do need to get a walker, and no, you can’t sleep on the couch; you have to get an actual bed that’s lower than your tall one if you can’t get into it. You need to be able to roll over and sit up.   This is why you have to take the entire dose of the Coumadin post op!  It’s great that you want to do all the post op exercises, please be sure to tell everyone in the hospital, even the Janitor that you will need home visits for PT, because we all know Box Wine can’t drive that far that many days a week…   Finally we made it through the list.

The big day arrived.  I couldn’t be there; I had to work.  Driving the 90 minutes south to the hospital of her choice just wasn’t possible.  So I waited for her call.  I didn’t get it for two days.  “Oh, well, I called your SIL, you know, and told her everything was okay.”  This is a passive aggressive shortcut for saying,” I really hurt, and I didn’t want to talk with you about it.”  By the time I spoke with her, she was feeling better, had hit her low point, and bounced, and was ready to go home from the hospital. 

 She told me about blessing the room with her Brussels Sprouts wand, and the floor where they learned how to walk again.  “Everyone was just running up and down with their walkers in their pajamas!  It was such fun!” (I’m sure it will be a theme party soon.) She described the skirt she took that she had found at Nifty Thrifty and how much better it was than the sweats she had been instructed to take.  She raved about all the wonderful people who were going to help her.  “It takes a village, you know!” 

 In the end, she did not have to go to a SNF. Someone from in-hospital PT taught her how to get onto her tall bed, so we did not have to face the dreaded living room bed situation.  She did need the Home Health Nurse.  A LOT, as someone came nearly every day for dressing changes and BP monitoring.  She got the Home Health PT.  She used the walker for almost a week.  She is still using a cane, and has not yet gone back to yoga, thank goodness, though she knows the doctor told her she could.  

Now she is soooo excited about getting her next hip done… and maybe her knee!  Me too, Boone’s Farm, me, too.

Dry Gin Martini, MD.  Anyone for a corpse reviver?