Let's Hear It For Nurses

As I write this, it's Saturday morning. I'm watching a Premier League soccer game. It has been twenty-four hours since I rolled into the recovery area of the hospital operation theater. Dr. Meyer and his pit crew, like beave of nurses and technicians, have repaired my hernia. By the way, one of the nurses referred to the nurses gathering around me, hooking me up to various contraptions and aiding the doctor in setting up his equipment as 'the pit crew.'

These people are talented, professional, and damn it, just plain nice. I asked my room nurse Tracy about the morale since COVID is beginning to slow down. She explained that they didn't see COVID patients in their department. (I had to take a COVID test to be operated on.) But it was apparent that many elective surgeries were being delayed by patients not wanting to go to the hospital for fear of contracting the virus. Tracy also pointed out they were getting an above-average amount of referrals from the ER. Unfortunately, these patients often were the ones avoiding surgery, and they waited too long. In some cases, it was a fatal decision.

As many of you remember, I was in rehab from November 2019 through March 2020 with an infection that required surgery to remove my artificial knee and adminstered intravenous antibiotic treatments. This was when I became a fan of medical staff people. Many of them work hard for little pay, and I can only imagine the hours of overtime and the grief these folks endured with COVID. Many of these folks do what they do to comfort and care for the sick. Unfortunately, some people die, and for medical staff, it can feel like a failure. When there are a lot of people dying, it must be hell.

I thought I'd share one of my attempts at pencil sketching.

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Ring The Bell

It appears there is a tradition in the radiology department at Ascension Hospital that patients, upon completing their course of treatment, ring a bell. ( We know not for whom this bell tolls.) Ring the Bell with My Sweetheart Jeanne. Jeanne drove me to all but two of the appointments. Pam Frautchi took me to the other two. Today, after being zapped thirty-two times, I rang the bell. This begins a roughly one-month recovery period where the effects of the radiation abate and, I'm assured, a return to normalcy occurs. In my case, I anticipate more energy and greater awareness. Books, Books, & More Books I am simultaneously celebrating the end of the third year of volunteering for the All Saints Hunger Book Sale. Next week, we will wrap up the preparation for the sale and open our doors on August 3 for the public. I ran into this humourous but quite accurate cartoon on a T-Shirt that shows most of the volunteer's sentiments at this point. If you think the printed and bound p...

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It's time again.

It started in 2004 when we moved to our condo off Downer in Milwaukee. Then we mover to the Westside of Milwaukee when we rented from Ken Karr, the former landlord, now a current friend on Highland and 29th St. Then we moved to Mandeville Louisiana for a little less than a year. Returning to The Fox River Valley, we rented a home in Fox Crossing, formerly The Town of Menasha. When the tree fell on the roof, and the landlord felt no urgency to fix it, we moved to W. Commercial in Appleton. Here is a shocker. Are you sitting down? We are moving. No, I don't mean off the couch and out to the patio. There are too many damn mosquitoes for that to happen. No, we are packing our stuff, or at least the stuff we unpacked from the last move and moving to a home Maria purchased on Mason and Glendale in Appleton. Let me unpack that last sentence (pun planned for). We are moving at approximately the end of September to a house. The house has been in t...

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