Just call me nurse Meredith

Nursing is a career I have the utmost respect for.  When I was younger I wanted to be a nurse, a sales clerk or a secretary, my imagination was pretty limited in those early years.  When I got into high school I loved art and science.  After researching professions I realized that an Occupational Therapist melded medicine and art, this sounded perfect to me.  I also wanted to be able to do my own thing, not having to follow Doctors directions and such.  The joke is as an Occupational Therapist working with special needs children and babies, art is not really even factored in to what I do ( I think those books I read were all about the very early stages of Occupational Therapy).  Occasionally we do a craft or two with my older kids to help with their fine motor skills or attention span but that is about it.  However my admiration and respect for nurses continued to grow and it still does.  As I have spent countless hours in the ER, hospital and the nursing home with my parents I have witnessed how valuable, knowledgeable and compassionate nurses are. Let me just say I am not that compassionate when it comes to my own family or taking care of others, which might make a good reason that I never went into nursing as a career.  As an OT I can hand the patient back after an hour or two, nursing is 8-12 hours a day with the same patients whether you like them or not. 

This week as my Teenager started to recover Mr. 20 year old became very ill with vomiting, fever and weakness.  Of course you understand he was on the way to a big swim meet, and there is not a whole heck of a lot you can do for your son while he is 900 miles away.  It is hard to tell him what to buy at the pharmacy to help, you know he can't breathe and his head hurts but what he takes might keep him up all night.  Let me say the results of the swim meet were disastrous, but in his own words he said he just had to get through it.  Well he did and now he will be home in just two days, when I can give him a big Mom hug and hope to squeeze all that yuckiness out of him.

So as I started to worry slightly less about him, and once again start packing for a 24 hour Southern Florida college tour with my Teenager (we missed last weeks trip due to his illness) he informed me his throat was hurting again.  Really how can this be?  I looked in his mouth and sure enough those white spots were returning even though he was still taking his antibiotic.  I called our Doctor who was again out of town but was scheduled in with her partner.  So while we waited for the appointment I canceled hotel reservations, unpacked and waited.  After a good hour in the waiting room, and an hour in the evaluation room we saw this lovely man, who is just so wonderful.  He was amazed at the state of my Teenager's throat, really I thought it looked a million times better than last week.  He diagnosed  my son with acute tonsillitis, gave him a very heavy antibiotic, a steroid and a referral to get those babies out.  Yes I have a nice big surgery to nurse my 17 year old through in the future. And just to test my patience a bit more another wisdom tooth removal this week, now it is Mr 20 year old's turn.  My very limited, and not so compassionate nursing/mothering skills are going to be put to the test.  Wish me luck.

 And just to make you smile somebody got a hair cut this week.  Here is the before and after.

  Those spikey spikes lasted all of 15 minutes. 

 Hope you are all having a good weekend and a special thank you for your book and audiobook suggestions.  You have given me lots of books to look into, I just might need these when I am on recovery duty.