Inertia

Other than a few good days here and there, I’ve felt a little under the weather since my shoulder surgery a few weeks ago. It’s not that my shoulder isn’t getting better, but rather that I’m just tired and out of breath a lot. I hear it’s not unusual to feel like this after having general anesthesia, and I am getting older - or so my children constantly tell me. :-) Yes, Kathie, I have been to my internist who concurred with the post-anesthesia “yuckies” diagnosis. (Obviously, that last was in Pat-speak.)

In the meantime, I seem to have lost my blogging inertia. Oh, I’ve been reading other people’s blogs a lot, especially some written by a group of friends in England. (I especially enjoy this one.) I feel a bit like a voyeur reading these guys’ posts about their lives and their opinions about what’s going on around them, but fortunately they haven’t told me to butt out – yet. I find that they write well and with astuteness, and the comments they write back and forth, teasing and supporting each other, are genuine and clever. And I guess I’m just starved for intelligence from beyond Charleston...

I have to get back to my own writing, however. Sometimes, just making a simple decision reboots my motivation. So today I decided to drop the “My Friends and Family” blog. It was a nice idea, but for the most part my friends and family are just not interested in blogging. I did want to preserve the following post, though, written by my sweet and brilliant daughter, Jessie.

On July 11th, she wrote:

The Job.
I work in the NNICU: Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. I've only been here for 2 years. I was hired straight out of nursing school. So this is all I know. And I'm slowly starting to wonder what am I doing? Why am I participating in prolonging agony for my babies and their families?!?! What does God have planned for me? I became very close to two families in particular. And each case ended in a funeral. Our dark outcomes outweigh our miracles. We have NNICU reunions to celebrate these miracle babies. But what about the ones that don't make it...or rather we save and then they don't make it. They were never supposed to be here in the first place. My job has become just that - a job. I don't want to save them...I want them to go home to the angels.

No sooner had I tidied up my eye makeup after reading Jessie’s post than the following comment from Kathie appeared:

Hanging on my wall for the last twenty years is a photograph of a pigtailed girl wearing her AK's oversized white tee shirt. She is sitting on the ground of my garden, watering a young tomato plant with a watering can almost as big as she. The expression on her face is total concentration and devotion to that plant.

Well, that plant's days were numbered but the care it received that day made its life more bearable and it knew it was being taken care of by someone with a lot of love and devotion.

I am so proud that little girl has grown up into a fine young woman who gives her love, devotion and energy to these babies. Some will make it, some won't, and some will have challenges in life, but all will have had the honor to receive care from an extraordinary person.

Sorry, I’ve got to go now and find another box of tissues.