today i'm grateful for

the loneliness that subsides when words of similar longing make life a little more bearable after all...

"and you can't ask for much more than that, can you sir?" i softly asked as i gently pulled a mask over his face. turned the flow to 8 instead of 10 liters to draw out his treatment - he was a bit short of breath. then i smoothed the wisps of hair from his 87 yr old forehead and massaged the creases between his anxious brows.

"my dear, you have warmed the cockles of my heart... do you know what this means?" he was already beginning to drift off.

we talked about human nature and what made his life so rich. he is ready to die...

i always have mixed feelings when i make them cry... even if it is with a smile.

next door was the man who told me the hilarious joke about the two blonds that walked into a building and the married couple from tennesee who divorced in california...

and around the corner from them was sweet miss frail.

"can i tell you? how happy i am that you found me? because i was lost. out there..." she said with glazed eyes. "and now you have found me." for whom i got yelled at by a doctor for insisting that she get respiratory treatments for her severe stridor. a cardiologist who was more concerned about her heart problems than her pulmonary problems. he barks at me to find her chart because he wrote orders for resp treatment and why haven't i given them yet? turns out he didn't write them, and her chart was at his desk, and when the nurse finally uncovers it because it was nowhere else, lo and behold! there's an order that he wrote AFTER i freakin told him to write one and he blew me off saying he already did. dickhead. i should've kicked the leg of his chair when he was dozing off at his desk in the nurses station. yeah. that would've felt great. she suffered through the night and i should've done more. ugh.

my charge chuckled when i told him i'm gonna to lose my job over fighting with a doc one of these days...

stitch mumbled, "oh my gosh, we are so alike..." and told me about a time when he refused to suction a patient who didn't need it...

i wonder if he went into the med room and stuck his tongue out at the doc and flipped him off too...

listening to: "i'd die without you" artist: P.M. Dawn, The Bliss Album
it makes me happy sad, which is so fitting this week...