Floating Jesus

Working 9:30-17:30 – a great shift for a Saturday. Can sleep until I wake up, and then lay in bed another fifteen minutes past then. Have a leisurely shower, breakfast, some internet surfing, a little poker (lost $6), then head in to work. Weekends in the city are great because there is no traffic. Half the stress of this job comes from the traffic.

Half my shift is over, and all I have done is two transfers – a dialysis patient and a psych. The rest of the time I’ve been typing away on my laptop.

The dialysis patient was fairly interesting. She seemed very teary and thanked us just about every fifteen seconds. I guessed that she was new to dialysis, and I was right. She is a diabetic, who had to have her legs amputated, and then suddenly her kidneys went, so she went from having control in her life to being in a nursing home, unable to adjust the heat – it was too hot in her room – and unable to shut out her roommates TV, as well as being at everyone else’s mercy.

She was a big woman – wide - and the dialysis center we went to, instead of using stretchers like most do, uses these geriatric chairs, where the patient sinks down in them. This center’s chairs don’t have removable sides, so we have to lift each patient up about a foot before we can transfer them over. This lady was hard to do, not just because of her weight, but because of her girth, she was sort of wedged on both sides. I was working with a strong male partner. I can’t imagine doing her with one of the weaker females. We’ll be picking her up and taking her back three times a week from now on.

**

Took a little nap in the back of the ambulance. I don’t sleep so much as stretch out. The nets are great for stretching. I lay flat on my back and reach my arms up over my head and grab on as high as I can on the net and just feel the stretch in my back muscles.

**

We help an out of region ambulance unload a heavy patient coming from a distant hospital to a nursing home in the city. She is too wide for their stretcher. I carry a picture of hers, a larged framed photophoto of a marble Jesus — his arms out -- suspended in space. She is upset because they don’t have the special bed she needs. For a few moments, she refuses to get off the stretcher, but we convince her that the nursing home’s bed, while not the one she wanted is more comfortable than the stretcher she is on. She relents.

**

We sit downtown in an empty parking lot. All the winter snow is melted. The wind whips up the sand. My partner says it reminds him on Iraq. I look up at the Capitol building on top of the hill to the south. The sky is pink and purple as the sun goes down.