3 days away from this work place can sometimes feel a lot longer. Getting up at 4am each of those days contributes much to that sentiment. It feels like the days simply will not go away, will not end. I walked a lot, as usual. Parts of Brooklyn not entirely new to me but not frequently traversed. 9th Street from 7th Avenue to Third Avenue, then up a piece to where the F\/G trains clawpast to reenter the underground. I sweated… swat? Swot? I perspired more than usual but nowhere near as much as others around me, if sweat-stained shirts are to be used as a measure of comparison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I wound up in Brooklyn with nowhere to go and no one to know after the weekly walking group I’d planned to join decided to cancel on account of the heat. I was annoyed by this. By 10am heat was not really an issue yet, but what do I know… Just being selfish. There are a number of older people who join this group\u00a0 who may have been less willing than others to risk being in the heat. I shouldn’t complain. It’s a free gathering with no expectation of tipping or donations. And for all that it allowed me a chance to check on the payphones at the Brooklyn Central Library. The only working publicly-accessible payphone I could vouch for in NYC was at that library but this is no more. A couple of months prior one phone had been removed and the remaining phone worked. Today, oddly (to me, at least) the previously removed phone was restored to its location but now it does not work, either. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yesterday was CT Scan day. My confidence in the technicians at this lab was not high. The nurse who drew blood said something like “Dangit” when she plunged the needle, mumbling that it have been a long time since she made a mistake. She said she hit a vessel. I didn’t knkow what that meant but I saw the blood flowing. Seems she was most concerned that I felt pain on account this. That is true. There was an ouch. I can take it. She went at a vein that I don’t think any other murse has gone for when drawing blood from this inferior vessel. It was on my left wrist. Blood almost always gets drawm mid-arm. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So there was that little incident, in which a medical professional essentially said “Oops” upon puncturing my body. That’s what you wanna hear. A little later a patient ahead of me had to be removed from his procedure. I could not determine why but the technicians in their sound-proofed room were yelling at each other pretty brutally. The room is sound-proofed against the patient being worked on, not the rest of us in the waiting area. I think the problem was that his pulse rate accelerated something crazy and they had to push something other than dye through the IV. He was white, mid-60s, and seemed fine upon leaving the CT scan chamber. But he was told, apologetically, that his body’s reaction to the process prevented the technicians from getting the results he needed. I guess they’ll find another way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
None of that should\u00a0 have surprised or impressed me but the minute or two with that room of technicians and nurses screaming at each other did not fit any stereotype of an unflappable medical professional. One person was trying to blame the other but the reality did seem to be that the patient hismelf had a genuine reaction to something they injected into him.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My scan was to check something in my heart. I joked that they might have trouble finding it, but there may be a smoldering charcoal-briquette still beating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Today I look forward to not being in the heat. This is what having a job means to me more than anything after working from home for so long. Let someone else pay for the a\/c, the INternet, the endless cold water. \u00a0 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
3 days away from this work place can sometimes feel a lot longer. Getting up at 4am each of those days contributes much to that sentiment. It feels like the days simply will not go away, will not end. I walked a lot, as usual. Parts of Brooklyn not entirely new to me but not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-cug","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48004\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}