Looking back over everything I read this summer, I thought to highlight my favorites. (Mostly because there were some real disappointments.)

Here are the gems!

• Antony and Cleopatra by Coleen McCullough

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

• Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips

All in all, I would say that branching out into new genres for summer reading turned out splendidly. Ok, ok, so historical fiction is a favorite not a different, but I am new to humorous reading and science fiction and completely new to “Greek god living in modern London fiction.” lol

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and I leave my shoes on indoors.

I order fabric in yards and meat in pounds.

I write the month before the day.

I say “Happy Thanksgiving” instead of “Have a nice Thanksgiving.”

and my inner cyclical clock flatly refuses to acclimatize to Thanksgiving being in October rather than November.

Don’t get me wrong. I mean, I like it in October here. The leaves are gorgeous colors – other than green, that is – the air is cool and  the turkeys are sold out at the grocery store. What more sign do you need that its time for Thanksgiving?

It’s just that right along with all those other markers, there is the indistinguishable, undeniable somethings-not-quite-right-but-I-don’t-know-what feeling this time of year. And its sort of a relief when I remember that its just my inner American coming out and reminding me its still alive.

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Today I finished reading your book, “The Making of a Nurse.” Although you’ll probably never see this, I want to offer my thanks for your words. All of them. Each and every one.

Twice I’ve begun nursing school and been unable to finish due to life-altering personal issues. In the wake of my second departure, grief, fear and rejection on a nuclear scale saw me, in turn, go on to reject all that I have ever known, including my chosen profession. Ever since, I’ve been wandering on the inside, desperate for someone to save me and give me the answers. But it was only once I stopped flailing and looking for others to pull me out of deep water, that I found I could save my own life by following my heart.

That began a gingerbread trail away from the neurotic cottage of isolation where I could (not that long ago) be found bouncing off padded walls muttering repeatedly “Who am I, who am I?” towards the trees, the wind, the sunset and flowers that beckoned down the path of real life. One of the blooms turned out to be your book, as it grabbed my attention in Chapters one random day.

Of all the books I brought home that day, I read yours, cover to cover, first. You had me at page 50 when you said, “First I got to know a patient’s veins, and then I got to know the patient.”

Walking with you through your life and career to date, I recognized too much of myself to recount them all, but here are a few. Treasuring being with your patients at those most precious moments in their life, having been inspired by a television doctor and nurse pairing, appreciating how nurses are the constant caregivers so different from the doctors who are in and out, and the instropection on hands. My “What is nursing?” paper in university started off with a poem written by a nurse about how we use our hands.

Most importantly, your words cleared the path ahead of me. I see now that I am a nurse already, albeit one without a certificate. But it’s in my heart, there’s no denying it. (Even in video games, I end up playing a healing character, one who’s singular purpose is to help others.) I feel both committed and enthralled by the profession, inspired rather than daunted by its challenges. I look forward to finishing school as soon as I can.

I commend you for writing your story, for doing something about the problems rather than merely complaining, for encouraging future and practicing nurses and for all your years of caring.

Sincerely,
the nurse without a degree… yet
Kalanna

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Rarely do I go political when I blog. And this might not necessarily be “political,” but it’s certainly thought provoking.

The following is an excerpt from an interview in this week’s MacLean’s magazine – the Canadian equivalent of Time magazine – with Margaret Atwood surrounding the issues she tackles in her new book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth.

ps. I’ve never read a single solitary volume of Margaret’s, but she is venerated here as one of the great Canadian writers. Its the angle she presents this little stroke from that intrigues me so much.

Q: And you find that we not only have a debt to the environment, to the earth,

but that it’s coming due rather quickly.

A: It’s coming due. It was very interesting to me that when Louisiana was destroyed in that flood the fundamentalists were very quick to say, it’s the punishment of God on a sinful city. Now that the oil industry has been so hard hit in Galveston, are they up on their pulpits saying, God is punishing the oil industry? No, no, no! The interesting thing about the religious component, for me, is that Jesus hardly mentions sex at all. He’s pretty interested in the poor, he’s pretty interested in selling your worldly goods and storing up riches in heaven. However, religious fundamentalists have made it all about sex, and that’s like saying, ” Look at the sex and we’re just not going to talk about what you may be doing in a financial way that is sinful.”

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but that’s a good thing.

It was an assessment test to see how well I know sign language. Failing means that I get to start in the beginners, level 1, from the ground-up, don’t know squat class. Which is exactly where I need to be.

The commitment is two hours a week and will garner me a certified – hopefully gem-encrusted – certificate at the end. Learning sign-language – in this case, ASL or American Sign Language, the standard in North America – is something I never would have considered on my own, but it ties directly into my current work and my future profession and so am going ahead with the class with bells on.

As a full-fledged Cajun, talking with my hands is nothing new. Although it does have the downside of rewarding me with coffee in the lap on long drives when I don’t have a change of clothes. Learning more hand-signing may exponentially increase the frequency of these episodes, but at least a deaf person happening to be driving by will be able to understand the swears. Yes, learning sign language is absolutely identical to learning any second language. You have to double check strange, new randomly seen words with someone you really trust lest you say condom instead of appointment, for instance.

As I use it and learn more words and actually converse, my love for the language grows. I only get to work with the deaf patients on occasion but I puff up proudly when I manage haphazardly to get my meaning across. Turns out that the signed alphabet is absolutely essential to master first because even if you do make a mistake like the one I mentioned above or don’t know the actual word, at least you can correct the hysterically laughing person by finger-spelling the word you really meant. Or at least that’s what I hear.

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