Small World...Biblical Hebrew Joke

So we were having dinner with friends. Among the guests were a female pastor and an American missionary from Congo, where PH grew up. He, of course, can speak French and Lingala, the trade language of the region, and could converse with the female pastor, who spoke some English but was more comfortable in Lingala and French. I could understand most of the French, but my spoken French is pretty rusty. She found out I had studied Hebrew in seminary, and said (in Lingala) that she had studied Hebrew in seminary in Kinshasa, but couldn't say she was really good at it. She then looked across the table, this delightful woman whom I had barely understood up until that point, stared me in the eyes, and said...

"Dagesh Forte!"

At the risk of making a funny moment unfunny by explaining it, this is a doubling of a Hebrew letter to make it stronger. In English-speaking Hebrew classes, we call it strong dagesh. She told me it was the only thing she remembered from her Hebrew studies.

We both burst out laughing hysterically, the only ones (besides PH) who got it.

Never thought I'd be referencing Biblical Hebrew with a Francophone Congolese woman pastor in our Nation's Capital.

It is a small world, indeed.

A Few Pictures...

Moi and StrongOpinions at her place.

At 12,000 feet. Note I'm looking at the camera, not the view. That's a little too high up for me.

Home Again

We're back home. The last leg of our flight was delayed, so we ended up not getting home until 1 am or something. It was good to be home with the cats and our own bed.

It was a great trip. We spent a few days with StrongOpinions, saw the house she's sharing with roommates, got her some cooking tools as a housewarming present, and wandered around Boulder. Got to visit with a seminary classmate who's curate of a church out there as well - so much fun to see him and hear of his experiences. On Monday we drove up to the Rocky Mountain National Park and went through the park, including a stop just before crossing the Continental Divide at the Alpine Visitor's Center, above 12,000 feet. I didn't have altitude sickness, but for someone who has a fear of heights, some of the views were a little hard for me to take. No matter. I just closed my eyes for the hard parts.

We also got to spend some time with PH's aunt and uncle and cousins, the Ds. Such delightful people! Among these folks are the ones who helped StrongOpinions and me when she was hospitalized out there with suspected bacterial meningitis in May (my mother's day celebration). Good to see them in less stressful circumstances.

It was good to be away - it took me a day and a half to stop talking about CPE stuff and start talking about the coming semester in seminary!

Yes there are pictures, and I will post them soon, but right now I've got to plan my next trip, to go up to New England over Labor Day and see my new grandson.

Done

CPE is over - we graduated today. I had a final go-round with the prickly person in our group in our last IPR, and, mirabile dictu, the supervisor told her she was transferring her unresolved stuff on me. This was something I had been trying to get her to for several weeks, and the supervisor had just stepped back to see if she would get it, and if I could lay it out clearly enough, and finally she realized that the prickly one wouldn't listen to it from me. It is a relief to have been backed up.

I got a chance to say goodbye to staff and patients that I had developed relationships with.

My neck feels way too light, without my ID and pager, though. This being done will take some getting used to. Eleven very difficult and wonderful weeks of my life. Three baptisms, five deaths, two commendations, a funeral, innumerable Kleenexes (for me and for parents), deep conversations with nurses, witnessing open heart surgery, developing working relationships with so many new people.

We leave early tomorrow to go out to see StrongOpinions and PH's relatives in MileHigh City. Tonight PH is taking me out for a belated fancy birthday-end of CPE dinner. I couldn't have survived this without him, bless him.

Champagne, anyone?

One Day to Go

We survived final evaluations. The prickly person was predictably prickly and somewhat condescending to me. Everyone else was supportive, complimentary and kind. We also did an exit interview with a team of senior people, mostly about what could be done to improve the program.

I spent time with the AIDS patient and also visited the CICU, and the babies there. I feel like I've done a good job of saying goodbye. I've been touched by the warm thanks from patients and staff alike.

Tomorrow feels anticlimactic, with one more IPR, a play session, lunch, and "graduation".

Tomorrow I'll go around and say goodbye to a few folks I didn't see today, but I'll be glad to turn in the pager and the keys and the magnetic ID.

I'm so done.

A Full Heart

...and my 15 year old AIDS patient has taken a turn for the worse and is categorized as end-stage. I feel like I'm abandoning her, ending CPE right now. Another difficult learning.

The chocolate cake was good, though.

RIP, M

My dear friend M died early this morning. She had pancreatic cancer; it had only been diagnosed a few months ago. She was 57.

She taught me many things:

• it is alright to question authority
• passion is a gift, not a dysfunction
• family matters
• the phos is hilaron.

She was a stalwart of our icon-writing class, and was the person who got me started on this wonderful spiritual practice. She also was the personification of hospitality. We had many wonderful dinners with her and her husband. She was my spine at a time when I needed it.

I will miss her deeply. I suspect that as I write this, she is asking Saint Paul, "So what did you really mean about women not speaking in church?"

Rest lightly in the arms of the Lord, M, you deserve the rest. Have a glass of Chateuneuf du Pape for me.

Random Dots of CPE: Three Days Left

• I did my final verbatim today. Not bad, not good, just glad it got done.
• Baking a chocolate cake for the IPR tomorrow - maybe it will sweeten us all up a bit. It's a birthday cake to myself that everyone else gets the benefit of.
• Tomorrow will be the last formal day of clinical visitations, plus a reading seminar and IPR. I will miss a couple of patients that I've worked with for almost the whole time I've been here.
• I do have a new patient who is an infant who is missing the bones in her thumb. A strange sensation, holding the hand of a baby whose thumb just sort of flops every which way. Sadly, the thumb problem is probably indicative of a genetic syndrome that may mean more problems than the heart defect we are looking at. Cute baby - tough outcome most likely.
• Thursday will be final evaluations and the exit interviews with the committee, with Friday IPR and graduation, followed by a lunch. Our IPRs have been something of a bust, compared to the fireworks in other friends' IPRs. We have only had a few major blow-ups, only a couple of tense moments. This group just didn't seem to have it in them to fight much. There was one person with whom I didn't get along, but we came to a rapprochement of sorts. Not stuffing things down, just dealing with each other's differences reasonably respectfully. I'm not really sure that it was necessary for our group to have that kind of intense disagreement - or maybe the supervisor chose us as people who probably wouldn't fight much. Hard to say.
• I'm tired. I've got all this CPE stuff wrapping up, a son in the hospital recovering from an appendectomy, a dear friend with end-stage pancreatic cancer, and not enough time to process it all. Meh. At least the chocolate cake will be good.

Prayers, please...

...for Litigator, who had an emergency appendectomy this morning. I was ever so tempted to hop on a plane to go to City of Angels and be with him, but he is 23 and wants to prove that he is an ADULT, don'tcha know, so he doesn't want 'rents around. He will be coming home from the hospital tomorrow, and it just so happens that Stepson #1 will be in LA tomorrow on business, and will just so happen to check on him.

Not that we're being overly parental or anything...

Sometimes this empty nest thing is a challenge.

Oy.

New Toy

My birthday present from PH was an IPod. I am happily downloading some of my favorite podcasts and CDs. Hopefully, I won't break it within the first week of use. I'm also looking forward to using it for audiobooks. Bliss!

Random Dots of Saturday

• Tomorrow is my birthday. I will have to adjust to the idea of telling people I'm 55. In honor of the day, I went to the nail salon and got a manicure, pedicure, and brow wax. I feel very soigne.

• I ran a number of errands, including the weekly weigh-in (down 1.6 pounds) and the farmer's market (tomatoes! zucchini! peaches! ginger gold apples - the first of the season! homemade ravioli!). Our farmer's market is the oldest continuously running farmer's market in the nation. It has not only food items of every variety, but also flowers and some beautiful crafts. I've learned to manage how much I actually buy there, but it is all a temptation. I also hit the library and the regular supermarket.

• I also went to hospice to visit my dear friend M who is dying of pancreatic cancer. I suspect she will only be with us for a few more days. She whispered for us to leave so she could take a nap - there were four of us in her room - then gestured for me to come closer so she could say something to me, since her voice is down to a mere whisper. She said, "Talk to S. (another friend who was in the room with us who has undergone some difficult surgeries this year). I'm worried about her." This is so emblematic of this wonderful friend, who always put the needs of others ahead of her own. Her dying at 57 seems particularly unfair.

• PH and I are going to dinner at an Ethiopian Restaurant tonight with my CPE group and their significant others. Will we actually be able to talk about things other than the hospital and CPE?

• Spooky the cat has decided she will help me with my typing, so I think I'll end here before she types something untoward. She can be so rude!

Are We There Yet?

Six more days of CPE. The last two days are final evaluation and graduation and stuff like that, so there are really only four more days of clinical work. Remarkably, we have an IPR (group work) scheduled for the final day. I'm ready for it to be over. I got my last verbatim written and have pretty much finished my self-evaluation (it came in at a modest 12 pages); I may polish the final eval a little bit more over the next couple of days, but if I so chose, I could say it is done right now.

We all seem just whupped right now. Even the supervisor seems to have checked out. The string of ungodly hot days hasn't helped matters.

I've learned a lot through this experience, as I had expected, but now I need some space to process it all.

I still think I want to do some on-call work in the fall, but I need a month away from this kind of work. I need a couple of weeks of knitting and reading trashy mystery novels and cleaning the house (or not). I need some time away from dying babies and crying parents. I need silliness. I need chocolate.

Hot, Hot, Hot

Heat index of 105 degrees today. I stood on the Metro platform this evening waiting for the train to come for 15 minutes, instead of the usual 3 to 5, because of train delays. Heat does not agree with our Metro system, and it also doesn't agree those of us with MS. Then I got a call from Litigator, saying I needed to get the paperwork in to be a guarantor on his new apartment, like, IMMEDIATELY. The management company, of course, wanted pay stubs, tax return, bank statement, my most recent bloodwork results, genealogy...

Suffice to say, it wasn't fun. And since I can only get my pay stubs online, on the corporate computer that runs slower than molasses, it was stressful. It got done, though, so my kid won't be living on somebody else's couch. All this freakin' running around getting paperwork done meant I missed going to Wednesday Evening Eucharist at the seminary. Drag.

On the other hand, I didn't cry in IPR today, and there are only 7 more days of CPE. I got my last verbatim written, and did a draft of my final evaluation. Once I polish that, I'm just riding it out until a week from Friday, assuming my patients stay alive until then.

Yeah. Wah, wah, wah. I'll shut up now. PH is grilling burgers outside, and the rest of dinner awaits, so life is actually pretty darned good.

A Hot Day

I did the funeral in the funeral home today. The deceased was a 10 week old girl whom I had known on the CICU. It went reasonably smoothly; even the ten year old cousin who was to sing did a good job. Got a lot of positive comments from the family who really appreciated my homily.

Then we caravanned over to the cemetery for the interment. My prayers were short, about seven minutes, but the family decided to wait to watch the baby's casket be lowered into the grave, then put roses on it. Took a long time. It was 98 degrees out. I had on a black knit dress. I thought I was going to pass out with the heat.

It was a long day, but I think I did a good job and it was a comfort to the family.

So what's a little heat?

Sunday Morning

On Sundays I get up early to take my anti-osteoporosis medicine. Yet another joy of middle age, dang it. Between that (which has to be taken 30 minutes before anything at all) and the regular morning meds (which have to be taken an hour before eating), I usually get up at 5:30. The coffee maker starts up at 6:50 and I bring coffee upstairs to PH at 7 am for some quiet conversation on Sundays - our little peaceful time together before the day begins.

All that will change next month when I begin Field Ed, since it takes a good hour to drive out to my Field Site church. Fortunately, I won't have to be out there until 9 am - only one service on Sunday - so my wake-up schedule won't change. Just the quiet coffee time will go away. Sad about that - it was one of my favorite times in the week.

We'll have to figure out another time for that.

Two more weeks of CPE, then we're going out to the FlatIron Range to visit Strong Opinions at her new place for a few days, and see some of PH's relatives in MileHigh City.

I. Cannot. Wait.

Random Dots of CPE: Ten Days Left

• So why am I the only person in our groups who cries in IPR? Am I in touch with my inner wuss, or out of control, or just more aware of the challenges that we're facing? Feels pretty uncomfortable.
• I am doing a memorial service in a funeral parlor on Monday, for one of the babies who died on CICU. Doing any kind of service like this, apart from liturgics practica, is a new thing. These folks aren't Episcopalian, just nondenominationally Christian, without an affiliation to a church. It doesn't feel like the sort of family that would be comfortable with a full-blown Episcopalian service, so I'm going to cobble something together from our tradition and PH's Covenant Book of Common Worship, which isn't quite so fussy. Some prayers, some Scripture, a few words about the baby, who was a beautiful little two-month old with light brown super-curly hair, a song from a cousin. Plus prayers at the graveside for the interment. Learnings abound.
• A friend from seminary and I ran into each other today, after PH and I came back from the Farmer's Market. He said, "You've got that exhausted from CPE look. You need some rest." No kidding, pal...
• I'm looking so forward to this being over, ecause I AM tired. And yet I worry about the patients and feeling like I'm abandoning them. Ah, well, I think they and I will both get over it. Yet another thing to cry over in IPR.

Okay troops, here's your question of the day, one that our group has chewed on for lo these many weeks: do you believe in miracles? Not just the "gee, isn't that a beautiful sunset?" kind of miracle, but God reaching down and fully and miraculously healing someone who has something awful? If you do, how do you think God chooses who gets a miracle and who doesn't?

Sermon for Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Luke 23:50-56
Now there was a good and righteous man named Joseph, who, though a member of the council, had not agreed to their plan and action. He came from the Jewish town of Arimathea, and he was waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God. This man went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Then he took it down, wrapped it in a linen cloth, and laid it in a rock-hewn tomb where no one had ever been laid. It was the day of Preparation, and the sabbath was beginning. The women who had come with him from Galilee followed, and they saw the tomb and how his body was laid. Then they returned, and prepared spices and ointments.
On the sabbath they rested according to the commandment.


I’ve been doing CPE this summer, at Children’s Hospital in Washington. I spend much of my time in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit, where tiny babies, some only days old, undergo open-heart surgery to repair congenital defects. It is a place of great hope, and sometimes great sadness.

One of our sickest babies died recently. Cassie was born with many medical problems, and in her ten months of life underwent a number of surgeries. She finally could hold on no longer. In the last few weeks of Cassie’s life, her mother often said to me, “I just want to hold her in my arms.” There were so many tubes and wires connected to that tiny body that it was impossible in those many weeks for her to be lifted off the bed and into her mother’s embrace. So at the end, the nurses undid most of the wires and tubes, and let her lay in her mother's arms. In death, finally, Cassie’s mother got her wish. The parents sat quietly with her for a long time, and after the last few pieces of equipment were unhooked, they bathed her and dressed her and continued to hold her in their arms.

This is a ritual that often happens in this unit when a baby dies - and babies do die here frequently because we do the most radical of surgeries, the true last-ditch efforts. The parents stay with the baby, bathe their child, and spend time quietly holding their little one. They are waiting. Waiting before they let go.

I wonder about these rituals of washing and waiting. Our Scripture reading this evening speaks of them after Jesus' death on the cross. Joseph of Arimathea collects Jesus' body, lays it in the tomb, and the women come to prepare the materials to wash and anoint the body. It sounds remarkably like the scene I described in the hospital. These actions are in sharp contrast to the responses of others to what has happened to Jesus on the cross. Luke Timothy Johnson highlights these different responses in analyzing this passage and the one that immediately precedes it: at Christ’s death, the centurion reacts by identifying Jesus as an innocent man. The people watching the crucifixion, presumably originally as a form of entertainment, turn away and head for home, beating their breasts in an act of contrition. Jesus’ followers watch, frightened, from a distance. These are expressions, in a way, of the mind: seeing, speaking, regretting, grieving. But Joseph and the women respond with expressions of the body, by doing something active: securing Christ’s body and beginning the ritual preparations for His burial. They are doing something concrete and tactile. Why the different response? Why the washing and waiting, in the hospital or in Joseph’s newly hewn tomb?

I believe that some of it is to lend tactile truth to the death. When you have touched a dead person, child or adult, before the body even goes cold, you know they are dead. You can feel there is no life in them. Some of it, too, is an honoring of the person by washing them, anointing them, preparing them to step away from this world and into the next. It is the last gentle act of love you can do.

There is another element to this kind of ritual. In our shock and grief, sometimes we can only do the housekeeping tasks to keep going. I remember when my mother had her first heart attack. I was fifteen years old. It was a bad heart attack; she was not expected to live. I went home from the hospital that afternoon in a fog of confusion. What was I to do? So I washed windows and cleaned the floors. It seemed a needful thing to do at the time. All I could manage was something tactile, something finite, something that I could control in a time of no control.

So, too, at the moment of death, we wait with the one who has died in a liminal space between the stilling of the heart and the uplifting of the soul to God. We hold them in this sacred moment, not just in our hearts, but in our hands. Before we can rest on the Sabbath, according to the commandment, we must do this work of our hands.

This ritual of washing and waiting is very old. Jewish scholar Ruth Langer describes it thus: “From the point that a person dies, not only the immediate family, but also the community collectively, has a responsibility to ensure that that person is buried properly, showing the greatest respect to the body which had housed life. In most communities today (and this has been true for many centuries), this is the task of a special voluntary burial society, the hevra kaddisha (holy society). Although today they usually perform their tasks at a funeral home, the rituals were designed to take place in the home of the deceased. [W]ith maximum concern for the deceased’s modesty, they first wash the body, and then ritually purify it by pouring over it quantities of water, dress it in white shrouds (and prayer shawl for a man), place it in a plain wooden coffin (if any coffin is used) and close the coffin. During the entire tahara (purification), the only words spoken are a few brief prayers and appropriate biblical verses. This relative silence developed from a sense that the deceased’s soul has not yet left the body entirely and can hear — and be grieved — by words spoken in its presence. The family and community also supply shomerim, watchers, who sit with the body from the time of death until the funeral begins, quietly reciting Psalms — maintaining a focused silence.”

They are waiting.

In this description of the rituals, we can see the details behind the very brief picture Luke sketches out in the Gospel. Joseph and the women were in that liminal space. They had no idea of the glory of the Resurrection to come. They were deeply grieving, only knowing they had lost their dear teacher in a horrific way. The only comfort they had was to use their hands to do the housekeeping tasks: to follow the traditions, the ritual, and wash Him and anoint Him and lay Him in the tomb. The only gift they could give Him was the work of their hands: to wash Him and anoint Him and lay Him in the tomb. They could not know yet of the rolling back of the stone, of the light of a new morning of the risen Christ.

I used to think that rituals like wakes were barbaric. I grew up in an Irish Catholic family, and the wakes were something out of James Joyce. I can still smell the cigars in the smokers’ parlor, and the Bushmill’s and the beer on the breath of the men. I can’t count the number of times I heard someone say at the side of the casket, "Doesn't she look good? Didn’t they do a great job on her?" Spending time sitting with a body? Having the dead person made up and dressed up and laid out for all to see? Awful!

And yet…and yet…

Now I start to see the wisdom of ritual to lend reality to what has happened, although the making up of dead bodies still seems wrong to me. I wonder if we can visualize a going up to heaven without the rituals that bid the person, or at least the person's mortal body, farewell. In our grief, we cannot yet see the rolling back of the stone.

These rituals, in that liminal place, shut the door of the past, of the living of this person who has died, and open another door to the glorious place where all pain is gone, all suffering, all limitations end, and new life begins. It allows the possibility of joy, even in our grief.

To comprehend that joy, the vast expanse of it, may be beyond us. But our faith in it can be incarnate, on the eve of the Sabbath, in the wisdom of the body, in the work of our hands, in the gift of love.

Amen.

Moi, A La Meyers Briggs

I took the Meyers Briggs Personality Test some 20 years ago. Seeing my buddy Cheesehead had just done it, I was tempted: would it be the same or different after so long? I'd heard one's results could evolve over time. No such luck. I'm exactly the same classification I was back then. What's an INTJ like? See below:

"...approach reality as they would a giant chess board, always seeking strategies that have a high payoff, and always devising contingency plans in case of error or adversity." - The Portrait of the Mastermind Rational (iNTj) (Keirsey)

"...observer, values solitude, perfectionist, detached, private... does not talk about feelings, hard to impress, analytical, likes esoteric things..." - Jung Type Descriptions (INTJ) similarminds.com)

"To outsiders, INTJs may appear to project an aura of "definiteness", of self-confidence. This self-confidence, sometimes mistaken for simple arrogance by the less decisive, is actually of a very specific rather than a general nature; its source lies in the specialized knowledge systems that most INTJs start building at an early age. When it comes to their own areas of expertise -- and INTJs can have several -- they will be able to tell you almost immediately whether or not they can help you, and if so, how." - INTJ Profile (TypeLogic)

"At work, INTJs use their conceptual strengths to analyze situations and then develop models to understand and anticipate through relentlessly to reach their goals. They will continue on with their plans, even in the face of adversity and data that might suggest to other more practical types that their goals are no longer feasible. By nature, INTJs are independent individualists." - INTJ - The Free-Thinker (Lifexplore)

"INTJs are natural leaders, although they usually choose to remain in the background until they see a real need to take over the lead. When they are in leadership roles, they are quite effective, because they are able to objectively see the reality of a situation, and are adaptable enough to change things which aren't working well. They are the supreme strategists - always scanning available ideas and concepts and weighing them against their current strategy, to plan for every conceivable contingency. " - Portrait of an INTJ (The Personality Page)


I suspect that my CPE peers would agree with much of this. I think it makes me sound more more strategic than I think I am, but who knows? Just call me Macchiavellian Mama.

ADDED ON: Now I've taken the multiple intelligences test, too. No surprises there : musical, verbal/liguistic/naturalist. Glad to know my suspicions about myself are confirmed.

Open Heart Surgery

Today, instead of our regular CPE duties (our supervisor is out of town for three days), I got to sit in on open heart surgery. For those in the know about such things, it was a Fontan procedure. The big daddy cardio-thoracic surgeon did it (actually he did part of it - more about that later). The patient came from halfway around the world for the surgery, which is actually the third in a sequence. This was a very chubby two year old, who was very unhappy with the world when wheeled into the OR, but silent shortly thereafter when the anesthetic kicked in.

Two other surgeons started the operation. Because of the past surgeries, there were a lot of adhesions connecting the lungs to the pericardium (at least I think that's what I saw) and they had to dissect them so that big daddy could do his thing. Took them over an hour with the scalpel, electric saw to the sternum, electro-cautery, and various other tools including a zillion clamps and retractors, to get the patient ready.

I'm not squeamish. That's a good thing, because this kind of surgery seems a cross between a butcher shop and plumbing work.

Big daddy surgeon came in after the initial prep work, finished separating out the artery that needed to be re-routed, got the kid on heart-lung bypass, stopped the heart with potassium (never realized how comfortable I'd become with the beep-beep of the heart monitor until it was silent), did the graft with a length of Gore-Tex flex tubing, put in pacemaker leads, reconnected all the appropriate arteries that had been sidetracked to the bypass machinery, and then unclamped. The blood started in to the repaired heart, and it started beating, slowly at first, then faster as the child was warmed up. When he determined that there were no bleeders, big daddy surgeon left the room so the two assistant surgeons could wire the sternum back together and stitch the muscles and skin. Unlike our newborns who undergo open-heart surgery, the patient's chest was big enough to accomodate the heart, even though it was swollen, so they could close her immediately.

Remarkable that the human heart can undergo such manhandling and holes and stitches, and come back, beating stronger than before. This child's future is still uncertain, but may be a lot better than it was before this surgery. It will be a trip to follow the patient in the CICU in a couple of days, and know I've seen that little heart, beating under halogen lights, bravely chugging along.

Metaphors abound.

Assorted Stuff

I'm on call through tomorrow morning, so my day consisted of various short errands close to home so I could dash to the hospital if need be. I intended to visit a dear friend who has terminal pancreatic cancer, but she had had a bad night, was waiting for the hospice doctor to come, and was not up to company. Please keep her in your prayers.

So the morning was a trip to the farmer's market for good local produce and cheese, a trip to Costco for large quantities of coffee (locally roasted!), cat food, and shrimp and scallops, allergy medicine for PH, and dishwasher soap, then off to the regular supermarket for the rest of the "normal" stuff we need to survive the week. Yes, I know. More than you wanted to know.

I got home and, after putting the groceries away and making a marinade for the mozzarella balls, plopped down on the couch to finish off Harry Potter.

I didn't get off the couch for the remaining 500 pages.

Great book...the woman knows how to spin a tale.

PH is off at a dinner party with friends from his MK days. Unfortunately, the home at which the party is being held is out in the 'burbs a ways, too far from the hospital to get there in the requisite 30 minutes should I get called in, so I'm having a solitary evening, which isn't really a bad thing. I finished another book that I'd started earlier this week, and the second load of wash is in the dryer. I may go to Blockbuster and pick up a movie...but then again, that would require I get up from the couch. Accio DVD!

Monday morning I'm supposed to observe heart surgery. The nurses in my cardiac unit said nothing was scheduled for Monday morning, so I may get in there Monday morning and have nothing to do, but sometimes things get scheduled at the last minute, so who knows? Our supervisor is out of town for three days, and we aren't supposed to see patients when she is not there to supervise us, so outside of the surgery, I've got three days off. Bliss. I've got a presentation on child abuse and our responsibilities as clergy in congregations on Thursday, so I'm not entirely without work to do, but being able to sleep in for Tues and Weds is a luxury. Monday, though, I've got to get into the hospital by 7 a.m.

Just twelve more days of CPE to survive. The last two days will be evaluations and such, so it's really more like ten days. I can do this...