Emt @ MindSay

Wow. I know it's been FOREVER since I've been on here. And saying, "Life happens, you know?" just seems like a cop-out, no matter how true it is.

Since I've haven't been here in a quite a while, there should be a lot for you to catch up on, but sadly, I'm afraid that is not the case.

I'm still working 24/72-hour shifts as an EMT, and volunteering as an EMT at the local rescue squad on my days off. It seems to most that I live, eat, breathe, and sleep rescue, but I do love it very much. My only complaints about it is the political drama with the higher ups, otherwise I'm content to check off my truck, finish my base duties, and run my calls. It's the nit-picky things that I try to not let bother me, and for the most part, I think I'm doing okay with that. However, on the other hand, the higher-ups are encouraging each shift to pick a charity to sponsor to increase community involvement (thus the March of Dimes post previously).

I really love the church I'm going to now. This morning's service was a baptism service. I can't remember the exact number, but I think around 80 men, women, and children were baptized today. And the energy was awesome. I told my friend who went with me today, that I believe that is the first church service I've ever been to where I felt like I needed to catch my breath after it was over from all the excitement. I'm also active in the nursery there (ages 2yrs and under) and those kids are just so precious helping pack up at the end of service, waving at me in the hall, and they're just so darn cute! And the pastor there does some pretty neat sermon series, (the latest one was "Express-o Yourself"). I do believe God has many more blessings in store for that place.

Oh! Before I forget, I am not Catholic, but I did observe Lent this year. I gave up potatoes. There were a couple of days in there where I really wanted a french fry ESPECIALLY when resturants would put them on my plate even when I specially requested that I did not want any, and I had friends trying to determine if I'd make it 40 days or not. But I did, and I did have some french fries at lunch today. When I was thinking of what to give up for Lent, I skimmed through my diet and realized that I ate a lot of potatoes, almost with every meal. So I bet you can figure out how excited I was to find I had lost 4 pounds, just by going potato-free (but that was the only difference in my diet, the rest remained the same).

So outside of working, volunteering, and church, there hasn't been a whole lot going on with me. My family, on the other hand, has recently sustained a ding or two...

Mom was in the hospital for a few days last week with a kidney infection and an 8mm kidney stone on the left side, and two smaller stones on the right side (but hadn't moved from the kidney at that time). She had 2 stints put in for the infection to drain and she has to go back next week for the doctor to go in and get out the 8mm stone. They feel, for now, that the two on the right side are small enough to pass. We shall see...

Dad messed up his knee at the beginning of the year by stepping off the back of a pick-up "wrong," (I even took him in by ambulance). At first the doctor thought it might have been a severe sprain, but has since deteremined that he has a small hairline fracture to the top of his tibia, stretched the ligaments on both sides of the knee, and has a partial tear in the back of his ACL. We have also found out that Dad has severe sleep apnea (he stops breathing 33.1 times an hour while sleeping, well, that's what he said the Dr said), and when he goes in to surgery this coming Tuesday for his knee, the doctor is going to keep him overnight to make sure there's no adverse effects to the medicine they're going to use to put him under.

My sister that's in the middle of me and our baby sister will be graduating in May from the community college with her degree/certification/whatever it is in General Studies. So she's trying to find a job and with the high unemployment rate, she's worrying she won't find anything.

And then my baby sister, she'll be coming home from college for the summer soon and she's been worried about the 'rents and this one really hard class she's in right now.

So yeah, other than hitting my head at work a few shifts back, hard enough to seriously think I may have given myself a concussion, I'm doing okay. Just staying busy taking care of everyone else, all while working, volunteering, and having a good time at church.

I hope you all have a wonderful Happy Easter!

In our house people sleep in shifts, I don't think any of us ever really sleep more than a couple hours.  Around 2 a.m.on Friday morning, I got up and went to the living room to watch TV. In a few minutes my husband comes down the stairs and sits on the sofa across from me.  He starts saying he is feeling weird, and getting that wild look in his eyes which I know means his blood sugar is low.  I bring his testing kit and it is 90.  I head upstairs to get some bottles of orange juice.  After quickly drinking two and waiting a few minutes he is acting more wild. He is rolling on the couch, yelling, and pounding his fists on the sofa.  At some point we both end up on the floor as I test his blood sugar again, 64, even worse.  I give him two more bottles of juice but he continues to roll around on the floor, pounding the chairs and floor with his fists, pushing the sofas, chair, and rug around with his feet, and then throwing himself backwards, yelling the entire time.  I have to keep moving around on the floor to stop him from slamming his head on the floor.  Usually 2 bottles of orange juice will get him straight, but not tonight. After 5 or 10 minutes he is not getting any better so I end up calling the paramedics. 

The guy on the other end of the line could hear him yelling and kept me on the phone more I think to keep me calm instead of getting any more information.  In what seemed like an hour but really was only a couple of minutes, 6 paramedics are in my living room working on him.  By that point he had gotten quiet and wedged himself between a chair and the wall, using one of the sofa cushions as a pillow. We all assumed that the orange juice had kicked in finally as I went over his list of meds with one of the paramedics and he was talking with the paramedics.  They checked his blood sugar, 49, that is not good at all.  So they start an IV and push glucose as fast as they can. This isn't the watery stuff you think of from a hospital but in a tube with a big thick syringe. It looks more like syrup or is as close as they can get to syrup to get it into his system  fast. Sooff we go to the ER.

Once we get to the ER I find out that his doctor had given him a different sliding scale to use for his insulin to see if that provided better control of his blood sugars. Well that didn't work out as they planned.  So I sit in the corner of the room as he sleeps as we wait to see how fast his blood sugars come up.  this ER doctor I have not met before.  We are such regulars at the ER that tehre are a couple that recognize my husband as soon as he comes through the door.  After almost 4 hours, they release him and we come home.  He goes to bed and I straighten the furniture in the living room before I head upstairs to take a nap.  Everything looks normal.

Yes, Peeing for the Man is something we all have to do eventually.  Thanks to the torkers, crankers, shooters, boozers, drinkers and whatever the else they are fucking called; many of us have to now take pre employement drug tests, random drug tests and/or yearly drug tests for our jobs.

I for one am one of the few that do NOT mind having to take the drug test.  Simply because of my husband's occupation.  He is a maintance worker at a packing plant.  Janitor many of you are thinking.  Sorry folks in a packing plant maintance folks are actually the skilled and higher paid employees.  My husband holds a Federal Journeymen's License in Electronics, an electrician, a mechanic, a trained first responder/emt and a supervisor who pushes paper work all in one shot.  The engines they work on can range from 10 lbs up to a thousand plus.  The wiring they work on is anything as a house might be to as complicated as wiring a whole panel of switches and wires that run anywhere from a dozen machines to the whole complex.  The electronics they work on look simple and most comp geeks would turn around and end up killing themselves with one misprograming of  a control.  I for one do NOT want a druggy or an alchie working anywhere near my husband.  Because SAFETY is important to NOT killing not only the maintance workers but the entire population of a plant. 

Many of you, myself included, do happen to wonder why one would have to pee for a clerk job, a cashier job, a bank teller job, food job, and the such.  Well simply put......if one is fucked up with drugs or booze......seriously folks your mind is fuckered be the reason and you do stupid shit like steal money or items, spit in someone's food, or server a food item that someone told you NOT to give them and you do and you kill them because they are allergic.  The list is actually quite endless as to the reasons.  As a teenager I got pist off as hell when I got my first real job as a supervisor/clerk at a small grocery store.  Why the hell did I have to have a pee test when I don't do fucking drugs?  As an adult I figured out the reason, just because someone says they aren't on drugs doesn't mean they are.  And it is safer just to test everyone then put your trust in someone who is lying.  And after my husband had to respond to one of his own crew when he was getting ready to come home one night.............I am a strong supporter of the pee test.  The dude was a drunk......hubby and his boss kept turning him in for drinking before, on and after hte job.  The dude had lots of DUI's and everytime my hubby got him out of the plant in NE, the union got him back on.  Then one day the guy was drunk off his ass..........and he didn't use his head.........and forgot his electrical gloves (the industrial rubber thingys-electricians will know what I am talking about) and granted he was only working on a voltage that normally wouldn't have killed anyway....he didn't even have the normal electrical gloves on and he got a volt of electricity through him and it killed him.  If it was a higher voltage he could have killed the employees in the general vicinity becuase even a small voltage caused a fire to break out in a panel room.  As it was my husband had to do cpr on the dude and when he turned over the dude to the paramedics he had to go help with the smoke inhalation folks. 

I wasn't to happy to have to go Pee for the Man today simply because I got a barely speaking English Asian lady as a lab tech and the woman couldn't do her job.  A pee test should take no more then 10 minutes tops.....evne if you can't pee!  Drink a few glasses of water fast and turn the faucet on!  The woman didn't understand what I was talkign about listing my medications so I wouldn't get dinged and refused too!  Then she wanted the whole dayum cup filled.  You know how many pee tests I have taken in my life time for various medical reasons and for employeement?  Not to mention I am the daughter of a Clinic/ER nurse!  You only need about less then half to fill the plastic wide vials to send off!  I knew I dind't have enough urine in me to fill the whole cup but she wanted a full cup!  I told her this and said okay.....and dropped me off in a waiting room with 1 small lil cup of water and said wait.  The bitch left me in the room for 20 mother fucking minutes while she dinked around in the room across from me.  I say dinked because I could see her fucking ass.  She was snacking on food, drinking a soda, and reading a mother fucking magazine.    Needless to say Niassa lost her temper.  And my sugars were out of wack all weekend for some reason and I was irritable as hell about having to make an extra stop for hubby to fill his truck up already.  So when I saw what she was doing and she told me to sit down and wait after the first time I told her I was ready and she blew me off I went the fuck off on her lazy dinky ass! 

Told her if she couldn't do her job then get the fuck out of the medical feild.  Better yet if she doesn't have enough to do in a doctor's office with a waiting room full of ppl out there then get her ass to a hospital.  And next time she blows someone off so she can fucking eat and drink a soda while reading a magazing  she better dayum well hope it isn't me again.  Not to mention she best learn to speak english clearly enough to understand what the hell someone is saying because if she fucks me over because she didn't list my medications I would have her sorry ass job not to mention her license.  Needless to say the Nurse Manager of the Office heard me going off and came and finished the test for me all the while apologizing.  I dont' know what was said to the lady but I know the Nurse Manager wasn't happy that I ended up going the hell off and being kept waiting while she read a dayum magazine sipping on a soda stuffing her fucking mouth.  I finally got out of the doctor's office at 10:30.  I got into the lab at 9:30 because I got to the office at 9:15!

I dropped off the employer sheet to the job site and told the manager what happened.  She took down a list of my medications to be on the safe side so she could let the corp health office know jsut in case the Nurse Manager fuckered up also.  And she is also going to suggest they use a different doctor's office to start doing the pee tests! 

On top of peeing for the man I might suggest that companies start testing for stupidity!:D

Okay this was an odd post I know.  I got to talking about why pee test were important and all that crap and ended up in a rant.  But you all will get over it:P

I am so tired right about now. Wyatt was easy to watch, but he didn't fall asleep until right before 11.

I just stayed the night, since his mom, LeAnne, is an EMT. So at 11:30, LeAnne gets home and puts Wyatt to bed, and then she goes to bed, I watch t.v. Then at like right around midnight, LeAnne's beeper goes off, and she flies out of the house. At 12:30, Ashely, LeAnne's daughter gets home, and we stay up until about 3 in the morning, just watching tv and talking. She is so funny... And then she fell asleep, and I fell asleep. 

At almost 6 in the morning, LeAnne wakes me up, and we leave. She takes me home, and then I went back to bed until about 11, when my mom woke me up and told me to go do chores.

I need to go do laundry for WLC, because I leave on tuesday. We are leaving the high school at about 4:30. IN THE MORNING!! So I need to get up at about 2, so I can do chores, and shower before I leave.

( can you tell that showering is one of my top priorities in life?)  

So how much I sleep tonight is vital to how awake I am for WLC. I'll prolly go to bed at around 9 ish.

I need to shut up now, I am probably boring you all with my life story...

Ciao,

Mariah