Moomins in my mailbox

this morning was my last on rotation at the hospital...now, 7 days of..???  i always have great ambitions for the days off but catching up things i've had to let "slide" while on rotation is pretty darn daunting.  still, today was a good mail day:  letter from friend Iola (actually it's "Lola" but when we first met the font on the name-badges was hard for me to distinguish "I" from "L" so there was some confusion), and Michael sent some neat envelopes he'd made while he had downtime at his conference in NYC.  and i got me some new stamps!   i like colorful stamps. 

 i also got a postcard from Finland and it had awesome Moomin stamps!

my rotation was pretty rough.  we were short-staffed, again.  i found out that the ambulance rotation for trauma cases was shifted to coincide with my team's schedule.  "you guys are the best."  well, fuck all!  spread that shit out!  i'm so damn tired AND how about more $$$$.   *sigh*  one of my co-workers has been "off"  mentally for the last year and this morning i think he's had a stroke.  he invests his focus and energies so strangely it leads to him bogging down and productivity in his department approaches nil.  not sure how i'm going to resolve this......i know he's had his drug-addict stepson and grandchildren move in with him.  i think it is exhaustion, mostly.   he has 30+ years of experience but today he had a peripheral blood smear to read from a chronic lymphocytic leukemia patient and i swear it was like it was the first time he'd ever dealt with this kind of problem. (the abnormal lymphocytes are fragile and rupture on the glass....looks like chrysanthemums (imo)) so there is a distortion in the differential counts (i.e., the ratio of lymphocytes to other white blood cell components will be underestimated since the burst cells are not counted).   it was......almost bizarre.   hopefully and prayerfully, i will figure some graceful way to take part of his workload (i'm already passed neck deep!!) and sort or re-train him.  i think he doubts his own judgement and over-invests his attention into every little thing.   

Just finished Marathon a film by Biju Viswanath about the relationship between American poet-laureate William Meredith, Jr. and Richard Harteis.  I get the feeling this could have been a great film.  It was just too graceless.  Too often in the film, I was thinking, "here is a point where it could become something greater"……these points all pass into disappointment.   I just think the folks involved weren’t the ones to do the story justice.  I admit, knowing what Harteis looks like:  I had to suppress a laugh at whom they picked to play the part of Harteis:  memories are indeed polished in the remembering.   Now, that was an unkind thing to say.  I’ll try to be better about that……….