Happy Birthday, Mom!

Today's my mother's birthday. She's 82; next week, my father will be 85. I called her this morning and sang the Happy Birthday song to her, and we talked about the trip. She's really looking forward to it, although she's grateful to be traveling with my sister.

She was originally disappointed that I wouldn't be in Philly for her birthday, but now she'll be in Reno not long after!

Assorted Treats

Gary and I just got back from seeing Ratatouille, the new Pixar movie. We thoroughly enjoyed it, and recommend it highly. It's very clever, so much so that we wondered if kids would be able to follow most of it, although a little girl in our row seemed to be having a wonderful time.

We also enjoyed being in efficient air conditioning, since Reno hit an all-time-high of 108 degrees today. Our house has AC, but the theater's was better. The nice thing about being in the desert, though, is that the temperature drops when the sun goes down, so it's always cool enough to sleep.

I learned today that my sister and mother are coming to visit! They're arriving two weeks from today and staying until the 30th. My sister hasn't been here for three years, and it's been even longer for my mother; we didn't know if Mom would ever feel up to traveling again, so I'm really thrilled that she's coming out. We've changed a lot of things in the house since she's been here, and she's never met Figaro or Bali. Her activities will be limited -- she needs a wheelchair to go anywhere, although she can manage stairs -- but at least she'll get a change of scenery.

My sister's planning to bring their wheelchair. Gary and I could rent one, and of course there are wheelchairs in airports, but Liz is worried about getting stranded without one. I think wheelchairs can probably be checked at the gate, right? Anyway, she's going to look into all of that and let us know if we need to rent one. And we're planning to get a stool or chair for the shower in the guest bathroom. Our stairs have a landing halfway down, and we may put a chair there so she can sit and rest if she needs to.

Gary's pleased that he has a good excuse to subscribe to the Times' daily crossword puzzle: he and my mother and sister enjoy doing crosswords together, although I've never acquired a taste for them. But my sister will play Scrabble with me; my mother finds it too slow, and Gary won't play with me because he says I always win (which isn't true: he's an excellent player and has beaten me lots of times).

Mom and Liz leave right before Gary and I leave for Mythcon, so I'm going to miss three weeks at the hospital. After next week, though, I'll have volunteered 500 hours, and that seems like a good time to take a break.

Finally, please don't forget that the next Carnival of Hope deadline is a week from today: Thursday June 12 at 5:00 PM PDT.

Cats! Always appropriate!

Happy Fourth, everybody. We're going to spend a quiet day at home, and then have dinner and watch fireworks with friends. One of the friends lives near the park where the fireworks will be, so we can watch them from her backyard. This suits me and Gary just fine, since we've grown less and less enchanted with crowds as we've gotten older.

I have to admit that I'm ambivalent about the Fourth of July. Part of it is that I don't like loud noises. Now that I live in the driest state of the country, which is currently on extreme fire alert, another part of it is worry about wildfires set off by idiots who want to blow things up by themselves. And although I'm profoundly grateful to have been born in a country with privileges like public libraries, indoor plumbing, and civil liberties (however besieged), another part of it has to do with my suspicion of knee-jerk patriotism, especially right now. Blowing things up and singing songs about "the rockets' red glare" seems cruelly ironic at the moment. I know it's a fine idea, in the middle of all our mistakes, to celebrate the many things this country has gotten right, but the Fourth still sends me into an acute state of cognitive dissonance. I can't help it; it's how I'm wired.

The priest who taught my preaching class once told us that she was deeply uncomfortable with American flags in church. She believed in separation of church and state, and also believed that patriotism too often becomes a form of idolatry, not to mention divisive us/them thinking. The Gospel calls us to care for all people, regardless of nationality; the baptismal covenant calls us to pledge allegiance to Christ, not to a particular set of geopolitical borders. She was as grateful as I am to be American, but her first loyalty was to the cross, not to the flag, and conflating them struck her as a distinctly dangerous enterprise.

It is, of course, one of the benefits of being American that I can even say these things. I don't for a moment want to minimize that.

But, as you can surely tell, I'm really bad at patriotic pieties. So let's retreat into cute pictures of cats, shall we?

Here's a feline still life. It's very unusual to be able to get all three beasts in the same shot; it only happens when they're sleeping or comatose, as they are here.

I have to say that I've become a big fan of the digital camera, which allows you to take (and erase) lots of bad shots without wasting film.

Here's Bali the Beautiful. Doesn't he have pretty golden eyes? I like this picture because there's some decent contrast; he looks like an actual animal, instead of a black furry blob. Harley and the Figgle are much easier to photograph, because they have clear markings.

Although this set of shots included a lot of bad ones of Harley, who kept moving!

Exhibit A: Blurry shot of cat grooming himself. Quoth Gary: "It's not out of focus: it's art!" And I like this picture because Harley looks so irascible, as if he's flipping us the feline bird.

I should try to come up with a cute caption for this, but I'll leave that to my readers.

Here's noble Harley, posing on the ledge that separates Gary's loft study from the staircase. I took this picture to show how his fur hangs over the edge, which I always find particularly adorable.

But hey, I'm his mom, so I'm biased.

Sometimes he lies completely flat on the ledge, looking like a flatcat. I didn't get any even remotely good pictures of that, though.

This one just cracks me up. He looks like a tribble.

The caption for this would be something like, "Oh, you're going downstairs? You're going to get me yummy treats? So what's taking you so long, and why are you pointing that little box at me? Silly human: that isn't a can of catfood! It isn't even a catnip mouse!"

And, saving the best for last, here's an ultra-closeup of Figaro. Gary loves this picture.

And here's my caption: "Look, ma! The sky's completely full of laser dots, only they're all kinds of colors, not just red, and they keep falling! Can I go outside and chase them, please please please? Or maybe I don't want to, because of the scary noises. If I stay here, will you keep me safe from the noises, and play with me with the red laser dot?"

Enjoy your fireworks, everybody!

Grand Rounds! New Office!

This week's Grand Rounds went up this morning, although I'm only getting around to announcing it now. It's a very lively and readable edition, and I'm delighted to be included.

Gary and I spent several hours today on campus, prepping for the office move, which is now scheduled for Monday. The university movers will move furniture (including loaded filing cabinets) and boxed books, but won't move computers or phones. We have to move our own computers; we aren't supposed to touch the phones. The Secret Campus Phone Police do that, I guess. So Gary boxed up books while I schlepped portable stuff (framed posters, chairs, a set of small tables, various vases, a bulletin board) to the new office. I'd originally thought I wouldn't have the key until Monday, but the previous tenant, one of our part-time lecturers, had already vacated -- although the movers still have to haul her filing cabinet and bookcase out of there -- so I got the key today.

I'm on the same floor, but at the other end of the building. My old office was shaped like the state of Nevada, which was charming but a bit difficult to work with, furniture-wise. The new office is a boring old rectangle, which is much more practical. The old office was near several classrooms and the soda machine, which made for lots of noisy traffic. The new office is in a quiet bay occupied only by faculty. The view from my old office was slightly nicer -- I had a gorgeous view of a huge evergreen tree -- but the view from the new one is pretty, too, with a similar tree partly visible through the ivy growing around and over the window.

Desks and computer tables stay in current offices, which means I'll have to transport the contents of desk drawers on Thursday, when Gary and I should be able to finish up on our end. The furniture I'm inheriting has some dings and scratches, but on the plus side, the computer table has a very handy pullout keyboard drawer with a nifty mousepad. The previous tenant left me a nice desk chair and a great footrest for use at the computer. I only have two outlets in this office, rather than three, but I think I've figured out how to arrange the furniture so it won't matter.

The previous tenant also left behind her computer, so our admin assistant unplugged it and moved it for me so I could move my own in there, so the guy who's inheriting my office will be able to move his on Thursday. There's undoubtedly someone waiting to move into his old office: it's a giant set of dominos. Whenever an office becomes vacant -- my new one was the home of someone who retired last year -- the chair of the department goes down the list of faculty, in order of seniority, to see if anyone wants to move to another space. It usually turns into a complicated game of musical offices.

Everything's incredibly dirty, in both the old and new offices. Gary and I will undoubtedly go through several bottles of Fantastik and rolls of paper towels trying to mop up the dust, and I don't think we'll be able to get all of it.

So it was a productive day, and I'm feeling better about the move now that most of the hard work is behind us. Unpacking and decorating are fun, and shopping for a loveseat for the new space will be, too: I'm determined to have comfy seating for students during office hours, and for myself when I need to read papers between classes.

And it was fun to be on campus. When we went to the bookstore to buy more packing tape, I saw a former student who told me how much he loved Shelter, and who really seemed to mean it. Since he's one of the most talented writers I've taught, that meant a lot to me. One of our graduate students passed along a compliment from a former student of mine who's a current student of hers. I had nice chats with several colleagues.

November is still tied up in plot tangles, but when I kvetched about this to Bernie Goodman at the wedding this weekend, he said that the quickest way to get out of writer's block on one project is to start another. I just may take his advice.

To Stress, Or Not to Stress?

Our story thus far: As I reported in a previous post, three years ago I had a stress-echo test after some months of mild chest pain. I was told that the test was normal and that I had a very healthy heart; the chest pain, we all decided, was GERD. I've recently started having the chest pain again, and I figured it was GERD (a logical assumption, since I went off my GERD meds after a study showing that they increase the risk of osteoporosis, which I'm at risk for anyway), but this time it's been combined with fatigue, a classic cardiac symptom in women . . . but also a classic sign of depression, allergies, and sleep disorder, all of which I also have.

But I went to my doctor for a checkup and mentioned all of this, and she said, "Let's do a stress echo," and I told her I'd had one and it was normal, and she looked at the results and said, "No, it wasn't normal. You had some ST-segment depression" -- which can indicate narrowing of arteries -- "but they decided it wasn't significant because your exercise tolerance was so good."

So I had another stress echo this morning, after paying my *cough, cough* $416.60 copay.

Note: I'm a healthy weight, have good cholesterol levels, have never had high blood pressure, don't smoke or drink, and exercise six days a week. However, my mother's had a stroke and my father's had quadruple bypass, so my risk is increased because of family history.

This time, my EKG was evidently pretty wonky. The PA was using words like "profound" and "globalized." The ST depression was 2-3 millimeters; T waves were "flipped." I'm not sure exactly what any of that means, but I gather it's not great. There was other stuff going on that I was even less able to follow; the PA and the two techs -- all of us crowded into a tiny room with an examining table, the ultrasound machine, the treadmill, and the EKG cart -- kept pointing things out to each other and muttering. The PA would gesture to something on the EKG, say, "What worries me is," and then go off into incomprehensible medicalese. I'm better at med-speak than many laypeople, since I volunteer at a hospital, but I can't follow arcane cardiac lingo. Occasionally he lapsed into plain English of the "Wow, look at that!" variety, which isn't the kind of plain English you want to hear during a medical exam.

The PA and both techs had responded with eye-rolling and/or raised eyebrows when I said that I hadn't been told about the ST depression last time. "Well," said one of the techs, "every doctor has his own way of doing things," but I could tell that she was being diplomatic and thought I should have been informed.

Mind you, I still didn't have any chest pain or shortness of breath on the treadmill; one of the corollaries of Murphy's Law is that all medical symptoms vanish in the doctor's office. (I've never had SOB, but the pain does sometimes start pinging during a workout.) The ultrasound tech said my heart looked absolutely fine, although she hadn't been able to get good pictures of one portion of the heart before the treadmill test. And the PA told me that 30% of women have false positives on this test.

But given my symptoms -- especially the fatigue -- and the family history, the PA clearly thought I needed more testing. When I asked him what would happen next, he said that the cardiologist would decide that, but that I'd probably be sent for a cardiac work-up, or maybe for a thalium stress test to get a better picture than the ultrasound had provided. And he said that given the family history, the cardiologist might even decide to "cut to the chase" and send me to the cath lab.

I said, "Can you compare this test to the one three years ago to see if it's worse?"

One of the techs said, "Oh, no, we don't have it," and then, "Oh, well, I guess we could get it out of storage." But no one responded to that with any urgency.

Wouldn't a comparison be useful? What am I missing here?

So I got dressed, and the PA went to find the cardiologist. And then the PA came back and said, "Well, he says it's probably a false positive and you should go home. But he'll append a note to the report saying that if you or your primary are still concerned, you might want to consider the thalium test."

Huh?

I don't get it. How can the PA and the cardiologist have such different takes on the same results? I'm also frustrated by the fact that the decision of what to do next was handed back to me and my primary: hey, guys, I was sent here because you're the experts, okay? I guess my primary has the result of the earlier test and can do the comparison, but wouldn't a cardiologist be better at that?

So I have a call in to my primary, who'll call back, I'm sure, sometime this century. Meanwhile, my gut instinct is that I should probably have the thalium test just to be safe; the PA even said, "Look, if you're nervous, press for it." But we'll see what my doctor says.

I have a long history of having vaguely alarming symptoms, and then having tests which produce vaguely alarming results, and then having gobs and gobs of ever-more-expensive tests which show that there's nothing wrong. This isn't how I want to spend my summer. But if something's wrong with my heart, I want to know about it.

On the plus side, watching an ultrasound of your own heart is seriously cool. The ultrasound tech agreed with me; she said, "This stuff blows me away." It's nice to be around people who love their work!

Back Home

We're back. We had a good time, but I'm exhausted, largely from having woken up at 5:30 this morning and then driven 250 miles. But being tired is good, because it means I'll get to bed early, which will make getting up for my 7:30 a.m. stress-echo a lot easier.

Random notes:

We had a very pleasant evening with my friend Ellen, her grown nephew Nate, and her son Paul, who's three and adorable: extremely bright, verbal, and energetic. It was great to see them, and Ellen fixed us a lovely dinner. I've always admired her efficiency, but watching her parent a three year old -- and she's trying to adopt another child from the Ukraine -- ratcheted the admiration up to awe, especially since she's doing all this as a single mom. (She's also one of the founding partners of her law firm.) She has a nanny, and she has a lot of help from family . . . but still!

I could never handle the stress of raising a kid. I just don't have the patience or physical stamina for it, and I don't think I would have when I was younger, either. Visiting friends with young children always a) deepens my enormous respect for parents (including my own!) and b) reinforces my gut sense that I made a very wise decision in not having kids myself.

We stayed Friday night at Ellen's and then drove down to the Sofitel Hotel in Redwood City, where we stayed on Saturday. Rina had put together beautiful gift bags for wedding guests at the hotel: several books, chocolate, different kinds of tea, and some bath items. Gary and I were touched and impressed. I wasn't nearly that thoughtful or organized when we got married!

The wedding was great: a short, simple ceremony led by Richard Lupoff, who -- among more traditional vows -- had Rina and Jacob recite the Green Lantern Oath:

"In brightest day, in blackest night,
no evil shall escape my sight!
Let those who worship evil's might,
beware my power . . . Green Lantern's light!"
-Alan Scott, the Golden Age Green Lantern
[1943, credited to Alfred Bester]

Thanks to Gary for tracking this down for me. Have you ever heard these lines at a wedding? I hadn't, either, but they certainly added a distinctive touch!

The wedding and reception were held in the San Mateo County History Museum, which is in an old courthouse. The ceremony was on the stairway; the dinner tables were set up in the second-floor courtroom. Rina and Jacob sat at the judge's table, with the wedding party at the attorneys' tables and the rest of us at round tables set up for the occasion. The food was really good (pan Asian, not the standard rubber chicken), and the cake was fabulous: iced with stars, and decorated on top with a toy spaceship and a round plastic planet. We didn't bring a camera, but lots of people were taking pictures, so I hope I'll be able to post one at some point.

We had good conversations with a variety of folks, including Bernie Goodman, to whom I'm forever grateful for telling Jacob to read "Gestella" (which is how the idea of a story collection got started). It was a lovely event and a thoroughly good time.

Today we got up entirely too early -- Gary slept later than I did, since he didn't have a coffee deadline -- and drove for a very long time. We stopped in Berkeley for brunch and in Sacramento for gas, but it was still a long drive. And tomorrow promises to be a long day too.

The cats are delighted to see us again, and it's mutual.

I hope everyone reading this had a good weekend!

Weekend Away

We're going to San Francisco this weekend. Tonight, we'll be staying with my college roommate Ellen in the city; she adopted an adorable little boy from Russia a few years ago -- he'll be four in September -- and we haven't seen them for a while, so we're looking forward to it.

As you can see, Harley was a big help with packing. Here he is lying on top of Gary's briefcase, as if to say, "Now make sure you have all your toiletries before you put anything in here!"

Tomorrow, we'll be checking into a hotel in San Mateo and then going to a wedding. Jacob Weisman and Rina Elson (my editor from Tachyon and his beloved) are getting married, and it should be a splendid time. Jill Roberts, the managing editor of Tachyon, will be "Bridesmaid of the Apocalypse." Love it! Lots of other SF folks will be on hand, since this is also the weekend of Westercon, which we aren't attending.

Speaking of SF, a discerning reader gave Shelter five stars on Amazon. Her review nicely balances the one from PW, although I suspect that plenty of opinions will fall in the middle. Thank you, Eleanor Skinner!

Sunday is when things get tricky, because I have to wake up really early to drink coffee. See, I've been feeling unusually tired and having various bits o' mild chest pain; these symptoms could be caused by a million things (GERD, allergies, depression, etc., etc.), but my doctor wants to rule out the most dangerous possibility, so she's sending me for a stress echo on Monday. I had the same test three years ago, when I was mega-freaked-out from CPE and church issues and having the same symptoms, and I was told the results were absolutely normal. (Before somebody asks about thyroid, I had bloodwork in September, and that was absolutely normal too.) I told my doctor that, and she looked at the old stress echo and said, "Well, no. You had some ST segment depression; they decided it didn't mean anything because your exercise tolerance was so good, but there was an abnormality." When I got home from her office, I hit Google and learned that ST segment depression on an ECG can indicate narrowed blood vessels. I still don't think that's what's going on -- I don't have any risk factors for heart disease -- but, anyway, I'm having another stress echo on Monday. Better safe than sorry, and all that.

But the test's at the absolutely ungodly hour of 7:30 a.m., and I can't have any caffeine for twenty-four hours beforehand. And my doctor warned me sternly that they really mean this. And there's no way I can drive home from San Mateo without coffee. So I'll have to get up at 6:00 or something on Sunday to get my two big cups o' coffee in before the cutoff.

I don't know if the San Mateo hotel has wireless, so I may not be able to blog this weekend. But I'll post Monday, if not sooner, with the results of the test.

Have a good weekend, everybody!

Change of Shift

The latest edition is up over at Nursing Link. Thanks for including me, PixelRN!

More on the New Home Office Setup

Lee asked in an e-mail how the home office project is going. (The work-office move hasn't started yet.) Here's a photo of the new computer cart, all nicely loaded up. Gary thinks this looks like Darth Vader's PC, and calls the photo "Ergo Scary," but it's certainly skiffy looking -- and comfortable!

Speaking of the workstation: I'm still stumped on the book, but I did get some work done on one of my fall syllabi this morning.

Having the terminal off the main desk gives the cats even more room to cavort. Yesterday, I left a half-finished glass of water there, only to find the cats drinking it. Why do cats love human water so much? They have their own water, but noooooo: they have to drink ours. Of course, my study's upstairs, and I can see them thinking, "Oh, look, they're giving us water up here so we don't have to go down to the kitchen!" But that doesn't explain why, if there's a fresh bowl of water on the kitchen floor and two water glasses on the dinner table, a few yards away, the cats will pick the water glasses every time.

Figaro has followed Bali's bad example on this habit. Both of them are especially smitten with ice cubes, although given the choice between fresh cat water with cubes or lukewarm human water without, they'll still opt for the latter. It must be a status thing.

As you can see, they'll stick their heads all the way into the glass to get at a bit of water. We keep expecting one of them to get a water glass jammed on his head and to start running around the house with it.

Here's a close-up of Figgy. I wanted to get one from the front, but he wandered away before I could. You can see in the previous photo what a long, lithe animal he is. His head looks slightly foxish, I think. Bali's much more ursine, and goes by the nickname Little Bear.

Harley, for some reason, elected not to drink from this water glass; he's not as settled in the habit as the other two are, anyway. Plus, his head's bigger, so I'm not sure he could fit his snoot in there with such a low water level.

Bali's other dietary peculiarity is that he adores carrots, and demands tribute of carrot peelings when Gary's fixing the carrot sticks he puts in my lunch every day. Bali also likes yams. We had a cat when I was growing up who liked string beans and spinach, but I haven't heard of cats eating carrots.

Or maybe he just likes the color orange. Remember Fledgling, the mask I made last summer? It's been living on top of a bookcase for almost a year, and Bali hasn't bothered it, although he climbs up there all the time. But now that the mask's hanging on the wall next to my desk, he won't leave it alone.

Of course, the mask has always included orange, so that can't be the reason for his sudden interest. I suspect the real culprit is the fact that the mask's hanging from a pipe cleaner. Bali adores pipe cleaners: Gary twists them into toy mice for him, and Bali carries them around with him, often dropping them into bed with us. So I suspect he's really thinking, "There's a toy mouse behind that plaster thing, and I have to flush it out of hiding!"

Expletives Undeleted

One side effect of volunteering in an emergency room is that I hear a lot of cursing, either because patients are venting about their conditions or because they're being deliberately nasty to staff. The first category doesn't bother me at all; when patients cover their mouths and apologize for cursing in front of the chaplain, my standard line is, "If God really cared about bad words, we'd all be charcoal briquettes." To my mind, the apology is sufficient evidence that the patient meant no offense.

The second category's trickier. I'm generally inclined to see foul language as evidence of illness (especially when the patient's clearly suffering from a psychiatric disorder, or is under the influence of alcohol or other drugs). In those cases, the language is a symptom. Volunteers being trained to work in the ED are cautioned not to take anything personally, and patient profanity seems to me to be a prime example of that directive.

On one recent shift, we had a young patient (early twenties) who was having a psychotic episode and had been put in four-point restraints. Every other word was "F***!" I felt like I was on an episode of Deadwood. But interspersed with the cursing were poignant pleas -- "Will you sit with me? I'm scared!" -- and complaints about the "leashes." Everyone who entered the room was cursed equally, but the patient's youth and lack of previous history made everyone sympathetic. (Not sympathetic enough to remove the restraints, however.) Later, an anxious relative asked me if the patient had been nasty, and I said, "Well, there was a lot of cursing, but none of us took it personally. We all knew that it was a product of the illness."

Older, more hardbitten patients -- especially frequent fliers -- don't fare so well. I once heard a PA repeatedly telling a homeless alcoholic to stop cursing. The PA became progressively more upset; the patient stayed calm, cheerfully coming out with ever-more-colorful expletives. I wound up getting an earful from the red-faced PA, who was practically spitting in indignation. My response, I'm afraid, was, "Look, it's an emergency room. This kind of stuff comes with the territory." In general, my take on the issue is that people who treasure propriety perhaps shouldn't work in emergency medicine.

But I'm not working twelve-hour shifts, either. What about the nurse who's confided in me several times about how sick she gets of being cursed at, whose morale is being eroded by patients calling her names when she's trying to help them?

I thought about her when I read this news story about Northern Ireland's "zero-tolerance policy" on assault, either physical or verbal, on healthcare workers. One of the nurses interviewed in the article, who's been physically assaulted four times in the past five years -- and is also routinely subjected to verbal abuse -- thought the policy was a nice idea, but questioned how it would work in practical terms.

I don't think there's any question that physical assault should be a matter for the police. But verbal abuse, it seems to me, is a grayer area.

When does foul language cross the line from being a symptom to being a personal attack?

How can it be dealt with effectively?

How can caregivers maintain their morale when subjected to it?

An Inspiring Grand Rounds!

This week's Grand Rounds is up at Wandering Visitor, with a theme of "things that inspire us." I'm honored to be included, and even more honored to be the first post in the edition.

Thanks, Wandering Visitor!

Geekerati Radio Interview

The interview I did with Christian Johnson tonight is archived here. As always, the sound of my own voice is a shock, but overall, I think I did fairly well.

Christian, who's one of my former writing students, asked smart questions and came up with some very shrewd observations. Thanks, Christian! And before the show started, I got to chat briefly with his wife Jody, also a former student. It was great to talk to both of them again.

The show is an hour -- a bit over, actually -- so be aware of that if you plan to listen to it.

My Brain Hurts

So last night I lit a candle -- part of my writing ritual when I'm feeling really stumped -- and sat down to start the major surgery on Chapter 2.

And what do you know: I indeed had a flash of inspiration that answered a nagging plot problem about the novel.

In answering one huge question, though, the solution raises five others. I now have to solve a complicated geneological riddle and a convoluted time-travel paradox. Gahhhhhh.

Note to self: When you tell people that you're never going to write something that requires historical research or six-generation family trees, keep your word!

Or, rather, never claim that you'll never write a certain kind of book . . . because if you do, that's exactly the book you'll wind up writing.

Going the Distance

Last summer, I took a one-week "Art and Spirituality" course in Berkeley. One of my classmates was a professional hospital chaplain. When I told her how much I enjoy my own hospital work, how it's often the highlight of my week, she nodded and said, "Yes, exactly! People who know me can't believe that I like getting phone calls at 3 a.m. when a patient's dying, that I'm happy to drag myself out of bed in the middle of the night to go there. But there's so much love at those bedsides: how could anyone want to miss that?"

I don't think I'd enjoy being woken up at 3 a.m.; one of the advantages of being a volunteer is that I work very limited hours of my own choosing, and that I'm not on call. But I knew what she meant about the love.

I've written here before about how the hospital has increased my faith in an afterworld, or an otherworld: a world, anyway, that we only perceive in brief snatches from our current vantage point. But my interactions with patients and their families have also given me more faith in this world, the one we're living in now. Because amid all the pain and fear and loss at the hospital, the prayers and questions and anger, the screams and the smells, there's also, almost always, amazing love.

Sometimes it's the love family members feel for the patient: the daughter who gently strokes her mother's hair after a heart attack; the husband who tells me how beautiful and vivacious his wife was before Alzheimer's turned her into a terrified stranger; the young parents who hold and soothe their miserable toddler. Sometimes it's the love of friends who've become family: the nursing-home aide who comes to the hospital to reassure a demented elderly patient who believes that she's his sister; the woman who spends three anxious hours in the Family Trauma Consult Room during her next-door neighbor's code; the two men, Buddhist and Muslim, who ask me to pray for their sleeping Mormon friend. Sometimes it's the love the patient expresses for others: relatives, friends, pets, God, the nurses, the doctors -- sometimes even the volunteer chaplain.

Love, I've become convinced, is what keeps people going through their own medical crises. However essential medical science may be, what patients love is finally what heals them, what makes them want to live. Love gives friends and family the strength to spend hours -- or weeks, months, years -- in the chaotic, often unpleasant environs of acute or chronic illness. Love gives us the ability to go the distance.

I knew all this intellectually before I started volunteering at the hospital. Now I know it in my bones.

And I also know that my work calls me to love those who feel unloved: the elderly patient dying alone in the ED, the homeless patient about to be discharged back onto the street, the alcoholic brought to the hospital after a suicide attempt. My job is to make love visible to those who can't see it.

And when I can't do that -- when I fall short because of my own faults, the patient's abrasiveness, or simple lack of access (the patient is asleep, unconscious, or surrounded by too many medical personnel for me to get near the bed) -- my job is to have faith that the love is still there, somewhere, anyway, and to pray that the patient will find it.

If I'm ever alone and unloved in an emergency room, I hope someone will do the same for me.

Another Doug Henry Update

I saw Beth at church this morning. There's been no movement on or information about the case; the crime lab hasn't even started working on the car yet, and DNA breaks down in the kind of heat we've been having. And they still haven't told her where the car was found.

Beth's hired an attorney who used to work for the police department, who's promised that she'll get at least some answers tomorrow. Beth's going to call me when she knows something, and she's given me permission to post about it.

She told me that in her gut, she believes that Doug isn't alive anymore. They used to take baths together five to seven nights a week -- that was their together time -- and twice in the last five weeks, she's felt Doug's presence in the tub, and has received unspoken messages from him. He's communicated that he's fine, and that everything's as it's supposed to be, even though what happened to him isn't something he'd have chosen (Beth believes there was violence involved). He wants Beth to be fine too. He's told her that he didn't leave her, that he hasn't left her, that he's always with her, even if she can't always perceive him. A relative of Beth's has also felt Doug as a guarding presence. He's told her that the dead are always all right, beyond fear or pain, but that they worry about and watch over the living.

She prefaced these stories by saying, "This is going to sound really weird," but it didn't sound weird to me at all. I hear stories like that all the time at the hospital.

Beth said that the two bathtub incidents were the only times she's felt comfort. Other times, she'll have sudden milliseconds of clarity and peace, but then they'll be gone and she'll be back in her grief and anger and confusion.

It seems to me that she's handling all of this with tremendous grace, even calm. I don't think I'd do nearly as well in any similiar situation. I hope I never have to find out.

Please keep Beth and everyone else who loves Doug in your prayers.

Ergo-a-go-go

Well, I like the ergonomic chair so much that I got one of these funky ergonomic keyboards. It takes a little getting used to, but I think I'll love it once I've adjusted.

I also got a cool glass computer cart to replace the folding tray table I have been using. The idea is that all the computer stuff will live there, so it can all be easily moved when we have company, since my office is also the guest bedroom.

Hear that, Liz? I'm trying to entice my sister into visiting this summer, so I've been bombarding her with incentives. Latest incentive: all the computer stuff will be out of the guest bedroom! You'll have lots of room for your stuff! Except in the closet, which is still a disaster! But if you come out here, I'll work on that, too!

I'll easily be able to unplug Vera from all the various extras when we travel. I still have to use Vera's pointer system, since there's nowhere to plug in a mouse, but that's not much of a problem.

All of this, of course, is Writerly Procrastination Strategy #592: When the writing isn't coming, revamp the office for maximum productivity! And then, if you still aren't productive, you have no one to blame but yourself! But in the meantime, you can spend hours or days revamping, and still feel virtuous!

Reorganizing the house for guests is another such strategy.

Those of you who write will recognize these strategies, I'm sure, and probably have your own variations on them.

The second chapter of November has a serious case of Expository Lumpitude, and I have to do something to turn it into an actual narrative that people will want to, like, read. I worked for about an hour this morning before realizing that the chapter needs major surgery, at which point I had a sudden failure of energy and took a two-hour nap. (Naps are a very popular procrastination strategy.) Then I went to the gym. Then we went shopping for office furniture. With all these procrastination strategies, it's a wonder I ever write anything.

The good news is that I realized that the second chapter needs major surgery; the bad news is that I have to do it.

In the meantime, I'm revamping the office. Wheeee!

New Bali Pix

Here's Bali sitting on my desk; the surface of the desk is newly visible after an intensive burst of throwing out tottering piles of paper, and Bali loves to hang out there now that he's no longer risking an avalanche by doing so. And, of course, lying on my desk has the added attraction, often, of blocking whatever I'm actually trying to do at the moment, a lure cats can never resist.

The remaining pile of paper, in that basket behind Balthazar, is the draft of Driving to November.

Here's a close-up of his fuzzy little face. I apologize for the goop in his eyes; I'm a terrible cat mother, I know. I could have sworn I'd cleaned his eyes just a few minutes before taking these photos, and look: new eye goop!

The mermaid postcard on the lamp base is a writing icon I bought back when I was working on a mermaid story. I haven't finished it, and at this point very well may not, but I like the image (and, as it turns out, there's also a mermaid in November).

On the base of the lamp are a quartz crystal I picked up while hiking on our local mountain, the one right across the street, and a tiny bronze Christmas tree my mother gave me one Christmas, and which miraculously hasn't been batted into oblivion by the cats.

Here's sleepy Bali. I love this position, totally sprawled out: it always makes cats look like they're actually beanbag animals who have no bones.

Harley does a hilarious variation of this in which he looks like he's flying, like Superman, with his front paws stretched in front of him and his hind paws sticking out in opposite directions.

Here's a front view of sleepy Bali. Gary likes this shot better than the previous one, but I like both of them. I'm just happy whenever I can get a picture of Bali that's actually in focus; that's much easier, from whatever position, when he's sleepy!

In this picture he looks like a toy cat, doesn't he? The couch in my study is home to a variety of pillows and stuffed animals, and sometimes when the cats are curled up there too, it's hard to tell which animals are alive and which aren't.

Here's the photo I was trying to get when I started this series. The black kitty has white toe tufts! I noticed them last night, right after Bali had been mock-fighting with Harlequin, and I thought the white tufts were bits of Harley's tummy fur that Bali had gotten caught in his claws. But no, they're his very own white toe tufts, and they're only on his hind paws, not the front ones.

Harley has magnificant toe tufts: Gary always says his feet look like snow shoes. Figaro has long, lean, knobby toes that are, I swear, as flexible as fingers. I'm expecting him to develop an opposable thumb any day now.


And, finally, here's a shot of some of the glass in my study window. I love art glass, and can rarely afford it; most of these pieces were gifts from my sister and my college roommate.

That crooked little blue and red and yellow panel, though, the third from the left? I made that during a one-day stained-glass course I took in New York City. The class was eight hours of torture, as it turned out: we did everything from selecting and cutting the glass to finishing the panel in that stretch, and our teacher was an elderly, embittered woman who provided neither a first-aid kit nor eye protection while we were grinding the glass. I got a small cut fairly early on, and when I asked her for a bandaid, she gave me a disgusted look and said, "You cut yourself already? I don't have any bandaids. Just suck on it."

Stained Glass Boot Camp. Just what I wanted.

By the time we got to soldering our panels, we were all so tired that our hands were shaking. Some of us, me included, had skipped lunch because we were so far behind: it's hard to learn new physical skills all in one day! We definitely shouldn't have been trusted with soldering irons. The woman next to me was in such a fog that she put her iron down on a pile of newspaper, whereupon the instructor yelped and rushed to put out the fire. No real damage was done, luckily.

At the very end, we had to solder on small hooks for hanging the panel. My hands were almost useless by then. I called the instructor over and said, "I'm having trouble with these hooks."

She looked down at my unsightly, messy panel, sniffed, and said, "That's not the only thing you're having trouble with."

The panel isn't great art, but I keep it to remind myself of having persevered through a difficult day, and I'm fond of it. It's my glass Ugly Duckling.

In other news, the radio show today was great fun, although when I emerged from the studio, I had a parking ticket! This, mind you, even though I'm UNR faculty, with a UNR parking permit, who was parked in an uncrowded UNR lot. I had mistakenly parked in a lot to which my permit doesn't give me access -- even though I pay $300 a year for the privilege of parking at my own job -- so now I have to pay another $30 to the university.

Dang!

Two Radio Shows

This afternoon, from 4-5 PDT, I'll be a guest on KUNR's High Desert Forum, where host Dan Erwine and I will be discussing the history of science fiction.

On Monday, at the invitation of my former student Christian Johnson, I'll be a guest on Geekerati Radio. Here's the press release Christian sent me.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
CONTACT:
Christian Johnson (geekeratiradio@gmail.com)
Geekerati Radio

Monday, June 25, SF and Fantasy Author Susan Palwick Discusses Her New Novel Shelter Live on Geekerati Radio.

Los Angeles, CA, June 21, 2007 – Award winning Science Fiction and Fantasy author Susan Palwick will join the panelists at Geekerati Radio at 7pm PDT. In addition to discussing her latest novel, Palwick will talk with the panelists about her influences and her general thoughts about the state of SF/F today.

Fans can listen to the show live, and call in with questions, by visiting the Geekerati website during the broadcast. Those who miss the live broadcast will be able to listen to an archived version of the show approximately fifteen minutes after it airs online. During the show, the Geekerati panel will be giving away two copies of her most recent novel, Shelter, and one copy of her previous novel, The Necessary Beggar.

Susan Palwick holds a doctoral degree from Yale and is an associate professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. She has written three novels, Flying in Place (Tor Books, 1992, reprinted 2005), The Necessary Beggar (Tor Books, 2005), and Shelter (Tor Books 2007). A collection of many of her short stories, The Fate of Mice (Tachyon Publications 2007) was published earlier this year. Flying in Place won the Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy Novel, presented annually by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. The Necessary Beggar received starred reviews from PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY, BOOKLIST and LIBRARY JOURNAL (which also named it one of the best genre books of 2005). Additionally, The Necessary Beggar was honored with an Alex Award from the American Library Association, won a Silver Pen award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame, and is a finalist for the Mythopoeic Award. Shelter recently received a starred review from LIBRARY JOURNAL. Palwick's stories often examine issues of identity and the relationships between the individual and society.

ABOUT GEEKERATI RADIO – Geekerati Radio is an online radio show hosted by Christian Johnson which features discussion of popular culture by geeks for geeks and is a featured show in the BlogTalkRadio network. The Geekerati Radio show airs Monday nights at 7pm Pacific.

I hope some of you will be able to tune in for one or both of these. I'm looking forward to them; I've done a few radio shows before, and have always had fun. (My one TV appearance, on the other hand, was a disaster, but that's another story.)

Happy Summer Solstice!

I hope everyone has a wonderful longest day of the year. I always associate this day with John Crowley's beautiful book Little, Big, although yesterday I finished reading Pstricia McKillip's Solstice Wood (also beautiful, and a fellow Mythopoeic finalist), and that's fitting, too.

Every summer solstice, I'm sad that the days will now start getting shorter again. It seems ironic that summer officially begins on the day after which the sun will begin to diminish.

Today is also the tenth anniversary of Gary's arrival in Reno, so it's a particularly special day for me.

May all our sunlit hours be blessed!

Edna, Meet Vera

Yes, here's the chair, again. Note the exoskeleton -- Gary's term for it -- visible through the mesh. Those pieces are either silver metal or black plastic, which really makes the chair look like something designed by H.R. Giger, who designed the sets and critters for Alien. Which is fitting, since when I sit in my new chair, I feel a little like Ripley when she puts on that robotic exoskeleton thing in the second movie and goes after the Bad Mama Monster.

This may have some interesting effects on my writing.

Here's another view, which gives you an even better look at the exoskeleton. The chair also resembles something that might be used by a particularly sinister dentist. But it's incredibly comfortable, and I have no intention of using it for malevolent dental purposes.

The chair is fabulous, worth every penny I paid for it. Very comfortable, very adjustable, very easy to work in.

Really important objects around here get names. Our current car, for instance, is Fiona Ford; our previous car was Holly Honda. Gary refers to the big-screen TV as the Omega 13, an affectionate reference to GalaxyQuest. My computer is Vera VAIO. And the chair is now Edna Ergohuman.

We pondered a few "e" names over dinner last night. Edna may sound too much like Vera, since they both have two syllables and end with an "a", but for various reasons, we didn't want to use the more common women's names starting with "e", like Ellen (we know at least five human Ellens, who might not be amused to have an office chair named after them) or Eleanor (the name of a relative). I'm not very fond of the name Eunice, and Elspeth has definite fantasy connotations. This is definitely a science-fiction chair. So Edna she is.

So far, Edna and Vera are getting along fine. If either of them is distressed about the similar names, they haven't said anything to me. Of course, it may be good that both names have two syllables, because that way they can't argue about whose name is more or less important. You know: kind of like giving kids very similar gifts, so they won't fight over them.

Oh, and to get your very own Ergohuman chair, go here. This company has the best prices I found online. I linked to the site in my first post about the chair, but I sent a link to this post to Greg from BTOD, for his amusement, and he asked if I'd link to the company here, too. So there you go, Greg!