Let’s get started

This past June in a fit of creative restlessness I started this blog. Since then, many people have died, but some of those I nurse — I’m a hospice nurse case manager — are yet living. One of my favorite slights from Shakespeare is when Benedict first speaks to Beatrice in the Shakespeare play, Much Ado About Nothing: “My dear Lady Disdain, are you yet living?” I don’t take credit for my hospice patients being alive from June, and now it’s November. Lots of things have changed so it’s nice to have some consistency. The POTUS is under impeachment inquiry. I never would have thought that would happen. My wife is losing her hair from chemotherapy. Again, big surprise. I dropped 30 lbs. since June, put 15 back on, but I tend to do that at once a year. There’s been some traction on our Home Improvement; I was introduced to a construction engineer who recommended a carpenter we like. We will hear from him soon.

Also, since June I’ve checked out and returned mostly unread almost 50 public library books. What a lovely example of invisible socialism, this public library I live so close to. I’m in a Chicago suburb but download books and video from my Chicago Library Hoopla app. In the news today Mayor Lightfoot successfully argued for abolishing most late fees/ fines, the idea of library amnesty being an overall increase in literacy. I hope it works out.

In hospice, it helps if you know a lot of different things; how things work, history, politics, bioethics, literary examples of how to be a skillful but decent human being and knowing enough to avoid the consequences of being violent or self-absorbed. I’ve read consistently for the past 40 years, remembering in my twenties when I read of Harry Stack Sullivan’s reading habits being described as “extensive, intensive, and catholic.” I doubt I’ve been able to match this description, but I do enjoy investigating subjects and authors.

This is a good enough start. I’m a hospice and palliative certified registered nurse, work full time and take my work home too many times, waking in the middle of the night for a bathroom break and find myself considering how to better care for one of my clients. I think the blog will help put to bed what’s been going on during the day, give the interested reader a sort of tour of Chicago’s neighborhoods, introduce you to the people who give and receive in the hospice transaction, and be a place for some good cracking jokes. I collect jokes, bring them out sometimes. Okay, maybe too many times, but in my defense they’re mostly dead jokes. I mean dad jokes. Like the family who treated their lung cancer-afflicted father by rubbing his back with lard. They did, yeah, and after that he sure went downhill fast.