The Rational Blues

There was a lady circling the desk (a patient) and she was saying random non sense words, asking questions about the number 9, with an occasional comment about Satan, and the end of the world..... (just in case you weren't already freaked out).  And  every time she passed me, I tried not to look at her.      

As I was getting the medications ready for my next patient, my I-phone was playing a song.  It was a Beatles song from my new cirque-LOVE cd (the Beatles remixed... But not jacked up) and while I was getting my meds together, I was thinking about John Lennon and how he had said once (as a response to the blues of life), "all you need is love".  

*(of course he also said he was the walrus......  which I never got, but I totally think the crazies would understand).              

John Lennon would have made a great blues man cause all blues men know about love.  But given the crap that comes with loving people that don't love you, the question I would've asked John Lennon (were he still living) would be, how do you know, all you need is love?  Cause (from a 7 Tower perspective at least) sometimes I think all you need is Haldol (antipsychotic medication).      

In fact, if life is a debate between whether the world is insane or sound, it's the crazies these days that are winning hands down as far as I can tell.

I have an uncle who thinks he's the opposite of all that (crazy).  He's a modern man.  He only believes in science, thinks technology is the answer to most problems in life.  He scoffs at traditional cultural concepts of the supernatural as superstition... (Not just the "big five" religions.....All of them....  Old Pagan.... New Pagan..... Asian.... African..... Native American......).  But he loves science fiction (may speak Klingon).  He's reasonable and rational and skeptical of anything outside of what he can see or hear.  He believes the universe is a closed box of cosmic dust and that people are not much more than a few brain cells and sex organs and hormones (to keep it all going).

He believes that he came from nothing and that he's going to nothing and that in the end there's nothing more out there than a very lonely compact atom sized dot that the entire universe will eventually collapse back into.  But still, every day he stands in the sandwich line at work and gets pissed off when the administrative staff casually cut themselves toward the front of the line, as if anything that happens in this world, good, bad, just or unjust, should finally matter in the end, at all.

(Now that's crazy).

Living life seeing things that aren't really there (Justice, Meaning, LOVE) is the definition of crazy.  Right?  And yet, deep inside us we all "gotta feeling" (another Beatles song) that all these things are true.  (is that irrational?).  The problem is that with all the (alleged) evidence to the contrary, we think this life matters.  That it has meaning.  That maybe after all.... All you need is Love.  And either that's true, and we're all living our lives unwilling and detached from something bigger, like some dying leaf on a breeze.  Or we're just terribly arrogant.  (and crazy).  And I'm willing to believe that a little of all three are true.  And in the end, you just cant deny the truth.

(*  Charlie Dixon once said the blues is the truth.  And John Lee Hooker said to; "Let that boy boogie woogie..... cause it's in him..... and it got to come out".).

I picked up my medications to go to my next room but as I stepped into the hall the crazy lady made her way past me with her back bent, head down like a chicken, talking out of her head.  I let her make her way past me without eye contact.  But this time she looked more familiar to me.  Maybe like every single crazy blues man that I'd ever seen.

Malay

Spent some time with a bunch of friends from work on Friday night. One of our friends, her name is Malay, is at MD Anderson today for surgery to remove a recently discovered cancer. It's a very extensive surgery. I'd be lying if I said we weren't worried about her. The get together was a surprise send off and we had a great time (and I don't think it was just the alcohol). But I learned Friday night that laughter is a blues fighter.

We spent the majority of the night talking about the crazies on 7 Tower. My favorite story was about one of our nurse aides who was sitting with a patient. The patient was very confused and while our nurse aide was watching him, he fell asleep (as a sitter you never fall asleep-it's like being a prison guard). Of course, as you could imagine, a lot of bad things could go down in a situation like that. (it sometimes has..... once a naked patient ended up at a quicktrip across 11th street). However, the best possible (and most thoughtful) thing happened. While the nurse aide was sleeping the patient climbed over the bed rails, crawled over to our sleeping "security guard" and covered him up with a blanket.

Lesson learned. Not all crazies are Hell bent on destroying the world.

A Beautiful Confusion

I was at work waiting on an email response from a friend and I was wondering if everything in the world (reality), all that I see and hear, is actually just as I think it is. 

I'd like to say my thoughts were inspired by some Taoist-like meditation about the sound of trees falling in the woods and stuff, however, in reality the question came as the result of just another one of my hospital work days, what I sometimes like to call my daily "7 Tower acid trip".        

Nursing is a strange combination of skills.  You have to look for objective facts and turn them into compassion.  It's like starting as a scientist and ending as a pastor.  I was getting my medications for my next patient, listening to my IPhone (on speaker) and I was thinking about the patient I had just seen, (one of the crazies) and how ironic it was to be listening to Floyd right now on my IPhone (dark side of the moon). 

What I remember about the man was that he was blind.... And nearly deaf. I remember how I had to lean way over to within about an inch of his face and then with the best projected voice my diaphragm could manage I would holler hello to him or that he needed to take his meds.  Or sometimes I would holler and asked if he needed to pee. 

He was an old black man.  (Stress OLD-maybe Could have been a hundred).  He looked like he could have been a blues man.  But it seemed that no matter what I hollered he always just kept saying the same thing.  "Yes ma'am", he would say.  And I would say I'm a sir, and I need to know if you've had a bowel movement today, and he'd say "Yes Ma'am".  And I'd say how many times did you go? and he'd say, "yes ma'am".  And then I'd say you didn't really poop at all did you, and he'd say yes ma'am.........  Then as a test, I'd say, "after lunch we're gonna scoot over to the other side of the room and with the help of Physical Therapy we're gonna fly out the window, you and me".  And then after my muffled, barely audible, non-words he would yell out "yes ma'am" one more time, emphatically as if that were the end of the conversation (and it was).  And then I would leave the room and come back to my med cart and begin working on my next patients meds;......... Pink Floyd playing gently in the background.... all you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be.......  

While I was standing at my med-cart I started wondering if it was true..... that all I touch and all I see are all my life will ever be?  Cause I was thinking about the old blues guy and the modern world and I was wondering if maybe there were things going on around us.... things this modern world with all it's "science-only" business could never hear or understand.  I mean what if all kinds of things were happening but because of my condition I couldn't hear any of it.  (psychotic?).

My email ring tone went off and I checked my messages to find that it was an update of a friend whose daughter had just come out of surgery.   Her daughter had been primarily deaf for most of her young life but for the first time she would be able to hear as the result of these cochlear implants.  And my friend said that the doctor said that they would be slowly increasing her reception because at first sound her world would be mostly chaos, hearing words and sounds and noises that she had never heard before.  He said that she might even be confused for a while but that she would work through it and start to distinguish things, voices and sounds and stuff, and that she would ultimately have to relearn how to live her life on this whole other level, and the email ended with this phrase from the dialogue between me and my friend:

She might be in a confusion?.... but it will be a beautiful confusion, he said.    

As I walked away from my med cart I wondered if some day there might be of a beautiful confusion for us?  And I walked on down the hall with my next patients medications and I tried to open up my ears as open as I could, like I was deaf, or crazy, or like I was expecting some kind of alternate world to break in.  But the only thing I could hear was the sound of my nurses aid asking my old blues man how many children he had, and the inevitable expected response, "Yes Ma'am.  Yes Ma'am.  YES Ma'am".                     

what its like to be in the crap

I was walking down the hallway the other night, and the crazy patients........ (psychiatric).......  were yelling out crazy things from their rooms.

(* and by crazy, I mean literally crazy.  Psychotic.  Seeing things.  Hearing things...... thinking you're the FBI............. or the devil). 

And I was carrying the last adult diaper in the hospital towards my patients room.  As I got closer to the smell, I thought to myself wishfully, "I'd rather be writing a blog about the blues".  And so, here it is.

The Blues is like hospital work in that it's all about what it's like to be in the crap.   
At risk of sounding too "smart-ass", (like one of those Star Trek dudes that wear the costumes and speak Klingon) I've been studying Blues music recently and I discovered that the Blues is played on a positive (major) scale with an occasional stretched (minor) note (referred to as a blue note).  I think it's ironic that the technical aspects of the music tell the story of a relatively sunny life (major scale) being corrupted by the occasional stormy monday of a blue note, because that's real life.

POINT:  generally, Life is good, but sometimes it sucks.         

I've never listened to blues music until just a few years ago.  That said, I'm a white dude that grew up in the redneck suburbs of Houston Texas, listening to Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd.  I Played in a couple of "hair bands" (karma?) in the eighties (See pic of me now, above "about me" segment on the right of the screen).  And as a child my mother played me the classics like Elvis, Chuck Berry, and Bo Diddley.  But, I think if you were to hunt the roots of all that music, you would eventually find the blues.   And the thing about the blues is that it's relatable.  Somewhere, sometime there were more innocent days, and then somewhere something happened and everything broke loose.  (sound familiar?).      

So here I am now, walking towards a funky room, carrying the very last disposable thing separating me and all the crap.  And all the way down the hall I'm listening to the crazies yelling at me.  And suddenly I find myself wondering where all this crap came from, and how it all got started.  And of course I wanna know if anyone has ordered the freakin diapers yet, and I'd like to know if anybody knows when the CRAP they're coming in?!!