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somehow avoided becoming terrible
Friday, September 8 2017
This afternoon during the bi-weekly all-hands meeting, I'd thought I would have to present. But IT didn't have their shit together enough to submit our notes to the powers that are, so IT didn't have to present at all. Once that meeting was over, I drove out to Rhinebeck to visit Gretchen (and deliver some things she'd asked for, including reading materials). On the way, I stopped at Adam's on 9W to get some Finn Crisps (which Gretchen imagined being able to eat). I also bought a plastic watering can to be used as a vase for some flowers Nancy and Sarah the Vegan had dropped off. (I pre-filled the watering can with water and told the check-out lady to be careful with it as she rang it up.)
Northern Dutchess isn't one of those hospitals that suffers from overcrowding; patients all get their own private rooms (something that was considered a great luxury when I had a private room at UVA hospital for the couple weeks of hospitalization I had there in the Fall of 1983), and (as I noticed when walking to and from Gretchen's room), a fair number or rooms are empty. So there is a large staff-to-patient ratio, which would suggest a high quality of care. Gretchen also remarked at the effortless competence of the staff as they ran the tests and applied the procedures. Her only real complaint was that it was taking them awhile to figure out what her vegan dietary requirements meant. This was in keeping with what she found to be the essentially old-fashioned nature of the hospital. It had started out as a small family-run facility and had somehow avoided becoming terrible as capitalism became increasingly sociopathic. They'd apparently never hired anyone to root our inefficiencies, but they had also stayed abreast of trends in modern medical equipment and procedures (nobody, for example, was trying to slap leeches on her, although leeches have been back so long they might've fallen out of fashion a second time).
When I was there Gretchen seemed weak but cheerful, helped in no small part by the narcotics she keeps being provided. Sometimes it's oxycodone and sometimes it's morphine.
On the way home, I went well out of my way to visit the Tibetan Center thrift store, where I bought an all-mechanical bathroom scale (I hate batteries in things that do not need them), a foot-tall plastic dinosaur (it looks like an Allosaurus), and a large bin of yet more K'nex pieces for some amazing future project.
After the workday had ended and after I'd taken a bath, Gretchen called and she sounded terrible. It seems her fever had spiked again at 103 (degrees Fahrenheit), neglected by a nurse who had come on after the 7:00pm shift change. This nurse also said some inappropriate things, particularly regarding Gretchen's recently-removed IUD. This news put me off my game for the rest of the night, and I went to bed fairly early after watching yet more season 3 of Halt & Catch Fire.
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