I See You

Finals are next week and, of course, I'm up late baking. My daughter wants a cake w/ an image from the children's book Hedgie Blasts Off on it. I'll let you know how it turns out.

I spent a day in ICU and I was standing in my patient's room when a loud woman's voice said "It looks like her blood pressure is dropping." Um, are you talking to me? I'm whirling around and the voice says, "Up at the end of the bed...the camera." And, yep, there it was zooming in on the scene in the room. "Your patient is really sick," the voice said. Um, yes. Septic shock will do that to a person: make 'em really sick. I said, "I'm just a student." And the voice told me that it belonged to a person named Mira (or something along those lines) and that she was watching a bank of hundreds of monitors from a city 25 miles away. I'm sure that the camera zoomed in on the scene several times throughout the day as the patient's blood pressure dropped to 60 over 40 and a dopamine drip and a flat head of the bed barely brought it up to 80 over 50. The funny thing is that all of the ICU nurses were really surprised that the camera had spoken to me. I guess they almost never do and I heard a story of a patient crashing and a lone nurse calling for help in the dead of night and the camera finally comes on and says, "Looks like you're doing the right thing." and that was it. And then there's the whole liability thing: see, we can show you on camera that we did all of the right things or, geez, here you are setting the drip rate wrong (or somesuch) which is fairly futuristic from the past 1984-like and all or is it Big Brother. It's a blur. Nursing texts have calcified my pop culture/literary reference bone.

The really amazing thing: another student took care of the same ICU patient today and she is as OK as she was before landing in the ICU. Hearing that made my week and I needed something to make my week because I didn't think I would make it this week.

I was in Disney World for Thanksgiving. It's a long story. I know, I should have been at home baking pies and perfecting The Dinner Roll, but I was riding the Dumbo ride instead. The picture is a bathroom sign in Tomorrowland (in The Magic Kingdom) which was the 50's version of the future. I love the past's view of the future especially when the past's view of the future is really of the past. It's so art deco.