Diabetes, with sugar on top

Ok, so how do I tell the dudes that ignoring your diabetes can cause erectile dysfunction? I'm thinking, well, people who are sanguine about their big toe being chopped off are hard to motivate. Not so, says the husband unit. It's all about the blood flow. So, if I can find a way to discuss this in an individual setting -( In a class, I'd be fine. No one is going to accuse me or misunderstand me in a class setting. I hope.)- if I could find a way to, uhm, bring it up to them, I could perhaps improve their insulin compliance. But no one in my department does, so I don't have anyone to learn how from.

Complicating this is the low literacy/ low vision of these clients. In general they can't or won't read, so I'm dragging the vcr around the hospital as it is. If they were readers, well, there could be a hand out. Or I could send them to the ADA website. But if they were readers, they probably would be compliant diabetics, and I don't get those clients. (Now there's a dream job: compliant diabetics. They'd stroll in, display their fully filled out blood sugar diaries, trade recipes with me for low fat, low sodium,tasty stuff, you know. Then we'd discuss the best way to work in daily exercise, and then they'd stroll back out, their blood sugar better than mine. I don't think compliant diabetics have a clinic, sadly.)

So, here's the question, if they don't care, why should I?

Mail Call!

Wonderful stuff in the mail from Beaverslide Drygoods. I only ordered one of each thing, to see if I liked it. I like it! Quilt bat is the big white thing. Really nice wool. I thought a quilt bat would be junk wool, but I was wrong. I could spin it, it's so nice. That's only $12US of roving, wich is wicked cheap. Much happiness. Son Two is cute, yes? He looks like his mom.

Homework

I am sitting here forcing my son to do homework. Is it pleasant? It is not. The sun is slanting in in a hide and seek kind of way, the street lights will be on soon. And WE have not been able to go out and play. Yes, we. I want to go out. I want to pick flowers out of the garden and kill crabgrass. ( I took the lawn out years ago- there are still places where the crabgrass comes up. ) I want to talk to another adult who- unlike my patients or my coworkers- doe not want me to do something for them right now. I want my kid to develope the work ethic that has served me so well over the years- do the worst first, and then knock out the rest, then do whatever the hell you want.

Following my own ethic, the first patient I saw today 1) spkoe another language, 2)had a major medical issue that I was supposed to teach her how to manage, and 3) had a psychiatric illness. The MDs keep refering her to be taught, because she clearly does not know how to manage her illness. Problem is, she has been taught by every member of our department, and she can't learn. She lives with her little tiny old mom, she of the poor vision, the poor hearing, and the poor motor skills. Mom is supposed to make this lady straighten up and fly right, except mom- get this- is still working. I have no idea why, but I imagine that it is to make money to pay bills, as the daughter has no income. That's the only reason I would be working at age seventy. So, she is not home at lunch to give medicine, the patient can't take medicine, and the MD's refuse to put her on what they term a "less elegant regime". Well, hell yeah. What's less elegant than being disabled, non English speaking, and sick? What's less elegant than being so psychatrically disabled that you can't get it together enough to get on SSI? What is less elegant than having been saved in the ICU and being released into the world certain to end up in the ICU again? THere is no real inpatient psych anymore. We just dump them on their relatives or the street.

My son has still not done his math. What on earth am I going to do with him. Hopefully, one day if he's hopelessly mentally ill and homeless, I won't look back and realize that it was becuase I couldn't make him do arithmatic.

Vermillion and Aztec Gold

Or so says the Jaquard bottles. The roving is something that spins nicely but is really drab as a yarn, so I dunked.

Today is the last year of the Jewish year- tonight at sundown the new year begins. ( I cleaned house in a really quick, Flylady kind of way.) Last week I met the first person in the history of my life who seemed to feel that Hitler was not all bad. I mean, I know they exist, I read the newspapers. But I never knew that there were nurses who felt that ( wrong headed) way. Rocked me pretty bad, especially as it is someone I see at work. For the record, she knits and sews.

SO, I contented myself today with my house, a visiting friend, my beautiful back yard, yarn, and color. Tommorow I will spend most of the day alternating between praying and keeping my kids from being the loudest kids in the congregation The syagog has hired private security to keep bad guys out.

OK, I left

And I didn't like it. I missed the blog, I missed the message in a bottle feeling I get whenever I post. SOmewhere, out there, there have got to be other people with the didning room overwhelmed with fabric, the bedroom buried in yarn, and the garage filled with dye. I keep hoping for some sign that the mothership is coming back for me, but instead I must search this globe for others of my kind.

This is a quilt made by my great grandmother. When I suggested to my mom that perhaps she and her sister would like one of the less damaged blocks, framed with the history of the quilt on the back, she said, and I quote "why on earth would you want to frame a rag?" Uhm I don't know. So, it remains mine all mine, but I'm not sure what to do with it.

We built a tree house. Technically, a tall house next to the tree, since no one else in the 80 some years this backyard has exsisted thought to plant a tree in it, and thus the tree, a Santa Rosa plum, is only 4 years old.

Well, the bottle is cast out.