Red head!

Before:

After:

Red head?

So, don't tell my sister Jenna who spent like 536,24o hours brushing out my dreadlocks,
but I kind of miss them.
Ok, so, I really miss them.
Like when people miss an arm they lost, miss them.

Sure my hair is 'socially acceptable' now.
But as I was telling the International Man o' Mystery recently (much to his dismay),
I don't generally go for things that make me 'pretty'.

I'd prefer to look interesting.
Hence the bleach blonde hair. Hence the dreadlocks.
Hence why my pretty, dirty blonde, shoulder length curls aren't really doing it for me.
They don't really go with my style,
which I also recently explained to the Mystery Man.
(He asked me who Michael Kors was the other day, so anything style related needs explanation.)

So I started thinking of social acceptable hair styles that are pretty AND interesting...
I'm pretty sure there's nothing that says, "I'm fierce but I still wash my hair more than once a month" more than red hair.

I know some awesome people who make red look like the new black.

Annie, a soul sister.

Emma, an inspirational friend in Italy.

I think ideally I would look like this:

A forest nymph.
Or really a model for Ban.do, and the headband is called "She lives in a fairytale", which is me, because there is no way in Narnia that hair would look like that.
Mine's too crazy.

I also feel like red hair can go horribly, horribly wrong.
Things I don't want to look like:

1) I'm a teenager who recently discovered Manic Panic.

2) Wilma Flintstone

3) This.
Brassy.

I would love to look like this.
Especially if I had written this song and were indeed an awesome rockstar.
Loving the bangs, Flo, lovin' them.

But I would probably end up looking more like this version from the music video, because well, my hair is crazy.
Which is all kinds of funnsies if you're in a music video. Less so if you're trying to interview a patient about their recent stroke.
No need to give them a heart attack also.


Then there's this version, which *might* be possible??
This is a lovely blogger, who is also a hairstylist,
so mine definitely won't look as nice,
but a girl can dream.

I have a hair appointment on Thursday.
Wish me luck!

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"She dreams in color, she dreams in red..." -Pearl Jam

"You'd find it easier to be bad than good if you had red hair," said Anne reproachfully. "People who haven't red hair don't know what trouble is."- Anne of Green Gables

Heartsies for this one.

This is from xkcd, which are like the superheros of comic strips for nerds.
Amen, brother, amen.

p.s. It is in no way sad that I'm spending my Saturday night reading xkcd. In no way.

http://xkcd.com/137/

More than a Doctor?

Photo source

We have a patient* right now that is dying.

He's a 77 year old man from India who came in with sudden onset severe dementia.
We tried all the drugs we could think of for that.
Nothing has changed.
He couldn't swallow on his own without risking him getting pneumonia from inhaling his food.
So we placed a nasogastric tube to feed him through.
He pulled it out.
We put it back and put mitts on his hands.
He pulled it out again.
He also pulled out his IV.
Three times.
He spits at the healthcare workers sometimes because of his confusion and agitation. He mumbles in Hindi and his glazed eyes will look right at you, but you know they aren't seeing you.
His 90lb frame is stiffly curled up in the fetal position dwarfed by the white sheets and blankets of the hospital bed.

He's been placed on comfort care now, which means hydration, pain management, and waiting.

He will probably be the first patient I have that will pass away on my watch.
And it bothers me for 2 reasons.

1) This is not a good death.
Confused, in a hospital where people don't speak his language, hooked up to IVs.
The real shame is he comes from a culture and a family that would normally take him home, feed him and keep him until it was his time to go, at home, comfortable, surrounded by family.
However,
since they live in the US now, they all have to work to afford to live and so there is no one at home to take care of him.
That's a real shame that that part of our culture, not taking care of the elderly, is eroding another culture's desire to do so.

2) I want to be more than a doctor.
In these situations, we've done all we can medically, and my team still rounds on him every day, just to make sure he's medically stable and to adjust his Ativan so that he is not so agitated for the nurses.
But it's times like this that I want to do things that go beyond the realm of medicine and would be considered highly unprofessional.
I want to climb in the hospital bed and cradle his frail body.
I wish I knew his language and would tell him stories,
beautiful stories of creation and and myths of the afterlife.
But in this age of modern medicine, even hugging your patients is frowned upon.

And so I wonder, is it really a doctor I want to be?
And if not, what would qualify me to care for people like that? A nurse? A chaplain? A mother?
And where does one train for that?

------------------------------------------

There has never been a time when you and I have not existed, nor will there be a time when we will cease to exist. As the same person inhabits the body through childhood, youth, and old age, so too at the time of death he attains another body. The wise are not deluded by these changes.
Bhagavad Gita

*some details have been changed to protect anonymity.

Women Wednesday

I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down.

Georgia O'Keeffe

I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.
Georgia O'Keeffe

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.
Georgia O'Keeffe

This summer Erica and I stopped by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe on our epic roadtrip and saw the "Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction" Exhibit.
I loved it far more than I thought I would.
And I think I'll start posting inspirational women on Wednesdays...
when I remember...
and when I'm not on call...
so, you know, sometimes.