The One Who Tried to Kill My Sister

The Saturday after Thanksgiving, the day after we buried my Uncle Vince, Nico Alistair Galownia burst forth from his mother, my little sister, and brought with him exuberance and despair in a matter of seconds in a true demonstration of the universe’s capacity to fuck your shit up.

We were gathered at Camp Grampa, where Shannon was improvising a dinner out of some frozen hamburgers and turnips, seeing if a change of scenery could put the grief one layer lower for my sweet Aunt Becky, a woman who just a month before was in this same kitchen, improvising a dinner of fried green tomatoes and fried blue gill that she and Vince had caught, in an effort to get our grief one layer lower. 

We got word earlier in the day that Leiah was headed to the hospital to deliver her son, a fella who’d made her belly so big strangers couldn’t contain their “whoa”s when she walked by, earlier that day, so I sent a text to David at 5:50pm to see how it was going. We got right in on the action when he replied “Dialted and pushing. Home stretch.”

In an attempt to do something with all the excitement, Susan and Becky trimmed the little Christmas tree Susan had put up in the living room. I collected bets for weight from everybody in the room to make it competitive. 

Finally at 7:37pm my phone tings and there is my nephew, Nico Alistair. A beefy red baby, 19 inches long, 8lbs. 13 oz. Isaac won. 

His dad let us in on his name, which wasn’t a guarantee, and told us that he was a super chill baby. And just as quickly as joy filled every cell in my body, fear crept in. Leiah had a huge 800 gram clot that was preventing her uterus from clamping down. She was hemorrhaging, and even though she was in the best place to hemorrhage, a place with blood and surgeons, and even though I knew they’d take the whole uterus out before they’d let it kill my sister, I was afraid. Leiah later told me she didn’t realize that many hands could fit in a vagina. David said, “The whole hospital was in there.”

Fortunately the fear only lasted for an hour before Leiah stabilized. She got blood and the hands that were inside her body did what they needed to do. We got pictures of her, smiling, pale and covered with a mountain of blankets, but alive and having achieved another echelon of love. 

Her family was complete, bookended by boys, little girls in the sweet center, and her record for biggest cheeks broken. Though it didn’t take away the loss that brought us together, Nico’s arrival bandaged our family with hope, with certainty that life goes on, that happiness will still bridge the sadness. He reminded me that the terrible things that are going to come our way will be made better by our cohesion and that even in the darkest times, there are beams of light to cling to. 

Welcome to the tribe, little man. I hope you love being one of us as much as we love you.

Pretirement

After 7 years in the Emergency Department at Harbor-UCLA, a Level I Trauma Center is South Los Angeles, I have pretired.

Pretirement is a lot like retirement, except it comes earlier and you fully intend to go back to work again... when you run low on money. 

I loved my job. LOVED it. And walking away from it was one of the hardest things I've ever done. So hard, I stalled it for 6 months so I could get my head around the idea of saying goodbye.

When I started my career as a nurse, I didn't know what to expect. I hated nursing in nursing school, and I wasn't sure I'd like it as a profession. Turns out, it is the best thing I've ever done, and I don't think that would have been the case if I hadn't landed at a county facility serving the uninsured. 

I loved the people I worked with, the patients we cared for, the uncertainty that rolled through the door, the smell of the firefighters' overalls, the lingo on the radio calls, the glued-together building that we worked in. I found my voice and my backbone, and standing up for someone who can't stand up for themselves became an everyday event, some classier than others. I got to do all sorts of amazing things as a nurse at Harbor, things that made me tough and things that made me cry. And laugh, oh there was never a shortage of things to make you laugh.

Disaster Training! What a disaster!

Thanksgiving with the Harbor Fam. We knew how to potluck.

In a place where people die, you've got to make the merry sometimes.

Easter egg hunts made everyone a kid again. Bad to be a patient in that 30 minutes.

Legends. Absolute legends. I was so lucky to work with them.

Less legends. But such a highlight of every day.

Helipad adventures

Everybody loves St. Patricks Day. Even the Russians, Mexicans, Filipinos, Nigerians, South Africans, Brazilians, Japanese, Chinese, Persian, and every other countryperson represented in our nursing staff.

Search and Rescue Training. I basically killed all the dummies. That's why it's called training,

Visit to the LA County Morgue. For, y'know, inspiration.

MICN Class. Literally thought my head would explode during that course.

Trauma Survivor Celebration. Without a doubt, my favorite extra credit work. 

I got to make friends from co-workers, celebrate their birthdays, weddings and new babies, support them to higher degrees, watch them fall into love and their first homes. We defiled party buses, celebrated any season we could justify, pulled off adult field days, white water rafted, camped, skied, tubed, and even traipsed through Europe. This dysfunctional family I was a part of is the reason I lasted all the years I did. 

Field Day! 

Work wouldn't give us a Christmas party so we gave ourselves one.

Lots of people died on the Kern River the year we did this. None of us!

At least one of us knew how to put up a tent. 

Birthday on the beach. 

Letting a couple doctors in on our good times. 

The Harbor Hoedown!

Babies! And since this, two more babies!

Playing in the snow became an annual thing. 

The gang does Germany. And Austria. And France. 

So much like family that Shana became a stand-in chicken mommy when we left. 

That place absolutely shaped who I am, and after seven years, I can say with confidence that I am pretiring a damn good nurse. I am smarter, kinder, better, more aware, and stronger than I planned to be. And even though my heart broke when I walked away, it was time. 

A couple months of perspective has really brought to light the toll that sustained intensity like that of my job can take.  It necessarily should have a short life or it will cost you some of yours. A typical day in the emergency department has huge swings from high to low, which can make you an impatient, detached, compartmentalized person as a means of self-preservation. Factor in the dysfunction and cripple of a pandemic, well, human beings aren't made to do things like that as a career. A month or six if it's real desperate, sure, but a career? Nah.

Pretirement is a welcome change. A slow, boring, empty change. It's got its own sweet torture, where every day feels like Sunday. Inconsequential things like if the hermit crab will show up out front become extremely important parts of the day. I am burdened by how many chicks the hens are having and tossing bread that costs $7 a loaf out to them in the morning. I spend an inordinate amount of focus on hydrating. I brush my hair once a week. A trip to the grocery store makes me need a drink. I've made huge improvements in my crossword game. I did a very complicated paint by number. Having only impulsive things to do has brought peace, and that peace has saved me from a chronic distress that I didn't even know I'd developed. Every nurse in the world deserves a pretirement phase after the Coronavirus shit we've been through.

I miss my job. I miss my work fam. But pretirement is just what the doctor ordered. 

Dad

He was so strong, even in his 60s, that I was sure, despite his lifetime of smoking and daily drinking, he would make it through. Sure, he'd puke and feel miserable, he'd lose weight from the chemo and lose his hair, but in 6 months, he'd be a new man with an external bladder. As he put it, "it's just plumbing." I mean, bladder cancer has a survival rate of 80%, and if anyone was built to survive, it was Dad.

But strong has nothing to do with it. Nor does effort. Just days before he died, he was hauling his wasted body up a flight of stairs with no handrail because he was working to regain his strength. It turns out he had no platelets, no red blood cells, and pneumonia, and even the fatigue that comes with one of those conditions, let alone all three, couldn't kill his will. When he went to the hospital for a check up, his sister-friend Barb and Susan, the girlfriend he refused to call girlfriend, the woman he would have called wife if he hadn't been so burned by his last divorce, used an office chair to roll him to the car. Barb told me he couldn't remember how to get to the hospital from his house, along roads he'd driven his entire life. And when he moved to the wheelchair to go inside, his pants fell to his ankles because he was easily 70 pounds lighter than he was when he was diagnosed. 

Susan kept us in the loop, even though I don't think he really wanted us in it. He'd rather we preserve an image of him as the Captain, the man with the cover and the concealed carry license, the guy who was as steady in a stick-up as he was while cleaning his own mother's bottom at her end. He was totally unfazed, and while that hurt deeply when I was a kid and he was a distant dad, I grew to appreciate that part of him the most as an adult. It was a tough lesson to learn to have no expectation of people you love, particularly a parent, but it freed me from hurt and disappointment more than I even realize. 

We didn't talk often, but he did write me letters and forward invites to the annual family reunion and keep me posted on deaths and births and marriages. The last few years, he'd trek to Kentucky to bring us some of his homemade deer jerky and a $100 bill for Christmas. When we were together for our annual summer visit for 4th of July, a holiday he made matter, we'd get a fire going and he'd make me laugh. Our politics couldn't have been farther apart, nor could our religious beliefs, but somehow we had a lot in common. He told great stories and got a kick out of little things. He loved the outside. He was a smart ass, with a sideways smirk and a twinkle in his eye that was always looking for a good time. For me, he was that parent that you look at and go, "oh, that's why I'm like this." 

I value my own physical strength more than physical beauty because of him. I'm not afraid to try things that are traditionally reserved for men because of him. I don't feel anyone else is responsible for my happiness or life choices but me because of him. I married the man I married because of him. I like solitude. I owe the parts of myself that are the biggest, the most pronounced, the most valuable to me, to him. 

When I got to the hospital to be with him, after Mack drove me 24 hours straight, I gave him a hug and said, "Wow, I didn't expect you to take Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death so hard, Dad." He peeped his eyes just to give me the glare that was our playful exchange. His hug felt amazing, warm and safe despite the fact that I outweighed him by 30 pounds. I sat with him and held his hand, and when he opened his eyes and saw me and I smiled behind my mask, he said, "Sorry." I don't know what it was for, I can imagine a million things, but I didn't want to hear it. I told him, "Don't you dare, you have nothing to be sorry for. You are an awesome dad and I love you." He responded with, "I love you too baby," and closed his eyes. 

The next three days are burned into my memory, and I keep reliving each moment over and over at the most inopportune times. It's sweet agony. I want to hang on to them, but I need to move past them. Our relationship was so much more than those three days, but those three days were sacred, intimate, intense days of love and fear and courage and laughter. Shannon sent a video of Nynie on the beach saying, "Love you so much, Grampa Greg," and when I showed it to him, he smiled the last smile I saw him muster. I had to call my step-sister Christie and give her the news, and my heart broke again hearing hers shatter. Leiah came to be with him also, and we sat on her bed in the hotel one night eating peanut butter pie right from the box with plastic spoons and relishing how lucky we've been in life lately, aside from the event bringing us together. When I said good night to her the next night, I had to tell her to cover her eyes because they were looking too much like Dad's and she was going to make me cry. 

They did a CT scan on Dad, which showed more cancer in his lungs, liver, and kidneys, maybe even in his brain but they didn't scan that part. I held his hand when the doctor came in to tell us the news, which we knew was bad thanks to the gift of summation by his excellent nurse... who turned out to be a relative, of course. Dad was as unfazed as ever, but I did see the tiniest tear appear on the lower lid of his right eye. He kept his eyes closed and brought it back into himself, stuffing it in the bottle he kept deep in his belly where he shoved all his intense feelings. I inherited that from him, but my bottle is admittedly leaky. He asked the doctor how long he had, and was given days to weeks. Dad held up his index finger and said, "One." I said, "Are you giving us one more day, you have one day?" He nodded. 

I immediately moved into action mode. "Where do you want to go? Where do you want to spend your one day?" He wouldn't answer until the next day. I guess it needed to sink in. His action meant dying, and I guess he needed to get square with that before giving out orders. The next morning, when Leiah and I walked into his hospital room, he said, "I'm ready to go home, I reckon." I told him we could do that, but I wanted him to know that the getting there part was going to suck. At one point, while talking about the stress of transport, I said, "If we can make people who've had their legs blown off tolerate a helicopter ride, we can get him comfortable." Dad piped up and said, "No fuckin' helicopters." The room erupted in laughter. I'm not sure if his trip via copter to Indy in August inspired the strong reaction or if it was the bill on his table for that ride for nearly $40,000 that did it. 

Helping Dad die was such a surreal experience that I was so grateful when the nursing element came in. Something familiar that I could cling to. A role I felt human in. A tether to this world. A distraction from myself. Turning him. Giving medications and tracking the times and doses. Checking his pulse and counting his respirations. Monitoring his urinary output. There is so much strength in caring for others. 

Friends came to visit, and the room filled with laughter at some of the stories we heard. It also filled with sadness as the severity of his disappearance hit people in the face. Barb was an angel who manifest miracles in the times of Covid. I fell in love with Susan for loving him so much and so delicately during this whole process. My cousin Kristin brought all her mom energy and pointed us on the path to the right decisions without telling us what to do. Leiah and Christie were sources of joy and comfort, as was Shannon even though she was stuck in Florida. We were a bunch of women helping a man do an impossible thing for him. 

He died late on a Monday, although not pronounced until early Tuesday morning. The nurse in me couldn't help but look at the clock when I saw the last pulse run through his neck. Time of death, per the microwave clock, 11:29pm. He always used to tell Susan "10 o'clock, lights out." He stayed up late to hang out with us a little longer, I guess. 

I had been giving him morphine and Ativan around the clock, but despite the meds, he started sweating from breathing so hard and fast. He was taking huge gulps of air that clattered his teeth. I called the Hospice nurse and asked him to come to the house. We gave him a big dose of morphine, and after about 20 minutes his breathing slowed. The nurse left. We sat with him. Then his breathing got slower and slower, still gulps, still clattering his teeth. And eventually it stopped. We held him, said goodbyes and I love yous, and Leiah and I fell into our husbands. I looked over at Susan, whispering in his ear, and my heart broke into 1000 more pieces. I still have no idea how she didn't die in that moment too. 

Christie had the good sense to break out the peach Crown Royal. We sipped a shot and waited for the nurse to come back to pronounce him and the funeral home to arrive. I rubbed a little taste on Dad's lower lip. Barb told an amazing story about giving farm animals shots and we laughed again. But the room was notably absent his laughter. He was gone. I still can't believe it. 

Something Concrete

Being at home all the time really makes you recognize all the annoying things about the place you live. For me, it's been the driveway.

The driveway has been sinking since we moved in. Pulling in from the sidewalk started to make the car go PLUNK! about a year ago. Mack band-aided it for the past year with a paver we put in the 4" drop by the sidewalk. Alas, the paver is now chunks of moveable rock and the car is PLUNK!ing again. This time the car is not a Chevy Volt. It is a Tesla. It is Mack's fancy Tesla. 

And now we're getting a new driveway.

Picking a driveway is seriously harder than it looks. A couple years ago I consulted with a landscaper for a yard design, and she sucked so bad she suggested bringing the driveway into the yard. I hate large swaths of concrete, and I had no idea why she was suggesting we move the driveway into the view of the front porch. Well, I still think her idea is stupid, but I have a new sympathy for figuring out a driveway concept that looks good. It's frigging hard.

I thought about keeping it simple and just redoing the whole driveway, but see the part above where I hate large swaths of concrete. Then I was going to get that concrete grate looking stuff that the grass grows up in, but it looks way more modern than my 100-year-old house. Then I started looking at ribbon driveways, a driveway concept I'd seen but had no idea had a name. They seemed like an option, so I called my Do It Guy, Kyle, and he got to work.

Of course, because it's a home improvement project, we found a problem. The dirt under the driveway by the house was wet. Did we have a sewer leak? Did we have a sprinkler problem? What the heck? Kyle climbed under the house and dug a hole that could've been a grave for 10 people trying to find an answer. The answer was just wet dirt. We had to delay a bit to let it dry out, and then, business time. 

While Kyle and his crew broke their backs, I had to figure out what to do with the middle of my ribbon. I went down a driveway rabbit hole on Pinterest and decided I'd fill it with rock. Then I decided I'd fill some of those gaps in the rock with plants. I'd make a driveway garden!

Maybe one day my love of gardens will turn my thumb green.

Grateful that we'd bought a pick up truck, I headed to the stone store, where I was confronted with La Paz cobble and Yosemite cobble and Sierra cobble, large cobble and small cobble and pebble cobble. Jesus, why is there so much cobble to choose from! I ended up buying 3 tons of Yosemite cobble. Yep, the same stuff I loaded up on during our trip to the Sierras earlier this year for free cost me hundreds of dollars. As they loaded the pallet into the truck bed, I wondered if that old girl would break in half. Luckily she didn't. That'd be what I'd do unloading all this damn rock and placing it in the middle of the damn ribbon. 

Since we have nothing else to do, I popped up the sunshade so I wouldn't burn to death and started taking armloads of rock to the driveway. I had to buy dirt to put under it so it wouldn't just be a place to break your ankle, and so my garden could have a chance, so I also hauled about 500 pounds of that over. I put on my podcasts, zoned out, and 8 hours and a broken body later, behold.... a driveway masterpiece. 

I'll be shocked if the plants survive, but isn't it just the cutest driveway you've ever seen for now? If it's not, shut up because I'll never walk the same and it needs to be worth it.

The Interesting Times

Breaking news: we're still in a pandemic. The coronavirus continues to keep restaurants in take-out-only mode and masks are such a feature of my face that I've got mask-ne. It's acne... from a mask! We get Door Dash a couple times a day and have developed a real Amazon ordering problem. The toilet paper/hand sanitizer madness has subsided and you can buy those things as needed again. There's no where to go and nothing to do, and when you walk down the street and people see you coming, they'll cross the street to keep 6 feet of clearance. Okay, that social distancing part I love and want to keep forever, but the rest is tired and annoying. Interesting, huh?

Just a couple gals getting a Covid antibody test. I was hoping Mom's sickness this Christmas was Covid so she could exist in the world. No such luck.

Bubba, Lee, and Mateo are staying with us, and Shahin, Tom, and Laila are next door. The proximity of family spread across two neighboring properties has made our bubble a little bigger than most people's, and I am so grateful for that. Mateo is about to be a big brother in a few months, but for the time being he is relishing being the center of six adults otherwise boring and alcoholic seltzer soaked worlds. 

He's really into Grossery Gang, so much so he had it as his birthday theme. He's got moldy nachos, a soda with worm straws, fries with vomit? on them, a tub of discolored popcorn, and about 100 other small, squishy rotten food items that he totes around in a box and plays with all the time. He never lets me, or any other women he ropes into playing with him, be anything but Bagel Lady.

That boy comes up with the nuttiest things. He is A LOT, never gets tired, and sometimes I find myself bickering with him like I'd bicker with my sisters because I AM MATURE. But most of the time he is being a bright spot in the middle of this boredom. Mack bought him a book of stories and one of them is about a donkey that wants to sing like grasshoppers, but since it's an old storybook, they call the donkey an ass. Mateo loves being allowed to say ass, and that's the only reason he likes that story.

In non-Mateo news, I've spent my free time planting a garden in the container boxes Scott and I built before this all started. The cabbage worms are trying to sap my will to cultivate food, but I finally caved and dusted them with Sevin and I think I may just have the upper hand now. My friend Annie started making mead from scratch. Mack and Erik, Annie's boy, built automatic weapons. Men and women respond to global crises in such different ways. 

  

Zoe, Bubba's dog, is also living here, and she has developed an understandable fascination with the chickens but a really bizarre friendship with Lemondrop. She bursts out the back door and acts like she's herding the chickens, except they're already in their coop. She runs from one side to the other, getting all up in the dusty bushes and getting filthy. Then she'll come inside and chew on herself from itching because she is not a chicken and cannot do the dust they way they do. 

Oh, the gorgeousness. Those asses. 

Mack and I have managed to do a couple of escapes, one to camp at Mammoth Pool in the Sierras and one to visit my family. Mammoth Pool was beautiful, but Mack and I had a moment when we wanted to kill each other because I insisted we take the long way home from the waterfall to the campsite and the long way ended up being 8 hours of nervous off-roading in a giant pick up truck. This is only about the 10th time I've ambitiously led us on an adventure that ended up being a scary ass drive that takes forever. 

It started out so perfectly.

Listen, Google Maps confirmed this was the way.

Worth it.

Beautiful campsite right by a little creek.

He finally forgave me after a pot of chili and the serenity of a campfire. 

The trip back home was way too fast. I had to hit Kentucky, then up to Dad's for a day, cram in some aunts, uncles, and cousins, meet the newest member of the tribe, Crew, and then get back home, all without catching or giving anyone a deadly virus. The fear of travel is real when the lovies are at the receiving end of it, but I couldn't not see them, especially with this threat looming over us and no visitors allowed in hospitals. 

2020: bringing the campfire hangout back cuz you have to be outside and social distanced!

Worth it.

Don't know how these teenagers are making it thru this mess with a smile on their faces. 

Pandemic baby! Welcome Crew! Do you know how hard it was to not be able to hold this fresh baby?

We still have no idea when this might all end. When we might be able to hug and kiss again. When we'll see smiles from strangers and celebrate birthdays again. When we can travel to the places we're drooling over again. When we can go to weddings and hold the babies. When this interesting will take a turn toward normal. But until then, we're washing our hands, being good recluses, and being grateful we're dodging the invisible bullet.