Devil's Den Week

Every January, Freddy & I go to Devil's Den State Park in the Ozarks south of Fayetteville. It's a special place to us ever since our first visit during my family reunion in July, 2002 when Freddy & I had just started seeing each other. We made a reservation that time for the following January. When we checked out that time, we made another reservation for the following year, etc. This was our 8th visit. In between times, we carry Devil's Den around with us in our pockets like a delicious secret. During the rest of the year, we smile wryly as we drive past the exit sign on our way to Springdale or Nebraska, counting the months until we'll be checking in there, again.

There are rules for our stay in the cabin. These are them:

• No tv
• No phones
• No computers
• Fire in the fireplace, constantly
• Be as close to nature as possible which involves the windows and doors being open whenever possible. (this one is my rule)
  

As for the tv, they didn't use to have tvs in the cabins but about 2 years ago, they got them. It's not a thing for me because I just don't turn it on but it's quite a temptation for Freddy who drapes his jacket over the tv to keep it from speaking to him.


Usually, the cell phones don't come in up there but this time, they did. A little. I could stand out by the truck in the driveway to the cabin and get a few bars. I'd check the answering machine at the clinic, primarily because I'm waiting on pins and needles for a go-ahead on a new massage gig with a pretty good potential. I'm about to run out of money to tide me over and keep me out of a full-time job back in the ER (which is the only place I'd work, although I'd bitch about it, unceasingly). This year they have phones installed in the cabins but our's didn't ring and we didn't use it. Simple.

Same with computers. We didn't bring one.

The fire rule is the way we are able to abide by the doors and windows open rule. They go together. Here's what we do. The first night, we check in, unpack, bring in arm loads of firewood. Then we go to Fayetteville and eat. Sometimes we eat in really nice places. This time we ate at Formosa Garden which was pretty darn good oriental food (I don't know the difference between Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Thai but I think it was Chinese). Then we go buy groceries. Well, because one of us stayed up way too late on the internet the night before we left home and only getting 4 hours of sleep, we (I) was too tired to shop after we ate so we just picked up a few things and went home. Then Freddy builds a fire, takes his place at the table and reads for 4 days. I open the window in the living room, fold the futon into a bed, pile onto it my books, magazines and art supplies, get two pillows off the bed for my back and one for my lap and wrap up in a blanket and start reading, writing or painting/drawing in front of the fire. And that's how we spend our week at Devil's Den every January. Oh, and the puzzle. I almost forgot the puzzle. That's the best part. The first January visit to the cabins I brought a jigsaw puzzle. How often do you have the time to do a puzzle, for Christ's sake? Well, I did one and I was hooked. I've brought a puzzle every year, since. For some reason last year I didn't work on the one I brought but I was back at my game this time. God, what a luxury to put together a jigsaw puzzle. I can't get over how much I love that. Try it. It's better than Zoloft.
I sit on the log chair outside on the rocky area beside the cabin. I wrap up in a blanket, take a mug of coffee with me and write, read or just watch birds. I stay until it gets dark and I stay latest on the last night because I don't want it to be over.
You can see the top of the cabin my mother and sister, Janet, stayed in during our family reunion. Seven years later, I still expect to see them in there when we drive past. It makes me miss them all.

I've been in this weird faerie-drawing mood, lately, that I'm not sure what's about. So while hiking on one of the Devil's Den trails, I took 191 pictures of cool places that looked like good backgrounds for faerie paintings or drawings. Little rocky out-croppings and mossy covered rocks with holes in them and hollow logs. What inspiration there. I hiked every day we were there.


I attempted a watercolor of the above photo. Wow. It's not as easy as you'd think. I did some art, what little I did, because Bobbi said, "Do some art while you're there," when we left and she's been especially sad lately and I wanted to please her. This painting won't, though.




























These are some of my favorite pictures of the trail. There was a waterfall and ice all around that, on the trail making for some monumental puckering but breathtaking scenery. Freddy went with me the first day and after that I was on my own. One day as I was walking to the trail from the cabin, I came across an armadillo bumbling around in the leaves. I was able to get up close to him and every once in a while he'd look around and get startled when he saw me. He'd take about 3 fast steps and go back to rooting around in the leaves. Crazy thing. As if he'd outrun me in 3 crummy armadillo strides.















A park employee stopped when she saw me taking like 9 pictures of this armadillo and must've felt sorry for me. So she told me about this guy on the right. She said he'd be down by the lake between 8:30 and 9am. So the next morning I got up and went down to see and there he was. What a sight. I couldn't get very close and this picture is horribly zoomed and blurry but what an incredible sight. When I tried to get closer, he flew away and I wanted to flog myself. Next morning he was back, as was I and minding my manners better that day. I watched him as long as I could, there in the bitter cold and then I left him for somebody else to look at and I went back to the cabin to pack.















On the way home (not exactly. We live south of the park and Amanda lives north, but, anyway) we stopped to see the boys, oh yeah and Amanda. They're short-timers now and I'm gonna miss them a lot when they move to Nebraska. (Waaaaa!)







































An old friend, Elizabeth, was visiting while we were there. It's easy to see that married life agrees with her! She looks wonderful. Doesn't she know you're suppose to gain weight when you get married? It only took the boys 2 hours to completely knock out any existing energy we had and we went home pretty early.

It was a wonderful trip, as usual. Is it not January 2010, yet?

Maybe It's 'Cause of January

My bedroom is my favorite place in the world. We laughingly call it my home office because I spend almost all the time I'm home in there. I read there, do everthing I do online there. I even have a printer on Freddy's side on his bedside table with the printer cord snaked around behind the headboard.

This is my bedside table. On it are the things I love. The things that make life worth living.
A water bottle.

A cordless phone. Cordless so I can carry it to the kitchen to get coffee while I talk, as well as to the bathroom.

Clock radio with sound machine and a thing on the top that does this.















My new drug of choice "Head On". It's a topical anesthetic, homeopathic, that you smear on your head wherever it hurts which in my case is always over my left maxillary sinus and sometimes my whole face.

Vicks (in the drawer). Same application, usually. If I'm really sick I put it everywhere like when I was a kid. But I have to be sick enough to not care if my hair gets greasy. I have two jars in that drawer and more on the dresser. I love Vicks. I once heard a comedian say that he thought the government should issue Vicks to the general population because it's so wonderful.

Remotes. Four of them. One for the TV. One for the VCR. One for the DVD player. And one for the Direct TV receiver. That's why I can't get a home theater (which would go in the bedroom, by the way), because I don't have room in the nightstand drawer for another remote. As it is, when I put something on the table, something else falls off.

A cup of expresso made in my new, stove top expresso maker that I bought at Tuesday Morning in a fabulous, hinged and lidded box with four expresso cups and these sexy square saucers. (I can't figure out how to turn this picture 90 degrees to the right like it's suppose to be).

Drawing pencils. I started drawing faeries last night and worked on them a little bit again tonight. It's fun though I'm not particularly good at it.

A spa textbook from which I glean ideas I use to turn my clients into great drooling, euphoric idiots.

One of the three new books I bought Wednesday in Hot Springs. A Jack Canfield book about the Law of Attraction which, by the way, I know really works. We'll talk more about that, later. I also bought, "You Staying Young" (hardcover on the bargain table for $9.97 at Books-a-Million) and "The Real Age Workout" for $6.97.

My new Hancock's of Paducah catalog. Hancock's of Paducah has the most exquisite fabric. It makes you want to make somebody a quilt just so you can buy some of that fabric. That is if you'd ever finished the baby quilt you started for your (almost) 5-year-old grandson while he was still in the womb.

Toilet paper. Because there is no room on the bedside table for a Kleenex box.

The electric blanket control. How can an electric blanket bring so much pleasure to a life?

Yummy, soft, blue earplugs (in a condiment dish under the electric blanket control). They're called "Hear-Os" and they are the only thing keeping me from beating my husband's head in with a jar of Vicks for snoring so loud.

My eye mask. I started using it when I worked nights at the VA. I can't sleep without one, now. I have two. One here and one in my makeup bag for when I'm out of town. I also have more Hear-Os in there.

Really thick Lavender-scented cream that my friend, Dottie, gave me and which I slather onto my feet when I get out of the bathtub, sometimes, and which makes my feet feel totally yummy.

My cell phone. It's usually plugged in on the kitchen counter beside the refrigerator but I'm too lazy to take it in there tonight. Besides, the battery should be okay since it's been on silent all day and I missed all my calls.

My laptop. Not right now, of course. Right now it's on my....well...lap. But it lives on the bedside table drawer which is always pulled halfway out.

And the best for last.....Q-tips. I'm about Q-tips like my daughter is about the Ped-Egg. I bore my ears out, and anyone else's I can gain access to, every chance I get. My doctor said I have scars in my ears. I didn't tell him why. My perfect job would be cleaning out people's ears and popping their pimples and blackheads. I'm completely compulsive about those things. I sometimes think about deliberately feeding Freddy an abundance of fatty foods so he'd develop a bunch of really nice zits that I could then squeeze. I've considered going back to school to become an aesthetician so I could do "extractions", legally. Sometimes when I'm doing massage I feel a blackhead on a client's back and I have to really fight to not work on it. When I'm working in the ER and I know we've got a patient with an abscess, I start watching the doctor really closely to see when it looks like he's getting ready to go in and drain it so I don't miss it. Don't hate. I've seen other nurses like that. It's not that weird. We're abscess junkies. What of it?

So, I guess, that's pretty much it. My bedside table is like my whole life, right now. No direction. No organization. Messy. Lot's of potential but nothing really happening. I kinda like it but it's a little unnerving, too. My life, I mean. Right now, I mean.

Shredding Reflections

I'm going to bed in a minute, as in, putting my head on the pillow and putting the ear plugs in my ears and the mask over my eyes. Not just sitting on the bed with the comforter over my legs, pillows to my back, my laptop on my heavily pillowed...well...lap as I spend most of the time I'm home if I'm not cooking or doing laundry or soaking in the tub. Those are my favorite things to do, those four.

My bed is my home office, really. Oh, we have a "computer room" with a desk and, now, an art table and a daybed. Our desktop computer is in there and Freddy uses it to read the New York Times and New York Post, but that's about it. I prefer my bed and the printer that sits on top of Freddy's nightstand, it's cable snaked around the headboard to my side where I connect it, periodically when I need to print out a flyer, or something. So I don't use the desktop in the computer room, much. I quickly check my email in there, sometimes, while shredding the cereal boxes that the recycling Nazi won't accept, but that's about it.

Freddy takes the recycling stuff to the recycling place, which is a developmental center for mentally challenged people. I didn't think about that when I got the resentment.

It all goes back to when I was working full-time in the ER and trying to run a business on my "days off" and Freddy ate frozen dinners all the time. I mean all. the. time. (I especially like this putting a period after each, separate word to accentuate the statement-thing). So we had mountains of frozen dinner cardboard containers and lots of cereal boxes which I flattened like a good, green witch and stuffed into the box with the cardboard for the recycling center. That went alright for a while and then one day Freddy came home and said:

"You can't put the cardboard tv dinner boxes into the recycling, anymore."

"Why?"

"They won't take it."

"Why the hell not?" I asked.

"Because it's not considered cardboard".

"What? Since when?"

"I don't know. He just said, 'Tell your wife this is trash,' kinda grouchy."

"Well, what the fuck is cardboard, then?"

"I guess the corrugated stuff like big boxes are made out of."

"Bullshit."

Freddy didn't mention "developmentally delayed" man, he just said, "man" so I was just thinking "What an asshole," and immediately went about devising a plan to scam the recycling...person. Then it dawned on me. The shredder! I'd shred all that, what I know damn well is, cardboard and send it to the recycling center in the black, plastic bags along with the other shredded paper I always sent and the "tell your wife this is trash" horse's ass would be none the wiser. And that's what I've been doing for about 9 months. Every time I take a carton into the computer room and shred it I mentally thumb my nose at the "tell your wife this is trash" man. About 5 months ago it finally dawned on me.

"Hey, you know that guy at the recycling center?" I asked Freddy one day.

Blank stare. "What guy?" He always waits a while before admitting he doesn't know what I'm talking about out of fear of a scolding.

"The guy who told you the cardboard was trash and they wouldn't take it."

"Yeah?". He clearly didn't remember.

"Was he retarded?"

"Oh, that guy. Yeah, he was."

Shit. There went all the fun, almost. I found a way around it, though, by deciding to forget about it, pretending he was a supervisor of normal intelligence. Blocking the clarifying conversation with Freddy out of my mind and sharpening the mental image I have of the recycling Nazi and delighting in outsmarting him.

And I shred. Some of us especially need victories like this.

Sleepless in Lincoln

I feel like Holly Hunter in the movie, Home for the Holidays.

It started with spaghetti sauce. All our lives, our mother has made this wonderful spaghetti and meatballs. She gave me the recipe and I started making it myself when I first got married, the first time, back in 1975. It's delicious.

Mom is 82 and I don't know if her cooking was really good when we were growing up or if we just thought so because we didn't know the difference. But she's gotten, well, as older people do she's gotten lax, I guess you'd say. She cuts corners. Consequently, there aren't a lot of things she cooks the way she used to and we generally prefer eating out when we come up here to visit. But she asked me last weekend if I wanted anything special to eat while we were here, aside from the huge Thanksgiving meal we're cooking. I did still love her spaghetti sauce the last time I had it so I requested that, knowing it would make her feel good to treat us to something tasty and it not being especially difficult to prepare and we might save ourselves from at least one lecture on wasting money on fast food. It hasn't been spaghetti and meatballs for some years because, she says, the meatballs always break all up, anyway, so now she just uses hamburger in the sauce which didn't appear to make a big difference. Still, I wondered how the meatballs managed to stay together for 40 years, for the most part. But, as I said, last time it was okay so I figured it would be safe. I'm sad to report the spaghetti sauce has gone the way of all the other things she used to cook that were so good and that we looked so forward to.

She is, now, not only skimpy with her own cooking but while I read aloud a recipe I found on the internet today, having no intention of actually making it only delighting in reading about it, she interrupted with a dissertation on, "Why would you want something else to eat when we already have all this food?"etc. That's the whole point of going home. And the longer I'm here, the more I need to eat in order to tolerate the dysfunction. My mother is dwindling away, disintegrating into her sauce like her meatballs as we watch, helplessly.

There's that. And then there's my brother. And my daughter. And the cold. And the darkness. And now I can't sleep. We went to see Twilight tonight and I drank a huge Diet Pepsi which I almost never do since my banding. It was enough caffeine to keep me awake until, so far, 3:34am. And I seem to be having an exacerbation of the hot flashes that were subsiding since I started my Estridiol. If I were home I'd get in the tub and soak and watch an old movie on Turner Classic Movies (yes, there is a tv in the bathroom) but here, not only is there no tv in the bathroom but no bathtub. Only a shower, not that I'd actually get in a tub here. Not the cleanest environment, anymore. I'm pretty much miserable and I know that the grandsons will be trotting in here around 9 to wake me up. And by the time I wake their mother up I'll be wide awake, albeit tired and surly and then I have to bake pies and put together casseroles and do dishes and instruct the other members of the family on how to manage their lives. It's all quite exhausting. I can't wait to go home.

Isn't it strange how we all get in our own little worlds apart from our families? The older we get, the deeper into our own worlds we get. More comfortable and less tolerant of discomfort. Less anxious to subject ourselves to the insanity that is our family. God knows I have a good family. One of the best I know. But it's so damn noisy here and so many people and I've eaten all this sugar. I need medication this week, I really do. This would be a good time to start abusing Xanax.

I'll be glad to get home to my little self-absorbed life on Saturday and I probably won't be back for another holiday anytime soon. I'll have to forget some of this, first.

Oh, Happy Thanksgiving.

Of Fires, Hot Flashes & Bear Dookie

I woke up today feeling really good. No obligations, which is all I've ever asked from life, by the way, but it rarely works out. I called Freddy to have him pick up some Celestial Seasonings Candy Cane Lane tea on his way home and then I sat up in bed and wrote in my journal. I planned to go out in the barn and built the first fire in that woodstove and build a soap mold today. It was cold and I've been day dreaming about that for some time. But Freddy showed up before he went shopping and I decided to go with him, needing to pick up my hormones and thinking I needed to give them my new insurance information. Wrong. Insurance doesn't cover compounded medications and I'm beginning to think I may know why. I go between freezing and sweating about 115 times in a 24 hour period since I started my new, compounded, bioidentical hormones for which I held such high hope. .

So we went shopping and I got the idea, as we were pushing the shopping cart to the truck, that a big bowl of tortilla soup would be nice. So we went to the Mexican restaurant and ate, me bitching the whole time about ignorant hillbillies and nonprofessional behavior (more hormone-related thought processes).

And here it comes again. A wave of heat traveling instantly from my knees to the top of my head in a mighty whoosh culminating with me feeling as though I could breath fire if I exhaled with my mouth open. Note to self: buy some dong quai and black cohash tomorrow after work.

After we ate, we decided to go out to our cabin, for the first time in a couple of months, just to make sure everything was okay. As soon as we got out there I had to start a fire in the pot belly stove. It was freezing and the wind was blowing and I couldn't resist. The cabin is strawbale construction, like our barn, and it heats up nicely and stays that way for a while without much of a fire. And that potbelly stove is a dandy. I keep a small basket full of try kindling, just leaves and handfuls of sticks, in there at all times. That way, even if it's raining or there's a foot of snow on the ground, I can still start a fire at the spur of the moment. And I always go gather up more before I leave, even if it's, as I said, wet or whatever because it'll dry long before I get back out there and need it, again. Freddy made a pot of decaf while I hauled 3 or 4 armloads of wood from the wood pile to the livingroom. We had it toasty warm in minutes and spent the next hour, or so, doing what we always do out there. Nothing. Sitting holding our mugs of coffee, staring at nothing like dope fiends in an opium den. About every 3 minutes, Freddy says, "God, I love this place," then falls silent again for a little while.

About the time we were thinking about leaving, I went up in the loft to see how warm it was up there and pretty soon had dug an old quilt out of the plastic bin we keep linens in up there to keep them safe from the mice, and spread it out on the bed and decided to take a nap. Freddy joined me and we dozed for a while. I got up toward the end and grabbed the old, afghan (my friend Carol's mom calls them, "Africans" as in "No wonder you're not cold, lying on the couch wrapped up in two Africans") off the railing and covered up as the fire was beginning to die down.

When we left for home, we saw a big pile of bear scat just down from the cabin in front of the pump house. It would've made a great picture, full of persimmon seeds but I was ill-prepared and didn't have my camera. I thought, after all, that we were only going to Walmart when I left home this morning.

I made 4 dozen, or so, peanut butter cookies when we got home and froze most of them for our Christmas party a month away. It's suppose to get down to 20-something tonight so I covered my lettuce with an old, blue tarp and then shut the flaps on the chicken house windows and rigged up a light in there to help keep the chickens (and doves and turkey) warm and encourage them to start laying, again. It's been a good day. We don't spend enough of them together. And tomorrow's ICU for 12 hours.

On My Way Back

I've been doing pretty well with the time change and subsequent impending exacerbation of SAD that I get every year until yesterday. And that's how it happens. I'm going along without any problem and BOOM! I get an unnerving sort of coldness in my stomach and I know it's time for my full spectrum light. I use it when I first start feeling the coldness. Once I start, I try to use it every day. If I go out of town, I bring the light. It's not negotiable. It makes a tremendous difference.

And in the meantime, I cook. Oh, and eat. Monday I did one massage and was home by 2. I cooked until 10pm. It was wonderful. I've been busy or out of town or working for several weeks, now. I'd gotten used to being home and was settling into this delicious slower pace before we went away for a week. When we got home there were three weeks of working basically a full-time schedule in ER. And then a lot of massages to do in the meantime. All that to say that I didn't have time to cook and I hated it, having had a really good taste of what it's like to be a real person who cooks in her own kitchen and does her own laundry and vacuums. So I made up for it yesterday.

I cooked stuffed grape leaves, homemade pita bread, hummus, kale with sausage and potatoes, bread pudding with lemon sauce and jalepeno jelly. Then last night I made miso soup. Oh God. Is that good. I never made/ate it before. And so easy. I got the miso this weekend when I was out of town.

This weekend was nice. I had no massages scheduled Friday so about 11:30 while talking on the phone to my friend, Bobbi, we decided it might be nice to drive up to Winslow, Arkansas on old Highway 71 and go to the Ozark Folkways. We packed an overnight bag in case we decided to stay at my daughter's in Springdale. I toasted homemade bread and scrambled eggs with Pecorino Romano cheese for our breakfast sandwiches and wrapped them in wax paper and we headed out. It was a beautiful day. We stopped to take pictures and gather leaves and pods for Bobbi to use in her artwork. The trees were magical. Brilliant. The sky, that deep blue you only see in Autumn. Breathtaking.

We spent about an hour at Ozark Folkways, before they closed, looking at art, Bobbi explaining how each thing was made and how we can do the same thing. She's such a delightful friend. So fun to spend time with.

We bought some stuff. Me, a couple of hand made pottery bowls and a bar of lye soap and she, a hand painted, lidded porcelain dish for my Christmas gift. So I came out like a bandit.

We went on to Springdale and spent the night with Amanda and family. Aidan graciously lent us his bed. I couldn't get over the feeling that I'd come to visit my daughter with my lesbian lover. Even better is the fact that the kids had little sores on their mouths and we were both kissing them. I told her we'd probably both come home with sores on our mouths after spending a weekend away together and everybody will think we caught them from each other. So far, so good, though.


We had a great visit with the kids. Matt made loaded baked potato pizza for supper. And appetizers while we waited: shrimp and cocktail sauce and 3 cheese garlic bread with marinara sauce. Man, was that good! Good food. Good company. Next morning Sis made apple cinnamon pancakes. Wow! Did we ever pick the right place to crash.

First stop Saturday morning was Hobby Lobby. Stayed there a long time. Then on to Ozark Natural Foods. We spent hours there poring through the bulk herbs and spice. It was a heavenly olfactory orgy. We bought lemongrass, dried elderberries, cumin, turmeric, curry, whole nutmeg, some other kind of orange Indian spice that I can't remember the name of. I bought miso and tahini and organic peanut butter and grape leaves and Sumatra coffee beans and I can't remember what all. Freddy's truck smelled like New Delhi on the way home. Sunday when I worked in ICU I brought along a newspaper I'd gotten on the trip and it smelled like spices. Yum!

We ate lunch at La Huerto on College. I had cheese enchiladas. After that we stopped at an intriguing line of shops on Dickson Street in Fayetteville. New Treasures where we bought bumper stickers that said things like, "Treehugger" and "Jesus was a Liberal". I bought some very ethnic-looking clothing and a long, tie-dyed jersey jumper. Next door was a bakery with chalk board menus and 24 inch breadsticks and huge slices of chocolate raspberry cake with 3/4 inch frosting. We had coffee and...well...chocolate cake.

Then the bead store. It made me want to learn to make jewelry. I bought two little silver hands with swirls in the palms and earring hooks to put them on. After that, on to the second hand retro clothing and costume shop where we bought nothing but a lady came up to Bobbi and complemented her on her lovely cheekbones.

On the way out of Fayetteville, we stopped at a purple building that looked like a castle where they do tattoos and piercings to ask about piercing my nose. I sort of chickened out but used the price for an excuse. I really should have done it, though. It woulda been great to cook using all those Indian spices with an earring in my nose and wearing my ethnic clothing. I'll have to make that a thing to do.

We stopped at Micheal's on Rogers on the way through Fort Smith and shopped for art supplies, some more. Nice stuff in there, though the lighting sucks. Bought a Fillet O' Fish sandwich that I ate on the way out of Fort Smith, sans the top of the bun.

So that's it, then. Wonderful 2 days. Made me want to live in Northwest Arkansas all over again having just gotten over that from our last trip to Eureka Springs. But I live here, I suppose, and I'll make the best of it. Not a bad thing, living here. Just not much here for open minds, I'm afraid.
Tonight I picked salad greens from the Mesclin Mix I
planted in October, though, and made this, which I ate for supper with some leftover grape leaves.

Before that, I walked around the pasture, twice, with Maggi. Then we fed the fish and sat at the end of the dock and thought, both of us, about how nice it's going to be with grandsons visiting, again. When the babies are here, I'm totally present in the moment. Completely at peace, albeit chaotic peace, but you know what I mean. The sun was setting and just lit up the tops of a tree near the neighbor's property line. It reminded me of a dream I had ten years ago about a lilac bush. It was comforting. I can feel myself slowing down, again. It feels good to be cooking.

My Book...At Last!

I'm gonna write a book and I'm gonna title it, Life is Just a Bowel Full of Cherries. Right. Just like this blog. I've always known what the book was going to be called, just not exactly what it was going to be about. I knew it would be about nursing and patients but no particulars, until now. Today at work it dawned on me. Twenty years in nursing, ten in the ER and I've picked up on some things the general public needs in terms of education. So, I'm going to write a common sense-type of medical manual for the general public who are, I'm beginning to realize, completely insane.

The book will be a sort of filling-in of the average Joe on the street regarding little medical things that I thought pretty much everybody knew all their lives, like I did. For instance, there will be a chapter titled, "When To, and When Not to Call 911". Under When Not to will be a paragraph explaining that when you have a bowel movement that, how do I put it, let's say "stalls", you have a few options, none of which involve activating the emergency medical alert system. One option is to end the attempt by employment of the anal sphincter thereby "pinching off" the sluggish substance. Another option involves straining to expedite things. There is always the sit-and-wait option to see if anything changes. And until this week it never occurred to me to tell another human being that getting "stuck" halfway into a bowel movement was no reason to call 911 but I have since been enlightened.

In the same chapter I will explain that if you are in your 50's, in good enough shape to ride a motorcycle to the state park on the mountain and camp, there is no reason for you to call an ambulance because you haven't had a bowel movement for 3 days.. Moreover, if you do call an ambulance and you have a bowel movement just prior to the arrival of the ambulance, you certainly don't need to come on into the ER, anyway, despite the fact that you "don't want to get in that shape, again!". Eat some Raisen Bran, drink some coffee and take responsibility for you own GI tract.

The chapter on "Proper Medical Terminology for Novices" will include, You have blood clots. There is no such thing as blood "clods" or "clogs." And, you have fibroids in your uterus, not "fire balls in your euchrist".

Just because you have a boil on your filthy body doesn't mean you were bitten by a poisonous spider. You probably have an abscess and might want to think about bathing once in a while. In the event you were, indeed, bitten by a spider, it probably was a brown recluse, not a "brown glucose" spider.

When you came to the emergency room once in the past because you couldn't pass urine, you were catheterized, not castrated (at least, I don't think so. However, if it turns out that you were, I'd like the name of that hospital so I can go there and apply for a job).

Under miscellaneous, I'll explain that when you "feel hot one minute and freezing the next" and you're not menopausal, it's no big mystery. You have a fever. Who has not known this since age 5? They actually sell devices that enable you to make your own fever diagnosis at home. They're sold at Walmart and they're called "thermometers". What's more, you can actually take Tylenol or Motrin for a fever and determine the correct dosage yourself by reading the label. Again, having a fever for one hour is no reason to rush to the ER.

Same thing with throwing up. If you threw up an hour ago, you don't have an emergency and you can stay at home. If you do end up in the hospital, throwing up isn't going to kill you and you don't need to send a family member darting into the hall to summon a nurse to the room. A nurse is not going to keep you from throwing up, (which is, by the way pronounced "vomit", not "vomick"). Just throw up and wipe your mouth and lie back down on your stretcher. When the nurse or doctor do come into the room, turn your head when you breath or cough. Your breath smells like vomit. Nobody wants to smell it, not even public servants. And while on the subject, if you come to the ER vomiting, don't get mad when they won't give you a big glass of ice water to drink. I promise you, if you drink a glass of water, you're going to throw up again. It happens every time. Another point, it doesn't matter what you saw in your vomit. Just because you saw, say, carrots doesn't mean you got food poisoning from your mother-in-law's glazed carrots last Sunday. You threw up what was in your stomach. Your stomach does not isolate the one offending substance and throw up only that. It doesn't work that way. Furthermore, you needn't describe it to us as in, my personal favorite, "It was green and slimy". Of course it was. It came out of your stomach. It was vomit. There's bile in it. Bile is green. It's no mystery. And there are no scientists in the lab waiting to analyze your vomit so don't bring it to the hospital with you in a peanut butter jar.

Now for the chapter on Medical History. You may be allergic to sulfa, not "sulpher". It is called emphysema, not "the zee-mee". And it's a hiatal hernia, not a "high up hernie".

Leukemia is considered to be a health problem so if you have Leukemia and the triage nurse asks you if you have any health problems, you should probably mention it.
If you are missing a kidney, we need to know if it was surgically removed or you were born without it, or what. It's not helpful when you tell the nurse, "Honey, I don't have any idea what happened to it". We expect you to research this before you come to the hospital.

If you cut your hand opening a package of bologna with your pocket knife, don't expect general anesthesia during your suturing. You're going to get a local anesthetic and stay awake. Nobody's going to recover you for an hour while you come out from under. We need our lunch breaks, too, you know. You might want to explore why it is you want so badly to be put to sleep.

When you come to the ER, bring a list of your medicines with you. Despite what you think, the nurses don't have copies of your med list folded up in lockets around their necks. If you can't even keep up with your medications while taking them every day of your lives, how do you expect us to?

If a nurse or a lab tech has a needle in their hand getting ready to start an IV or draw blood, the chances of them being successful are much better if you don't first say to them, "You have one chance! If you blow that, I want somebody who knows what they're doing." The employees at the hospital have licenses. They went to school. Despite what you might think, they really do know more about medicine than you do. That's why you're there. If you don't believe that, why didn't you stay home? Next time, you might want to think about doing that. Just stay home and use your Waffle House waitress experience to figure out the correct way to treat your heart attack and I promise you, nobody from the hospital is going to come to your house and drag you out and poke needles in you. They'll leave that to the funeral director and it will be a lot easier on them to just read about you in the obituaries next Thursday.

Anyway, you get the idea. And there's more. God knows, there's so much more.