Life As We Know It

Posted By electricnurse on March 8, 2010

Adam and I grew up drastically different…I believing whole-heartedly in santa and loving our Christmas tree, him not. I would be lying if I said this has not been an area of contention in our marriage. When first married, it was a huge issue when ever having children was brought up. We would sort of “agree to disagree” and that we would not have children until we could agree on those “sorts of things”. Like the Easter bunny or the tooth fairy. Once we were taking care of my sister’s kids while they were out of town and one of them lost a tooth. Heaven forbid I had to be the tooth fairy that night…Adam was NOT happy.

Over the years there have been great debates, awesome arguments over the holidays amongst my family and Adam. He definitely stands his own. One year my sister had him in the drawing and gave him a stuffed grinch wrapped in grinch paper…he took it in stride of course.

Like the easter bunny, Halloween is an issue too. These are all past-times that I am so very accustomed to and grew up with. These are things that we are sorting through and trying to figure out what will work for us.

SMURFS! That’s another area that has always gotten to me. I loved smurfette!!! Adam says he was never allowed to watch them and has a mind-set that the smurfs were bad because smurfette was a boy turned into a girl….something about witchery of some sort.

Where am I going with all of this, you may ask? Well, Adam has a good friend that he works with whose name also happens to be Adam (all the good one’s are!). They both love Jesus but have some differing opinions in some things and have decided to pick a topic to “discuss” each week on Adam’s (my Adam) bible study blog. This is in no way meant to be a method to criticise one another. It is not to judge one another, rather to simply help each other grow in Faith…..and maybe help Adam and I figure out what to do with our own little babe with some of these issues.

So, check it out. The link is also on the side bar with my other favorite sites. Please comment, but don’t attack. And, remember that they are going to start a new topic each Monday.

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Posted By electricnurse on March 7, 2010

fall. We were leaving to watch my niece play state bball in Lincoln this am and were actually running on time (shocking in and of itself I know!) so I was NOT hurrying but I slipped from the top step of our staircase and fell down the entire flight of stairs. This has been a fear since we’ve moved here, especially since we decided to remove all carpets and return all of the floors back to their original historic wood.

Thankfully I didn’t go head first. Adam was already downstairs and as they ARE wood it was quite loud. He says he heard my shoes make it down first, then me. I hyperextended my left shoulder which was my first concern as I’d hate to have a rotator injury but after we kind of took better inventory of all my parts we realized we had an issue with that actual arm. Plus, a bunch of bruises, and as time is progressing grunts and growns where new aches are coming.

I have a fracture right below my elbow. Fortunately not a terrible type and I will NOT, I repeat..will NOT be casting it. I ran real quick to the clinic to have one of my partners xray it before we headed to Lincoln and have it in a sling for now until the pain is a little better and then we’ll go from there. But, really…I have no interest in a full arm cast, armpit casting just isn’t for me and it is really only a “buckle” type fracture so it is more of a “puttin’” up with the pain type of scenario which I am noticing even tonight is mainly with any rotation or lifting anything. I still am concerned about the darn shoulder, that may be the thing that gets me in the end…we’ll just have to wait and see.

The long and the short….you get to the bottom of the stairs way faster that way. And, as my brother-in-law ever so kindly pointed out to me, you are officially old once you fall and break something vs. falling and jumping right back up and saying “I’m okay, it’s all good!!!”. So, I’m old.

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Posted By electricnurse on March 7, 2010

Riding in the backseat of my sister’s suburban I see this dolly on the floor and think, holy cow! Poor girlie, what happened to you. Your hair is a mess, face looks beat up and what’s this? Where the heck are your toes?!!! I supp0se this is what happens to dolls in a house with six kids???? WOW!

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Posted By electricnurse on March 5, 2010

Part of getting myself ready for a little babe is losing some extra poundage/ie: trimming down. It seems so easy for me to get into a rut, stop exercising and eat all of those goodies the drug reps bring day in and day out (the FDA says they cannot bring us pens but they CAN make us fat…real nice!). BUT, I know I want my body in the best shape possible before pregnancy in order to have the best pregnancy and delivery possible (and lets face it, postpartum too as I am the poster girl/billboard exhibit for postpartum depression). I actually know what I want my BMI (body mass index) to be before we get pregnant. I know, I know…sounds crazy BUT after waiting for 14 YEARS  we might as well do it right ya’ think? Yes, people…we will have been married for well over 14 years before conceiving. Yes, we have consumated the marriage and are either infertile or are a great exhibit that if you practice “safe sex” you can prevent pregnancy. So, take that….all of my teenage patients! 

I am also not ignorant to the fact that twin pregnancy truly does peak at the age of 35 (aaaaccckkkk!!!!), which I will be and I need to be in good physical shape to endure the labor and to have a successful vaginal delivery, especially in the way that we are thinking of doing (more on that wayyyyy later). My sister had gestational diabetes (thanks a lot, sister) with her last pregnancy and as this may be genetic this predisposes me too.

And, folks can we just be honest…I am simply going to be old (I will be termed an “elderly obstetric patient” and will require more frequent and different testing so I need all the help I can get going into this. Whomever came up with this whole elderly term was a nutso male doctor with not nearly enough patients and was obviously trying to get back at someone for something!)

WARNING, however: I will not be prego next month or even the month after that. We are hoping that it will probably be this fall but as I am a planner with a side dish of OCD I surely will be writing about it a lot in the future. Plus, I really need to try my best to consider my medical practice as much as possible as there are many patients that count on me so I haven’t figured that one out just yet. Just the thought of “Adam and Shana having a baby?!?” has some people’s eyes dilating so I’m just a’ clarifying that it isn’t happenin’ right now as we’ve got some business to tend to first (other then the real business). For example, my wonderful Father-in-law just recently called me to jokingly ask how things were going with his twin grandsons?! Can you believe it?! Holy Schneikes! Yikes! My blood pressure went up at that moment, cheeks turned red, I probably started drooling and I think I stuttered something like “I gotta go, I’ve got a patient to see” and promptly hung up. Yeah, I know I’m gonna have to learn better coping skills.

Okay, so onto the whole eating better, taking care of myself bit….Last month Adam and I read an awesome book. In fact it has been on the top 10 best seller list since the first of the year. It is a very plain, simple book. Diet really is that anyway…simple. It is like I tell my patients each and every day. We all know how to eat, we just need to do it. Food Rules by Michael Pollan is a really fun book to read. It has common sense “reminders” per se such as:

• don’t eat cereal if it changes the color of the milk
• try to shop only the periphery of the grocery store
• do not buy fuel for your body where you buy fuel for your car
• do not eat anything with more than five ingredients on the label
• do not eat anything that has ingredients that a 3rd grader could not read
• do not eat it if it will not rot
• do not eat it if it has high fructose corn syrup

….and tons more for a total of 64 tid-bit brief one pager rules. All common sense reminders.

Enough ramblings for now. We are still open to suggestions on roofing the other half of the house….wouldn’t want that babe to get rained on ya know.

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Posted By electricnurse on March 3, 2010

A friend of mine came across this recipe and loved it and encouraged me to try it. Adam picked up the ingredients for me and we made it last weekend and loved it. It is a wheat bread, somewhat heavy (which I love) and fat free. Best of all….VERRRY easy. Literally, no kneading necessary. It has been a great snack when I have been craving a carb as it is a whole wheat grain and is filling. Apparently they have a book with all sorts of other things you can do but I’m just impressed Adam and I baked bread for pete’s sake and am not so sure I want to push our luck!!! It literally takes less than 5 minutes to mix up. NO kidding.

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Posted By electricnurse on March 2, 2010

Adam and I have gone back and forth for a verrry long time about why egg shells vary in color. I kid you not…..that is what this post is about. Adam has vehemently sworn to the fact that it depends on the color of the chicken’s elbow. Well, we have this very nice patient that sells eggs to us at the clinic~antibiotic & hormone free, cage free too! I finally asked him last week and he looked at me like I had purple hair and orange eyes. Needless to say I told Adam he needed to check into his theory a little further.

Come to find out…he was close. It’s their earlobes that determine the color of the shell. Elbows…earlobes…elbows…earlobes. He says they sound the same to him and he just remembered wrong from the Discovery channel show he saw it on once upon a time.

So tonight we were boiling some eggs and there was a really speckly one and I asked Adam what color he thought that chicken’s earlobe was and his response was classic: his mama’s earlobe was white, his daddy’s was not~there are even biracial chickens, you see.

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Posted By electricnurse on February 27, 2010

here we have snippets from the past 3 weeks:

• My mama is home. Yippee! After three months gone taking care of my ill Pepe in Florida we are very happy to have her home. I missed missed missed her.
• We are getting ready physically, mentally and spiritually for a little babe. Or, as I told my baby brother…”I am getting my womb ready”. He subsequently freaked and said “please don’t say that word…it’s way to close to the ovaries”.
• I experienced a few days of euphoric relief when we learned Adam’s cousin (he was our best man) is having twin boys. You see, Adam’s Dad often prophesies and many years ago said I would have twin boys and I thought briefly that maybe he just saw the wrong person…Adam’s mom says no, though..it was me with the twin boys. That frightens the living daylights out of me and I would be lying if I did not admit that it hasn’t played a teensy role in us not multiplying as of yet.
• I met with our accountant today and left smiling brightly. We will be getting a refund big enough to roof half of our home! What about the other half, you may ask? We haven’t figured that part out yet…taking any and all suggestions…
• Our niece Rebecca is a senior this year and is still shooting to go IVY. She has had a phone interview by Columbia and a personal interview with both Harvard and Princeton!!!! Holy Crapola~we are so proud of her and hope she gets in.
• I’ve decided I need to learn to knit. I’m not sure why~maybe it has something to do with getting the womb ready. Adam was with me at one of my medical conferences last week and my “teach yourself to knit” book and needles and yarn were there and wouldn’t ya know it….he taught himself while I was at the conference and now he is teaching me. He is such a manly man. A studly man.
• I am learning Haitian Creole via a ten lesson system on cds. I’m a mess. Between the french that is shockingly still back there in the brain still from high school and the spanish I use in my practice now I can’t figure out what I’m saying half the time. Today I mastered how to say “I understand a little Haitian Creole” and “I am American”.
• For the first real time I have been seriously devastated that we do not have tv. I would love to be watching the Olympics. While we were actually in a hotel WITH tv at my conference the only thing on EVERY freakin’ channel was crud about Tiger Woods….spare me and everyone else! We were able to illegally watch the US vs. Canada Hockey game last Sunday and it was A-M-A-Z-I-N-G! Having grown up on the ice, I have a special spot in my heart for hockey but that game was great and I can’t wait to see who we will play in the finals!
• One final thing….I did see some bobsledding while at my mom’s for supper this week and have decided that my family is made for bobsledding. IE: physically. We have the same calves and thighs those guys do so I’ve put a call out to my siblings but so far no one has stepped up and volunteered to start traininng with me. Bummer.

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Posted By electricnurse on February 26, 2010

So.

I’ve been hiding, I guess. Actually, here is how it happened: a few weeks ago I got a letter from my father that hurt my feelings which shouldn’t surprise me as it has occurred off and on for the past 25 years. In fact, we (as in…Adam and I) used to have a rule that whenever I got something in the mail from my Dad I would not open it. Adam would and if it was something that was not hurtful he would give it to me, if not he would toss it. Needless to say, I guess we need to resume that routine because I didn’t see it coming when I should have. So. I felt sorry for myself for about three days. No blogging, emailing, really anything. Then, life took over.

Doc loves cows. Doc, as in the doctor I work with. Every January and February he travels with his grandchildren to cattle shows to CO and TX. This leaves things VERY hectic here on the home front for the other NP and I. Lots of late evenings at the hospital…no time for blogging. Then…I’ve been to three conferences in the midst of all of this too.

All the while, I think geesh…I feel like I have a lot to say but I don’t really know what nor why actually. So that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I’m working on a post with the goings ons at the Carters that I’ll post next.

So I suppose the moral of the story is: don’t hurt my feelings.

xoxo

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Posted By electricnurse on February 21, 2010

“I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be “happy”. I think the purpose of life is

• to be useful
• to be responsible
• to be compassionate

It is, above all

• to matter
• to count
• to stand for something
• to have made some difference that you lived at all.”  ~Leo Rosten 

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Posted By electricnurse on February 7, 2010

The last time something like this happened was when my sister emptied the clothes out of her dryer and a dead snake had it’s mouth clamped on her husband’s jock strap (oops…should I have put that in here?). 

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