Let me be honest, a lot of this post is going to be me bitching about things that are specific to nurses, doctors, or healthcare professionals at any level. I am not going to write things about how I hate patients that have a certain disease. A lot of those things cannot be changed like some of the behaviors I’ll describe.

Mostly, I want you, the non-healthcare people, to know exactly what you do that pisses us off. I don’t expect you to change because change is something people don’t want to do anymore; but now, however, we will both know what you’re doing is pissing us off.

You Don’t Know What You’re Taking or Why You’re Taking it

Okay, I get it. You might take a lot of medications. Blue pills, red pills, water pills, blood thinners. You might take these medications faithfully at the same time every day like you’re supposed to, but most you don’t know the names of the medications you take or what you take them for.

As an experiment, I have started asking people why they take a “water pill.” I know what the water pill is and why they’re taking it. The best answer I get is along the lines of “I take it to pee for my blood pressure.” I guess that’s correct, but not really. These pills help your kidneys get rid of extra water and salt and they do that by peeing.

Even knowing about a third of what the medication is for is not knowing enough. I have had a panoply of patients with diabetes say that they eat whatever they want and just use more insulin to cover the extra sugars. Here’s an exchange I had about that at work:

Patient: I just take extra insulin when I want a second or third piece of cake.

Me: That’s not what the insulin is for.

Patient: Well, it’s my body.

Me: That’s fair.  You ever hear of Death by a Thousand Cuts? Because that’s what you’re doing to your body.

Patient: That’s rich coming from a fat boy.

Me: Yeah, but I’m not diabetic and have lost 130lbs. And this is what I went to school for. But it’s your body.

We nurses and your doctors went through a lot of schooling to become experts on what medications do to and for your body. We will teach them to you as best we can, but the burden to understand it fully is on you. We want to help you. We have the data you need. You have your opinions and feelings, which leads me to…

Disagreeing with our “Opinions”

You can disagree with us on social issues and that’s fine. Those are the societal issues that welcome debate. But we come to you medically with facts and treatments that have been honed over years of evidence, research, and testing.

I can hear you contrarians already: “You’re just humans and you don’t know everything because my homeopath blah blah blah blah.” Yes, we are humans. We are not infallible. We make mistakes. I acknowledge that.

Our mistakes acknowledged and put aside, we do know what the best ways are to treat your illnesses. Let’s pick one that’s causing a lot of controversy right now: cyclic vomiting caused by the heavy use of marijuana. We dorks of medicine call it Cannabinoid Hyperemesis.

A lot of these patients come in with vague abdominal pain complaints, lots of vomiting, and “just feeling sick.” We do a lot of tests to rule out diseases that cause these symptoms. You get blood work, ultrasounds, CT scans, urine tests, and you get your nurse and doctor to push all over your abdomen. We spend a lot of time and resources to rule out dangerous disease processes and we decide that your pain and vomiting is happening because you’re chronically on The Chronic.

I had a patient who had all of these and had even been worked up by a gastroenterologist. A whole team of medical professionals had applied their expertise to this person’s body and found that the patient was in pain and puking because they smoked too much pot too often.

I entered the patient’s life on one such exacerbation. So, naturally, we had a Nurse Tyler Snark Talk:

Patient: Me and my doctor had a differing of opinions about why this happens.

Me: Kind of. Your doctor told you why this is happening, and you chose not to believe the truth.

Patient: You know what?  Fuck you. I’m in a lot of pain here.

Me: I understand that. But you’re so unwilling to stop smoking pot to see if that helps. Hell, you’re addicted to it.

Patient: Pot is not addictive.

Me: Then why can’t you stop for one month to see if your life improves?

Patient: (Keanu Reeves face) Woah

I doubt that I got through to that patient, but I told them the truth about their body and about their opinion. It’s often that your opinions are based on feelings about having to do really hard work, so you look for an easy answer or you don’t do anything because it doesn’t fit your narrative. Kinda like vaccines (guess what: they fucking work and don’t give your kids autism).

This stubbornness and unwillingness to listen is one of my biggest pet peeves. There’s even a type of patient that does it the most…

Your Toxic Masculinity Makes You Look Like a Huge Coward

I’m looking at you, older white men. Yeah, you, the biggest purveyors of saying, “I’m fine” or “I don’t want you to do that” or “I don’t take my meds because I don’t need them” or “Why can’t I just go home?”

Here’s the patient I hate the most: This patient is an older person who is brought into the hospital in an ambulance and refuses all treatment when offered or recommended by their treatment team. They come into my emergency department and immediately want to leave. They could be having a heart attack. They could be a breath away from respiratory arrest. Guess what, shitbag, you called the ambulance. They didn’t barge into your house, tread on your rights, kidnap you, and take you to the hospital to be held against your will.

You insist that you’re fine. You just want to go have a smoke. I get it. You’ve lost all your power. It’s a terrible feeling, but your imagined toughness hurts you more. Every time you delay emergency treatment (or any treatment), you are hurting yourself. You are so afraid of showing weakness, illness, or vulnerability that you’re hurting yourself.

I’ve argued with countless patients and heard every excuse. That’s all they are—excuses. A recent one was a patient who was in diabetic ketoacidosis (for non-medical people: simply put, this is when your cells release ketones into your blood, turning it acidic. A common thing that happens after that is a build up of potassium in the blood stream, which can cause some life-threatening heart arrhythmias at high [or low] levels.). This patient pled with me that they had a sick spouse to care for. I had researched this patient’s history and knew that the spouse was in a care facility and having their medical needs tended to. The patient expressed a desire to be with the spouse. I get that desire; there’s not much better than being near the one you love, and it must be maddening to have a loved one that’s ill.

Me, being me, had to challenge their bullshit:

Me: So what are you going to do when your heart stops?

Patient: I guess I’ll die then.

Me: (picturing a meme of an old man saying, “guess I’ll die”): hahahah that’s so stupid. You can’t do anything for your wife if you fall over dead next to them.

Patient: Aw fuck you.

Me: Sorry, sir. You’re not my type. You’re too old for me and have too much penis for my taste.

Patient: (a moment of silence and then some begrudging chuckles) Yeah okay. You’re right about that hahahahaha!

All things considered, you can refuse whatever healthcare you want. And if you collapse and lose consciousness?  Then it’s easier for your healthcare team to get things quickly done. That being said…

No, I Don’t Know How Long It’s Going to Take and, No, I Can’t Give You an Estimate

Healthcare is not fast food. Healthcare is not a car wash. Healthcare, for the most part, is not in and out. Get in and out of the hospital takes time. Also, some people never get out of the hospital.

A lot of people come up to me in the lobby of the emergency department and want to know long the wait is. It could be 30 minutes and it could be 10 hours. There are a lot of factors in these numbers. Is the department short on nurses?  Is there more than one doctor on duty? Is the department holding admit patients when they should be going upstairs?  Was there just a massive trauma and the departmental resources are focused there?

Another non-department factor to consider is you. How “sick” are you?  Departments have systems and algorithms in place to determine your place in line. An ED is not first come, first served. It basically works on a spectrum to almost completely dead (cardiac arrest, traumas, heart attacks, etc.) to not even close to dead (foot pain for years, dental pain, vomited once this week).

A doctor that I respect has a nice line for people when they complain about how long they’ve had to wait (shout out to Becca P!): “You don’t want what it takes to be first in line to be seen.” She’s right. That’s wishing death on yourself. That’s why I’ve stolen her line and use it when people bug me about wait times.

And, once you’re waiting, there’s nothing you or I can do to make it go faster. So, stop standing in the doorway and watching me chart. Yes, I know it looks like I’m just sitting there doing nothing, but I’m not. I am painting a picture of your health for your records. I am documenting your vital signs, signs of illness, and behavior. And, if you say some mean shit to me, I am directly quoting you.

We are charting these things to look for trends. Are you getting better or worse? Having your loved ones hover at the door and scowl at us does nothing to help you or me. If anything, it sours us on you. We’re feeling judged and inadequate for providing care.

When you (or them) wag your finger at us or threaten us or yell at us for things we cannot control—and yes, this happens every single day to every single nurse in emergency departments—you are showing us that you don’t know how the system works, that you have poor coping skills, and you treat your common man like garbage servants. And we are not your servants. We are not your waiters. I don’t work for tips; that’s why I say whatever I want to people. Your feelings are not my priority. They are important, and I don’t ever want to completely dismiss them, but they do not come first. Your life and treatment come first.

The endless bureaucracies of healthcare get to us too. We are on your side. My job as a nurse is to advocate for you in all ways. But we cannot make anything move faster.

This inability to affect change is why we won’t give you an estimate on how long it will take. We can kind of guess on how long labs take—30 minutes for some, an hour (or more) for others—but we can’t know when a machine that runs labs goes down or the blood tube clots or if the specimen is lost. Giving you a time estimate is giving you a reason to be mad at us later. Things take longer than we estimate.

I hate seeing you retch and vomit and would love to give you medications, but your doctor hasn’t ordered it. I can’t pull it from the machines without their order—sometimes I can, but most of the time I have done that already for you—and they are nowhere to be found. I wait outside of rooms for your doctor to get you the things that you need to be comfortable.

So, no, I don’t know how long it will take. I do know that I will be here with you through all of it. I will work quickly and efficiently no matter what, but I will like you a lot more if you’re nice to me.

A Bunch of Little Things I hate

Yes, I know the blood pressure cuff is squeezing your arm. Yes, I know that’s uncomfortable. But you need to stop moving that arm. It squeezes harder when you move. It’s a like a boa constrictor. If the blood pressure cuff hurts you more than your arm pain, then, honey, you have a new chief complaint.

Also, don’t tell me you’re a hard stick when it comes to starting an IV. Chances are that you’re not. It’s more likely that you’re just jumpy and weak when it comes to a little bit of pain because that’s all it is.

I will tell you when I am going to poke you with a needle. Please do not jump in surprise and knock the needle out of you. Then we both must start over. You get poked again. And again. Until you stop jumping and dislodging things.

Let me ask you this: how come you didn’t eat anything today?  A lot of my patients come to the ED in the evening and say something like, “I’m very hungry, I haven’t eaten or drank anything at all today?” or “I didn’t take any of my meds today so I’ll need those now.” What is it about being in the ED that makes you suddenly so hungry and thirsty?

Guess what?  If you’re having pain anywhere in your abdomen or chest, we don’t want you to eat or drink until we rule out your need for surgery. Do most people need surgery?  No. But the ones who do, shouldn’t wait for it because they bought out the entire vending machines supply of snacks and had a huge meal in the lobby.

Don’t tell me you’re having a seizure while you’re “having a seizure.” That’s now how it works.

No, there is not a vending machine for your medications. They come from our pharmacy. No, that pharmacy won’t fill your prescriptions.

I’m not sure how much the surgery will cost, but I know you’ll die without it, so maybe worry about that right now.

If needles freak you out, how did you get all your tattoos?

No, I don’t need to see the picture of your poop that you took / I don’t need you to open the container you have full of your poop that you brought from home / I don’t know if that snake that bit you is poisonous but kudos to you for killing it, putting it in a plastic bag, and putting it on the counter in the lobby.

Your child has a fever?  Did you give them any Tylenol or ibuprofen?  Why not? Please unroll them from that blanket. It’s making the fever worse.

Yes, I hate myself more than anything you can do.

 

Tyler’s Gotta Tyler

It’s been two weeks since I’ve gone back to work, and I’ve started being myself in a big, big way. My coworkers—who were open about their feelings with me—loved working with me because they say that I am fun to work with because I’m entertaining. I can see that about myself. I did a lot of theater and improv in my youth, so performing comes naturally to me. I was also a child of an unreliable alcoholic and addict, so I desperately want the approval of those around me.

This need to please is always there, whether I like it or not. It was there these two weeks and I could only ignore it for one. I went all out as soon as possible. The faces are becoming recognizable. The names?  Still a mystery for the most part. Why not lay some unadulterated Tyler on them?

I started unloading my sarcasm as I always do—right at the top. There’s a young doctor who’s very boisterous and the textbook definition of a ‘go-getter’ (ugh). He asked me to grab him the nosebleed cart. I asked him where it was because the location of stuff is still a problem for me. Him, empowered by youth and stick-to-itiveness, offered to grab the cart himself. I replied with, “Woah, woah, woah, you didn’t go to medical school to push carts around. You pay people to do that for you now.” He stopped in his track and looked at me mouth agape. “Besides,” I continued, not able to control myself, “I don’t think you’re board certified to do that.”

“I don’t mind getting things myself,” he said.

“That’s cool. I respect that. Tell you what. Show me where it is, so I can grab it when your lazier colleagues want me to get it for them,” I said. We both laughed at that one.

I waited an hour to hear from the charge nurse to see if I was going to suffer any repercussions for mouthing off to a doctor. No charge nurse came. I kept going.

People ask my name a lot. They want to know who this big hairy weirdo in their pod is. My stock response is, “My name is Tyler. I’m one of the new travelers so you don’t have to remember my name. I’m just going to leave you.”

Newfound confidence for snark aside, I realized that me being an unknown is helpful for pranks. I met a good partner in crime named Alex. Alex is a nice guy who likes to mess with people too. Alex had a patient die.

Patient deaths are a lot of paperwork and everyone gets notified—the charge nurse, the nurses in the lobby, and the hospital supervisors—so they can help get family to the bedside and spend time with their loved one. A chance to say goodbye. A chance to grieve. A chance to be there at the end. This is what they need and deserve, the human thing to do.

Alex got his patient sent off to the morgue after the family was gone. Alex wanted to get into a body bag and have someone come into the room and he could jump out at them. I loved this plan. I suggested a way to make it happen. I would say that I covered him for a lunch break and that he hadn’t done the paperwork nor tagged the body and I needed help doing that. Everyone would believe me because they had no reason not to. Alex would lay in wait and I’d Peter Piper some poor trusting colleagues into the room to hopefully shit their pants in fear.

Our first target?  The charge nurse Chuck. Chuck seems like a genuinely nice man. He made the effort to learn my name on the first day and has always joked with me. I wanted to see him scream and shit his pants because I am broken inside and love to laugh at others.

Alas, Chuck had gone home. Instead, I lured another charge nurse (who was wise to our trick because she knows Alex well) and this other male nurse. The guy jumped three feet and cussed us out. We all agreed that Chuck would’ve had a heart attack. “Perfect place for it,” I said, getting a laugh. Sharing a laugh over a coworker’s imagined death has bonded nurses for generations and Salem is no different.

Now I present to you, my humble readership, a series of interactions I had:

—————————-

Doctor: Is the patient in 31 yours?

Me: Nope. Not me.

Doctor: (not hearing me by accident or choice, I dunno) Okay, well they’re going to go to the cath lab for a procedure and post op here and then discharge. I’m gonna order a bunch of *blah blah blah* (The doctor goes on and on about important medications and pre-op routines but I’m thinking about if onion rings would be good on a pizza. Probably not but I’d still eat it.)

Me: That’s a lot of important information. I hope you tell a nurse who cares, like the patient’s nurse.

Doctor: Oh, I thought you said it was your patient.

Me: No, sir. I said the exact opposite of what you heard.

Doctor: And you just let me go on and were going to help the patient?

Me: I didn’t go to nursing school to say no to doctors. Doing what doctors say is kinda our only deal.

—————————-

Taylor: Your name is Tyler?  That’s easy to remember. My name is Taylor and that’s close to my name.

Me: And I won’t forget your name because your name is the name of the worst character from Gilmore Girls.

Taylor: *confused look*

Me: Team Jess! *then in a Luke Danes voice* Damn it, Taylor!

—————————-

Transport tech: Hey, Tyler!  Can I take your patient to CT?

Me: You can do whatever you want. You’re a strong, independent woman who don’t need a mans permission to do any goddamn thing.

Transport tech: I really need you to say yes or no.

Me: Stop living in the patriarchy!

Transport tech: Stop mansplaining!

Me: …yes you can take my patient.

—————————-

Nurse: You’re kind of an asshole, aren’t you?

Me: We’ve worked six shifts together. You’re kind of a dumb bitch for not noticing sooner, aren’t you?

Nurse: Okay, you’re a funny asshole.

*We high five*

—————————-

Tyler’s First Death: You Never Forget Your First

Salem gave me a milestone I have been able to dodge in my years as a nurse. I had a patient die unexpectedly. When I say unexpectedly, I do not mean accidentally. I do not mean that there was foul play. I only mean that the patient passed away sooner than the care team expected, but they expected sooner rather than later.

In my nursing career, my patients nearing death always made it to an inpatient setting where they could pass with a little more peace than an emergency department can offer. I think about the family members of patients who die who have to walk through the lobby of people groaning and puking and complaining just to see their loved one a last time. I wouldn’t want that for anyone.

Not only is the atmosphere not conducive to grieving, but ED folks are notoriously busy and even more infamous callous jerks. It’s what we to do to survive. We have to go from the unexpected death of baby to the dental pain next door who thinks that their cavity trumps everything. We compartmentalize because we care. We compartmentalize because we have to or nothing would get done. The misery of others becomes routine. Hate reading memos at work?  We feel that way about your gallbladder attack. There should be some dignity in death if possible. You can’t get a lot of that in an ED.

On to my patient:

My patient was a combative and cantankerous old git. From the moment the medics brought them in, they were fighting me. They were cussing at me. They were asking to leave so they could have a cigarette. They smelled like a human cigarette. Every blood draw, every blood pressure, every interaction was a battle.

“I’m getting killed by an altered shitty patient tonight,” I said to others. Their family showed up and attended to their needs and helped me care for them. They described the patient as cantankerous, opinionated, mean, and had the mouth of a sailor. “No shit,” I said. We all laughed. Even the fucking patient laughed at the trouble they caused me.

I feel for this patient. They were sick. They needed to be hospitalized. They were pushing 90 and their organs were failing. They were DNR which was nice. Their electrolytes were all out of whack from kidney failure. Their lungs were borked from COPD. They wanted to be comfortable. I can provide comfort.

This patient was slated to go to a room upstairs in the hospital but it wasn’t ready when their heart monitor started showing vtach. For all you non-medical readers, vtach is ventricular tachycardia, which is a type of arrhythmia that can be life-threatening if prolonged. I spoke with the doctors on the patients care team who checked with the family. They wanted the patient to be comfortable. They didn’t want to fight the vtach. They insisted that the patient didn’t want extra treatments and procedures.

The doctors ordered some fentanyl and Ativan to give the patient, a nice cocktail for making people comfortable. This was happening at the end of my shift. This was my last patient.

I went in to medicate the patient. The patient was moaning. This moaning was new. They were hurting. They were gasping. It was coming soon. As I touched their arm to inject the medications, the patient pushed me away. This exchange happened:

Patient’s family member: Don’t push him away. Tyler has been a great nurse. He’s been so nice to you. Be nice to him:

Patient: Ooooooooh fuck that idiot!

Everyone in the room—including the patient—laughed at this. Cantankerous indeed.

The moaning lost energy. The patient became much more comfortable. The patient was able to die in as little pain as I could manage to safely alleviate. The patient’s family was at their side as they passed away.

I was able to give the family a more peaceful death for their loved one. The patient?  They got to use their last words to give me shit.

When it’s my time, I hope I am able to antagonize my nurse like they did to me. Life is series of choices and we get to choose what we pass on to the next generation. I intend to pass on a lot of shit, figuratively and literally.

Here’s to you, you cantankerous old git. You were my first and I’ll never forget you. Rest in Pissed Off Peace.

 

 

 

Right after Christmas of 2017, I accepted my first travel assignment. I considered jobs in Washington, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Ney York, and California without much follow through. I was wanting to travel, but the idea of moving thousands of miles away had me leery. I knew I wanted to do it, but I was hesitant to pull the trigger and accept a job. But I finally did it. I took a travel assignment 65 miles away from where I live.

I talked to a lot of travel nurses about what they wish they had known when they were baby travel nurses. I took a lot of questions to my friend Alana. I went to her for a menagerie of reasons. Alana is the most skilled nurse that I have ever met. I once saw her build a miniature blanket fort for an elderly woman who had an altered level of consciousness. This little old lady would not keep still or keep her gown and brief on. “Oh, Nana,” Alana would say. “We gotta keep you covered up.” Alana kept this patient’s dignity intact when the patient was unable to do it herself.

She has been a professional traveler by choice for many years. Hospitals fight over this nurse. Her skillset is unmatched. So, I went to her with the most specific question I could come up with: “Ummmm, what should I do?” Alana advised me to pick an assignment that was in the state where I lived. “That way, if you hate it and everything sucks, you can still see your friends,” she opined.

That’s what I did. I started looking in Oregon. I had some job offers in Clackamas (a couple hours from where I am) and one in Prineville. Prineville interested me because it was near Bend—which is a lovely town full of delicious food and beer to kill myself with—but it was in the heart of winter. “There will be snow everywhere,” Alana cautioned. Her family is in that area, so she knows it well.  She is also a native Coloradoan, so snow doesn’t scare her like it does me.

One evening I am sleeping through a fever–delirious and uncomfortable–when my cellphone rings. The manager of the Salem ER had read my profile provided by my travel company and she wanted to offer me a job. Febrile and dehydrated, I said yes to everything she said. She asked if I had ever traveled before and I said no. She then walked me through questions that I’d want to ask managers when receiving calls from them. She did the work for me in that conversation. I just laid there trying not to talk about how I was interviewing for a job while wearing only my day-sweat Ninja Turtle boxers*.

After accepting the job, I sprung up and wrote out my letter of resignation and emailed it with an hour left in the day. It was done. I celebrated with a La Croix. It was a pamplemousse. Yeah, I know how to get down.

What I know about Salem is that there is a statue of man made of gold on top of their capital building. It’s a statue of the Jeff Bridges character from Tucker: The Man and His Dream. I visited it once as a kid. I’ve driven passed it a few times as an adult, but that’s it. In talking to coworkers, I heard two things about the Salem ER. “That’s the busiest ER in the state!” they’d say with their first breath and then follow with, “I loved when I worked there!”  Their ER is much larger than the one I’m used to.

I start this job in 24 hours. I bought scrubs to match their dress code. I ordered undershirts with long sleeves to cover my tattoos. “Our community is a bit more… um… conservative than yours, and our feedback from the community is that they want tattoos covered,” the manager told me. That’s fair. I’m competent enough to save their dying child’s life but they don’t want to see my RoboCop and comic book tattoos while I do it. That would be too much.

I’ll let you randos know how it goes. Or I’ll stop doing this forever.

 

*–These boxers were given to me by a coworker when I was in nursing school. I had told her how I forgot to pack underwear when I was traveling for nursing school, so she bought me a few pairs that would round out any manchild’s underwear drawer. She gave me a Batman pair, a Superman pair, and two Ninja Turtles pairs (one with all four and the other with just Raphael aka the best turtle).

Halloskis! Welcome to my travel nursing blog where I talk about gross things I see and mean things I say to sick people! A writer I respect once told me to think of my citations in the context of “who is this dude and why do we care?” So let me start this thing by telling you those things:

Who Is this Dude?: I am a 32 year old registered nurse who has been a nurse in a busy Emergency Department (hereafter to be called ‘ED’ because duh doy) in Oregon for just about two years now. I worked in the same ED in different roles before becoming a nurse.

While in that ED, I did a little bit of everything. I was a security guard in the ED, but I don’t want to marry a gun and I can’t stand InforWars. I worked in the patient transfer center. That’s where the hospital pays someone to watch Netflix and wake up doctors so that they can talk to other doctors and compare yachts (this really happened). Then I was a ward clerk in the ED where I answered phones and said mean things to doctors when they needed me to page other doctors. Then I was a CNA in that ED. My first two minutes of being a CNA had me doing CPR on a little old person. I didn’t care for doing real work, so I went back to my ward clerk desk.

I spent nearly ten years in that ED. It is my home. The people there are my family. They’ve come to my parties. I’ve politely declined going to theirs. I’ve begrudgingly watched their children grow up in out-of-focus facebook pictures. I love them all. So, like my family did to me and as how all families work, I have decided to leave them for something better. Well. I hope it’s better. It’s different though.

Why Should We Care?: I don’t know that I have a good answer for this. You get to make that decision. What I can offer you is that I’ll tell you true things from EDs across the country and the things I notice about the people and places I go. I have a penchant for saying what I want whenever I want; incidentally, part of the inspiration for this blog was a coworker telling me that I should write down what I say to patients. This happened almost a year ago and, as you can see, I got right on it. I also plan to offer up anything that makes me look bad. Case in point: I once dropped an enema on my head and had to walk through my ED covered in it.

To Wrap Up: So that’s me. That’s why you should keep reading. I’m going to give you a piece of something you might not get to see. The EDs are not like what you see on TV. I’ll try to post pictures too. Not in the ED, but of cool stuff I see. If I can figure that out. I am on the older end of the millennial spectrum so this computer stuff scares me. Stepping on someone’s brains doesn’t scare me but trying to make a website does.

Housekeeping: There are laws in place about releasing health information so I can’t and won’t breach anyone’s privacy, and, to be honest, I never remember anyone’s names. If there’s even a chance a person can be identified, I won’t include the anecdote.

What I’m Into This Week: Reading–A Series of Small Maneuvers by Eliot Treichel, Movie—Lady Bird, TV—The Good Place, Music—Sleep Well Beast, the new album by The National, Podcast—Gilmore Guys 214 It Should’ve Been Lorelai