And when I have the time--when I'm don't have to be up at 3:30am, when I'm eating something besides Cheerios for dinner, when I'm done starting epi drips in my dreams...this is to say, when cardiac is over--I will tell this blog all about how I am in love.

Not just in like. But in love.

In love like whoa.

The wedding

My little brother got married. And by little, of course, I mean younger and not actually smaller. I say little because I still think of him this that way--as small but mighty. Timmy was born with four holes in his heart. For the first four years of his life, no one knew. Most kids with this kind of heart defect turn blue on occasion. Timmy never did. I think it just never occurred to him to be anything but pink.

He had open heart surgery when he was 5. He was supposed to spend the rest of the summer taking it easy. Telling a 5 year old boy to take it easy—it’s like telling a bird to take a walk.

A few weeks after his surgery, we were at the pool. He had an extra stripe of white sunscreen on the 10 inch bright pink scar on his chest. His chest was a bit of funny shape, as if he’d been opened down the middle like a clam and then wired back together. (He had.) He was constantly being reminded to take it easy.

It was a nice easy walk to the top of the high dive. My mom spotted him up there, peering over the edge, his white greasy scar shining in the sun, just before he flung himself forward and landed with a splat, chest first in 12 feet of water. She got to him before the lifeguard next to the board even heard the splash. As she dove to the bottom of the deep end, she will tell you, “I was sure those sternotomy wires were broken.”

She pulled a stunned, but intact boy, from the pool; and for a few hours that day, he took it easy. He’s been back at it, though, plowing through life—sternotomy wires first—ever since. Maturity has pruned him to be more brave than reckless. His energy has been channeled into a fierce work ethic. And his scar has been a huge hit with the girls.

When I told my now sister-in-law that she was the best thing that’s happened to him since we fixed his heart, I really meant it. She’s sweet, and kind, and funny, and she lets him be himself.

Their wedding weekend was fantastic. I took the Boy home with me. Everyone loved him. And not like, “Oh, he’s nice. Where did you two meet?” But more like, “Oh my God, where did you find him? He is SO HOT!” (Granted, I didn’t really expect that from my uncle.) The Boy has a super cool superhero job. Word of it spread quickly through the groomsmen, and they spent most of the weekend asking if they could see his license to kill.

I never had to worry that he was bored, or didn’t have anyone to talk to, or wasn’t having a good time. I threw this great guy into a my favorite group of people, got myself a drink, and floated through an amazing weekend back home.

At one point, after several drinks, he accepted my mother's invitation to accompany the family on vacation next summer. When she mentioned this to me a week later, I said, “Mom, it was nice of you to invite him, but he and I aren’t really making plans quite that far in advance yet. We’ve only been dating a few months.”

“Well,” she said, “if things work out between the two of you, you can come, too.”

Overkill

Tilex Soap Scum Remover now kills the flu virus. It says so right on the label. When I read that I thought, "Do I really need you to kill the flu? I mean, has anyone ever actually contracted this disease from her shower? Athelete's foot...maybe. But, the flu?"

Am I the only one who isn't even the slightest bit worried about catching a fever and chills from her grout?

Check

I had the day off yesterday and so made myself a to do list. In between clean shower and sweep backyard, I wrote, get a grip. I wrote it as if it were a task to be accomplished, a chore to be done. Then, I looked over my list, realized I wasn't actually in the mood to do any of that cleaning shit, and headed to the bookstore instead.

I bought Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird. I wasn't looking for a book about writing. I was looking for some Anne. Anne is the kind of woman who would understand why I wrote that list...and why I walked away from it. She wouldn't ask why I had to buy a book, a bag of chips, and some guacamole and spend the afternoon sitting on a bench, spilling avocado on my shirt, growing new freckles (or, as is more likely with my genes, basal cell carcinomas) in the afternoon sun.

As I did just that, I overhead two young 20-somethings discussing what their lives would be like when they were 30. These two had all sorts of grand plans. They were going to be established in their careers, well into their first marriages, having their oldest of three children...

Oddly enough, neither of them said, "When I am 30, I'm going to make elaborate to do lists. They will say things like, chill the fuck out, lighten up, and get over yourself. And then, I'm going to spend whole Saturdays sitting in the sun, spilling guacamole on a white tee shirt, and working towards going home to put a check mark next to get a grip."

Dive, I am still happy

Very happy. When he walks into the room, I still squeal on the inside. Every single time.

But, I'm trying not to squeeze this too tightly, resisting the urge to act like an 8 year old boy who just caught a frog.

I am acutely aware of the fact that sometimes (oftentimes...hell, more times than not) even good things don't last forever. While I'd love for this relationship to have the spirit of a lightning bug with the longevity of a tortoise, I hope I will have the grace and maturity to recount this as a good chapter, no matter its length.

Unfortunately, in my experience, when you really like someone, grace and maturity are the first things to go...

Yellow

So then I took my turn

Oh what a thing to have done

And it was all yellow

I'm seeing someone. I'm not sure where this is going. I approach every day with a healthy dose of cynicism and prayer. I realize that makes me sound bitter and desperate; but, in fact, it doesn't really feel that way.

It feels...all yellow.

In spite of all me...or maybe even because of it.

It's been so long since I've been here, spammers are now leaving more comments than readers. It's like the thuggish ruggish have taken over this abandoned lot to sell drugs--Cialis, in particular.

30

On the morning of my thirtieth birthday, I woke up next to a gorgeous man. Tonight, he's taking me out on the town. A black strapless dress with little white polka dots. (Perfect for twirling.) Black patent leather come fuck me heels. A red clutch. Pearls. And a teeny, tiny red lace thong.

Thirty doesn't stand a chance.

Don't Hassel the Hoff

There was a moment this Christmas when it sort of hit me: The woman who used to call herself my mother is no longer with us. The conservative, opinionated, christian with a capital CHRISTIAN children's minister has died. Or evaporated. Or retired. Or gone to live on a farm where there's plenty of room for her to run around and play with others of her kind. The point is, she's left us.

And I, for one, am glad.

This is not to say that she was intolerable before...or that she's particularly tolerable now. No, this is just say that when she yelled, "Oh shit, I can't think of any lesbians!" I thought, Some things have gotten better since I moved out ten years ago. And you're one of em.

We were playing a game brought to us by my sister-in-law, Kim. Group games are not really something we do. Mostly, because we are a deeply lazy people. We do not chase after or in any way aggressively pursue fun. We get together, we drink, and we laugh...mostly at ourselves. Games bespeak organization, rule following, and creativity. We do not. But, as I said, at our core, we are deeply lazy; and the only thing more arduous than playing a fucking game would have been trying to convince Kim not to play a fucking game.

It goes like this... Everyone writes down the name of seven people, dead or alive, not so obscure as to be unknown.

My brother explains, "So, like don't write down the Attorney General or someone like that who half of us aren't going to be able to figure out." My uncle crumples up a piece of paper with Eric Holder scrawled on it.

Teams of three are formed. Everyone looks at his or her team and says some variation of, "Seriously? I have to play with you two? Well, we're screwed now." Everyone is pretty much right.

During the first round, your team has one minute to guess as many names as they can. You can give as many clues as you like.

I start with, "He was the first Black president."
My brother guesses, "Obama."
"No, the one before Obama. Blacker than Obama."
"Oh, Bill Clinton."
"Yep."

It behooves you to remember who all is guessed in this first round, because during the second round, all the same non-Eric Holder people are going back into the bowl, you have one minute to guess as many as you can, but the person giving clues can only say one word.

My sister yells, "Monica."
My dad snaps back, "Slick Willy!"

And all this nonsense is just a long, drunken excuse to get to the third round. Here, all the names are recycled yet again, but the person giving clues has to act them out.

My uncle moonwalks. (Sorta.)
His teams yells, "Michael Jackson."

My sister pretends to be fat and stuck in a bathtub.
Her team is largely silent. When she's done, they ask, "What the hell was that?"
"Harry Truman," she says.
"You moron," my brother barks, "you just acted out William Howard Taft."
"Ohhh, I wondered why no one was getting it."

And then, we come to the piece de resistance of drunken charades. My brother's fiance, Erin, picks David Hasselhoff out of the bowl. She begins running in slow motion, pretending to hold a flotation device. The crowd goes wild. We (almost) all figure it out immediately. Her teammate, my mother, however, is completely befuddled. In spite of the fact that David Hasselhoff was named in rounds one and two, and the fact that she's now watching a reenactment of the opening credits to the greatest lifeguard drama to ever grace the small screen, my mom has no fucking idea what's going on.

Erin decides to kick it up a notch. She throws my sister-in-law, Kim, to the ground and begins to drag her limp body across the carpet, as if she's saving her from drowning. My mom starts to name famous wrestlers. And then dead people. Erin starts doing chest compressions. It looks just like CPR...to everyone but my mother. To my mother, it looks like Erin is fondling Kim's breasts. When she starts mouth to mouth resuscitation, Mom is convinced this is girl on girl sex. "Oh shit," she yells, "I can't think of any lesbians!" And with that, her minute is up. You've never seen someone so disappointed to lose a point in a game she didn't want to play in the first place.

As it turns out, gay sex reenactments in the middle of the living room floor on Jesus' birthday only bother her when she can't figure out who's on top.

"I worry that Jesus drinks himself to sleep when he hears me talk like this." - Anne Lamott

(Laugh. It's funny.)

Many a good woman has had to learn that she can't always have what she wants. Such is life. And when you're too sad and tired to be happy for those who do, it's time to peace out, girl scout.

When the night has been too lonely

and the road has been too long

and you think that love is only

for the lucky and the strong...

Go home.

Cardboard boxes

I know, I know. It's been awhile. In fact, this may be the longest I've ever been away. I'm not sure I can say why I've been gone so long, exactly.

I spent the last month in the pain management clinic. The hours were good, but those posts would have sounded like my old ones from medical school when I was on a rotation I really didn't enjoy and the writing was so caustic that anonymous commenters felt the need to tell me I probably shouldn't be a doctor. I always wondered if those same people asked the mommy bloggers who occasionally admit to a bad day, "Have you ever thought you should maybe just give away your kids?"

In my non-pain clinic hours, I've had a great six weeks. I'm a little overwhelmed with the prospect of summarizing it, though. Beyond a bulleted list of all that's happened, it's hard to catch up here.

My brother got engaged, and I went home to celebrate with the family. They were just drunk enough to let me pick up the tab. Only in Ohio can you buy four rounds of drinks for 20 people with a couple hundred bucks. Midwest pricing and a gay waiter who appreciated the fact that I (mostly) kept my drunk sister-in-law from flirting with him made for some very cheap liquor. Although, I'm pretty sure when she readjusted her bra, popped a potato skin in her mouth, and told him, "I still have some to go, but I've lost 50 pounds since I had a baby six weeks ago," he was thinking, "Until a second ago, I liked the fellas; but girl, you had me at I used to be fat."

There's another amusing story there about gift giving gone wrong and one of the weirdest things a middle aged man has ever yelled in a crowded bar. In order to truly appreciate it, though, I think you had to be there in the moment when the bride-to-be opened the world's tackiest engagement gift, and my dad, in all sincerity, yelled "Oh, I love it! I'm a sucker for a snow globe." Now we know what his Craigslist personal ad will say on the off chance he outlives my mother: I like long walks on the beach, single malt scotch, and sparkly, magical globes of snow.

A few weeks after the trip home, Blake, Evan, and I spent a weekend in New York. La Cage Aux Folles, drinks at the Algonquin, more drinks at Marie's Crisis, brunch (and a fair bit of time spent in the ladies room) at Lips... Hungover and staring down a plate of eggs Benedict, I almost threw up in a drag queen's hair. (In Evan's best South Georgia drawl: But girl, you know that weave so tragic, little vomit won't hurt it.)

We drove Evan's car this time. Comparing this to the Bolt Bus, the back seat passenger summed it up as follows: "You know what the best thing is about your car? No one has come back here to take a shit since we left." There really is something to be said for not riding around next to a bathroom. And I said it.

A week later, my dad celebrated a birthday. After a few hours on the phone and a few drinks each, we decided that from now on, for the purposes of filling out census forms and applying for scholarships, we would count ourselves among the last remaining Blajewskimos. That's right. From here on out, on all official paperwork and government documents, we are Black Jewish Eskimos. (Also official: Having written that, I can now never run for public office.)

It was during that same conversation, before the aforementioned ethnicity changing decision, that I said, "You know how you buy little kids expensive crap for Christmas, and all they ever want to play with is the damn box? Well, the older I get, the more I think that all of life is like that. I laughed the hardest last weekend while drinking and singing showtunes off key in a basement bar at 1am...and then again hungover, nauseated, and stuck in New Jersey traffic on the way home."

"Well kid," he said, "I think you're right. I think all of life is like that cardboard box." And he would know. For he is the wisest of all the Blajewskimos.

It's like riding a bike

I was having a particularly tough day at work. I communicated this to my father like I always do...by sending him a text message that referred to work but in no way mentioned the shittiness of the day.

Your Iron Girl is doing two kidney transplants today.

I started my first case. My attending was exactly as I was warned he would be--old, and slow, and wheezy, and mad at me because he has gout. The longer it took me to get the central line in, the worse his gout got. That's the pathophysiology of gout. Inept anesthesia residents, maybe even intentionally, cause terrible foot and ankle pain with their inability to cannulate the internal jugular vein in less than 10 seconds. Incompetent cruel bastards, the lot of us.

I was glad for the warning, but in the moment, it didn't really do much to help. It never does, does it? Someone tells you something is going to be painful...and then it is. The heads up removed the element of surprise, reassured me that it wasn't just me, that everyone exacerbates his gout. But, starting the case was still like swimming through wet cement. Reminding myself, "He's like this with everyone," didn't make the central line go in any faster.

But go in it did. Eventually. And he left the room. Finally.

I texted Blake to say, "This morning, I was worried my attending may not survive the day. Now I'm worried he might."

A few hours later, Wheezy came back to give me a break. Everything was settled by then, the patient tucked in, the charting all caught up. The Goutmaster sat down at the head of the bed, propped up a swollen appendage, and opened his email. I gave the patient a dose of this and that and vacated the premises.

I didn't realize until I stepped out of the OR just how shitty the morning had been. I had been doing the one foot in front of the other thing to get through the laundry list of tasks that have to be completed at the start of a case. I hadn't had time to really think about miserable it was. As I walked away from the room, I thought, "Given the chance, right now, I would walk to my car, go home, and not come back until tomorrow."

I turned to cut through the PACU on my way to my coffee cup. As I walked under the hand painted white and black sign that says, GENERAL RECOVERY ROOM--a sign hung back in a time when they actually used to call the recovery room, The Recovery Room--I found a text message from my dad.

They got the right gal on the job. Just be glad you're not your sister... She's working in the 'beyond' dept of Bed Bath & Beyond today...and who the hell knows what's beyond?

Seriously, if that were me lying there, I'd want you in the room!

Nothing anyone else would have said could have made me feel better than I did in that moment. I walked to my coffee cup feeling a thousand pounds lighter. The shit eating grin was stuck on my face for another two hours.

Later in the day, I texted my dad to say that Blake was returning to work after two weeks in London. He had received some rather unjust criticism prior to his departure and was not looking forward to coming back. My dad, the Union President, sent a little something for my friend.

It started with, This is great...he is facing down the beast early in his career...always best to meet that bastard (unjust criticism) while you're young and strong...

I forwarded it to Blake. He wrote back, Where do I pay my union dues?

The next day, I emailed Dad. To understand this email, you need to know two things:

First, it took me for-fucking-ever to learn how to ride a bike. My father used to run marathons. He didn't even have to train for the first one. After all the miles he spent jogging back and forth down the driveway holding me up on my two wheeler, he was a power bar and some Gatorade away from his first race. His eldest child was the biggest little chickenshit on legs. You've never met someone so afraid of falling.

Second, this is in sharp contrast to the way that he learned to ride a bike. When he was a little guy, the Weber boys put him on a two wheeler and pushed him towards Bailey Road during rush hour traffic. They yelled, Pedal! and Turn! In that moment, he realized that if failed to follow their instructions, he'd die. So, he pedaled and turned. And that's how he learned to ride a bike.

Dad,

Everything you said yesterday, both to me and to Blake, was freakin' perfect. The older I get, the more I wonder if shepherding us through adulthood might be even harder and more important than all of that stuff you do when kids are still in the house. And yes, I say that as one who took a full 17.5 years to learn to ride a bike. Every single day, I feel like one of the Weber boys is throwing me on a two wheeler and pushing me into traffic...with a patient strapped to my back. I'm still not sure how I'd pedal myself upright without you.

Love,

T

It's true. Every day does feel like that. But, there is this feeling when the lines go in like buttah, the intubation looks like I throw yard darts in my sleep, the patient and I soar through a big operation...when I Pedal! and Turn! and we avoid being crushed by that bus barreling down Bailey Road...and the job is even more fun than this girl thought it could be.

Why aren't you writing about your job?

Because no one really wants to know what happens while they're asleep.

That's why they asked me to put them to sleep. There are many surgeries for which they could probably be wide awake and numb from the (insert surgical site here) down. But, they'd really rather not be. As it turns out, ignorance is, in fact, bliss.

I'd really rather they be asleep, too. I still like to talk to people...before and after. But during, I prefer them in peaceful slumber. Trust me when I say, I'm awake enough for the both of us.

The friends

It occurred to me the other day that if you don't have any good friends, it may be my fault. I may have them all. I was talking to Graci at the time, telling her that I think of her every time the pathology resident comes to the OR to tell the surgeons that the tumor is not a tumor. Then, the surgeons tells her she's an idiot and to send in her attending. She rolls her eyes and walks away.

A few minutes later, a little, old Asian man comes in and says, "Is not a tuma. Is a chicken egg. Your patient chicken?"

And the surgeon says, "How the hell should I know? I didn't examine him. But I KNOW this a tumor."

And the pathologist says, "Listen, we put zee tuma stain on dis and we poke it wit a stick and it say, I am not a tuma. We put zee chicken egg stain on dis and we poke it wit a stick and it say, I AM A CHICKEN EGG!"

The surgeon retorts, "But radiology said it was a tumor."

"Padology better dan radiology. I say dis all zee time." Then, the little old man crosses his hands behind his back and walks away.

Replace the words chicken egg with cystic adenoma and that's a true story. If you're ever telling Graci a true story, you should replace the words cystic adenoma with chicken egg. She has no interest in the true pathology of a pathology tale but will laugh her fool ass off if you sprinkle in a little poultry.

This brings me back to my original point, which is that I have the very best of the friends. By best, in this case, I mean most easily entertained. It is never a struggle to make that girl laugh...and I love her for it.

Blake and Evan are in London right now. Rhee (their pup) and I are holding down the fort in their absence. We miss them terribly and, if we weren't such Iron Girls, would certainly sulk these two weeks away. But, we are, in fact, Iron Girls. And as such, we are making the best of it. We have found that cheese and napping help us keep up our strength in these trying times.

Last weekend, before the boys left, we all watched Fried Green Tomatoes. I start crying some time during the opening credits of this movie and stop some time two days later. Graci, Evan, and Blake are the only three people on the planet who can resist the urge to mock me for this. Although, to be honest, two of them don't really have any room to mock. Graci was the most impressive crier I'd ever known...until I met Evan.

As I learned earlier this same day as we watched Rick Steves' tour London, Evan is particularly moved by the Rosetta Stone. "I don't know what it is about this," he said, his voice cracking, his bottom lip all a quiver, "but it gets me every time." I looked over to find him taking off his glasses to wipe his eyes. I looked back at the screen to see if maybe I was missing something. Perhaps an innocent animal had been crushed under the stone, or a small child had just lost his mother in the mass of tourists?

But no, it was just the rock with those translated hieroglyphics. I started to ask him what it is about this that gets him, but, as he'd just said, he doesn't know. Crying at the Rosetta Stone is sort of like having a crush on Hillary Clinton. You can see how anyone might appreciate the brilliance...but you can't logically explain that depth of feeling. It just is what it is. (That said, if Evan ever confesses that he has the hots for Hillary, I'm going to have some follow up questions.)

All of that is to say, Blake resisted the urge to mock my crying all the way through Fried Green Tomatoes. The other two can't mock. Crying fools, the both of em.

When the movie ended, I wiped my eyes (for the 57th time) and slipped on my shoes to go. I don’t often leave late on a Saturday night. (The boys call the guest bedroom T's room for a reason.) But, we hadn’t had much at all to drink, and I had a few things to get done the next morning at home.

Fried Green Tomatoes made me miss Graci. It made the boys miss the South. As I stood to go, they began to reminisce. Evan started telling a story. "My older cousin used to try to scare me and my younger cousin. One time, he told us the woods behind the house were full of Indians who would scalp us..."

I sat back down to hear the rest of this. Evan tells a tale beautifully. He whispers the quiet parts and sprinkles in pitch perfect dialogue. His boyhood stories are like Stand By Me...with just a touch of flair. And no one can end a story quite like he can.

In this one, he and his younger cousin ventured into the scalping jungle and crept around a small shack. "Are there Indians in there?" Evan's cousin asked. (Blake and I were on the edge of our seats.)

"I don't know," Evan said, wide eyed and dead serious..."but if there are, they drive a Monte Carlo."

We laughed like idiots.

Blake's childhood stories are more like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. As he tells them, part of me wants to snort laugh. The other part wants to hold him and stroke his hair and assure him that in spite of all that, just in case he forgot, he grew into a (mostly) normal and very good man who moved far away from the nut jobs and only has to see them on holidays.

Speaking of which, we then somehow got onto the subject of our most recent Thanksgiving. Blake's mom and brother came to visit. I spent the whole weekend asking Evan, "Who are these people, and where did your boyfriend come from?"

"This year was nothing," Blake said. "You should have been there when my grandma tried to shoot my mom." He then launched into a story about the year his mother and his paranoid delusional Alzheimer's afflicted grandmother wrestled over a loaded handgun on Thanksgiving morning. (So much for watching the parade.)

"My mom yelled at me to go for help," Blake said. "I still remember hurting my bare feet as I ran across my grandma's gravel driveway to get to the neighbors'."

This is where he got me. I used to spend summer months playing outside barefoot. I remember the stinging in my feet as I ran across gravel drives in summer's early warm days, before my heels had a chance to grow calloused and tough. I swallowed hard as I pictured the boy from Blake's childhood photos running barefoot and scared.

As with all of his childhood stories, though, this didn't end with the tragic and scary. It ended with the utterly ridiculous.

The police came, disarmed Grandma, and tied her ass to a chair. And then they left. As if that's what you do with crazy old people. Tie 'em to the furniture. Problem solved.

Blake's mom found a psych unit to take his grandma for a few days. But then, they had to get her there. They carried her out of the house, chair and all, turned it and her on its side - it was the only way it would fit - and loaded her into the back seat of the car. She road to the psych ward that way.

Picturing this, I laughed so hard I pulled an abdominal muscle. Exhausted from all that laughing, I kicked off my shoes and headed down the hall to my room.

The best of the best friends. An embarrassment of riches, to be sure. I assure you I am sufficiently humiliated...but I'm not letting them go anytime soon.

And I'm not beyond tying them to the furniture to keep them.