Over the river and through the woods.....

For many years, Thanksgiving was our holiday to travel.  After my in-laws moved in 1973, we started driving from Maryland and then Virginia to western Pennsylvania to spend Thanksgiving with my husband's family.  After Thanksgiving, he would often stay for deer season and I would go home with the kid(s).  We had many exciting adventures on these trips.  One year, there was a big snowstorm and power was out for days.  We were staying at the old brick house owned by Richard's grandparents.  The house was built in 1810 and has walls three bricks thick.  Grandma had a gas stove and she would turn it on, open the door and hang a heavy blanket in the doorway to keep the heat in the living area.  We would play cards until it got too dark - usually around 4:30 - and then go to bed and huddle under the blankets.  This was in the 70's and up to this point, I had no idea that electricity was needed to get gasoline.  Except at Andy Morgan's on Water Street in Smithfield where you could get gas at his hand operated pump if he liked you well enough.  Fortunately, the power was back on in three days and we had warmth and lights again.  One year, my sister-in-law and I drove to snowy, hilly Preston County, WV to bail two fellows (who shall go unnamed) out of jail.  More than once, the family drove up the east coast to Massachusetts.   The traffic was always horrible and one year, in New York, construction workers were tying up traffic on the busiest travel day of the year.  What were they thinking?
Now we live in western Pennsylvania.  My husband's parents are both dead, we see his siblings every week and that leaves just the two of us for Thanksgiving dinner.  Our two children have legitimate reasons for not traveling to see us at Thanksgiving.  Sometimes we travel to Michigan since two of the grandchildren have a birthday near Thanksgiving.  The tradition has changed or maybe just wiped out completely.  No more over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house.  I miss those trips in the 70's and 80's even though the trip was sometimes quite frightful.

My new JetPack

I have had some questionable ideas this year.  One of them was to get rid of Verizon for my home phone and DSL Internet service.  I couldn't get my husband to stop promising sums of money to unheard of "charitable" organizations.  I got home from a three week trip to the west coast and found a pile of pledges waiting for me to write a check and I decided enough was enough.  Apparently paying extra for having an unpublished and unlisted number is an exercise in futility.  So I went to Verizon Wireless and got two new devices - one to connect my computer, iPad, printer and phone to the internet.  The other device gives me wireless phone service for the new cordless phones I bought. And now I sit in the lobby of the hospital at which I used to work, using their free wifi to write this blog.  Why you ask?  Because even though I have upped my GB allowance twice in less than 3 weeks, I am perilously close to going over my limit and I have a week left in the billing cycle.  I never thought I was on the computer THAT much but I guess I have been wasting more time than I thought.  Maybe I should do more cooking and cleaning and reading.  I am hoping, though, that the first month of the new service was just a fluke.  I love the new phone system.  I think I have gotten maybe 2 phone calls.  I love that I can take my internet with me in the car or on vacation.  What I don't love is that there is no unlimited internet when you go wireless.  Just gigabytes that cost money the more you use.  So look for me at Panera Bread or the lobby of Uniontown Hospital playing Bejeweled Blitz or blogging.

The Scenic Route AKA the shortcut

Almost everyone I know hates driving on interstate highways, particularly I-95.  There is always someone who has a shorter way or a better way to get you where you want to go.  Now, I seem to have inherited the "make sure you have a good map" gene from my father but not the "let's take the scenic route" or  the "I know a good shortcut route" gene that is possessed by so many people to whom I am related.  Sometimes the scenic route is indeed scenic and sometimes it is even shorter, although this does not always translate into faster.  I will admit that not everyone wants to get to their destination in the fastest possible time.  Recently, while contemplating traveling from point A in SC to point B in NC, my brother suggested a route that would be much shorter than the Map Quest suggested route of taking I-26 to I-95.  I would take 17A north to 701 and after that, things were a little murky.  But I would eventually reach my destination.  For all of you folks who scorn interstates, let me just list some of the things you will not see on the interstate.  You will not find yourself behind a school bus that is stopping every hundred yards to let off another kid.  You will not get stuck behind some large piece of farm equipment that is being moved from one field to another, taking up 1 1/2 lanes of the 2 lane road in the process.  You will not see a dog meandering down the center of the road - at least not for long.  You will not be making a sudden right turn into the Dairy Queen you spotted while sitting at the red light.  You will not find yourself forced into turning left when suddenly your lane won't take you straight.  You will not have to slow down to 25 MPH in a podunk little town where the local cop would just as soon give you a ticket for "speeding" through his burgh at 35 as look at you.  The "shortcut" I took shaved 15 miles off my trip but added an hour to the travel time.  Sometimes you just want to get there.

Good-bye, Miss Farr

I recently learned of the death of one of my nursing instructors from Johns Hopkins Hospital School of Nursing.  Her name was Mary Farr,  "Miss Farr" to students.

 Mary Farr was the prime example of what a Hopkins nurse should be.  She herself graduated from Hopkins in 1941 and went to war with the Hopkins nursing contingent.  She taught nursing at Hopkins from 1951-1969. She was proper, professional, intelligent and always perfectly groomed.  She expected the best of her students - no, demanded the best from us.   She left no stoned unturned in the care of patients; her value system embraced excellence, integrity, compassion, thoroughness and dogged determination to "get it right" on behalf of patients and colleagues.  She knew everything there was to know about medical nursing.  She knew all the diseases, all the medications and their side effects.  She would grill her students endlessly about the care of the patients that had been assigned to the students.  She reduced me to tears on more than one occasion.  The first time was after she had subjected me to a great many questions about my patient, his diagnoses, his medications, nursing care indicated.  After she was done with me (and she kept up the questions until you got one wrong) and I had walked off, she followed me and said something to the effect that "I should remember that you are only 18 years old".  At which point I burst into tears.  I don't remember what triggered the other cry, but it came during a one- on -one session with her, maybe an evaluation.   We learned from her, the doctors learned from her.  She made an impact on everyone who knew her.   She could be formidable (something she didn't remember in her later years ), but I certainly learned a great deal from her.

Aging in Place

I worked for many years in long-term care.  I know that a big reason that many seniors have to leave their homes after a fall or an illness is the stairs.  After all, Grandma or Dad is already old and how much longer are they going to be around.  Why go to the expense of putting in a first floor bathroom and turning the dining room into a bedroom?  Let's look at nursing homes.  So slightly more than 10 years ago, my husband and I bought our current house.  Everything I could possibly need is on one level, and that includes the washer and dryer.  We actually bought the house for the view but the one-level living has been a big plus.  The only things in the basement are the hot water heater, the furnace, some old paint cans and the electrical panel.  I could go for a very long time and never need to go down or up those stairs.  What I didn't take into consideration, though, is the property on which this house sits.  When this house was originally built, it sat on 25 acres.  A previous owner sold off 20+ acres, leaving us with a little more than 4.  Four acres of grass and trees and bushes.  We now own a riding mower, a push mower, a garden cart that attaches to the riding mower, a cart that is pushed by a person, a leaf blower, a chain saw, two hedge trimmers, an edger, various pruning instruments and a newly acquired snow blower.  And let's not forget the rakes and the shovels.  Still, I am not sure it is enough.  There are bushes to be pruned, leaves to be raked and dead trees to be cut down.  There are limbs and branches all over the yard after every winter.  Right now there is a pile of brush, downed limbs and such, from Superstorm Sandy, just waiting to be burned.

And this is just the stuff that has been piled up.  There is plenty more still waiting to be picked up and carried or hauled to the pile.  There are millions of leaves still on the ground.  My advice?  Once you get to that age of retirement, you might want to look at condos- without stairs, of course.

Old age is not for sissies

For years, I have suffered some general GI disturbances.  I don't want to go into too much detail here about all of that.  But I did decide I must have a gluten sensitivity.  From time to time, and not for long, I try to avoid gluten.  Sometimes it seems to help but I never stay off the gluten long enough to be sure.  So recently, when I was having a routine colonoscopy, I mentioned to the doctor that I thought I had a gluten sensitivity and I gave her my reasons for thinking that.  So I got a couple of biopsies, lots of new blood work and I had to drop off a stool sample.  Yuck!  She told me that I had a moderately inflamed small intestine and it looked like I might be deficient in B12 and folate.  How could this be?  I take vitamins every day.  She suggested a form of colitis, perhaps Crohn's disease.  Do I look like someone who is losing weight?  Well, it turns out that the specimen revealed an infection - C. Diff to be exact.  This is a disease of old people who live in nursing homes or have been in the hospital on antibiotics.  I may be old but I haven't been in a nursing home in more than a decade, I haven't been on any antibiotics and I retired from working at the hospital 18 months ago.   Tomorrow I pick up my 10 day prescription of Flagyl.  We will see how or if that helps and take it from there.  There may be more going on than just C. Diff.