Renu's Week

Monday, October 17, 2011

Report of 17 Oct 2011

How time flies -

I meant to blog last week and ran out of time.

On Friday, 30 Sept, the 4 ladies coming to work with us at the Banyan - Neelima, Lisa, Andrea and Caroline - met at Linda Johnson's place with LJ, Deb Stedman and me for dinner. It was a nice, orienting kind of evening. These 4 students are grand fun to know - dynamic, intelligent, committed to making a difference. We look forward to their presence at the B. Dinner was a fun-filled, raucous event.

On 1 Oct, I got together with dear friend Aurora Freeman, our former neighbor in San Antonio. We ate non-stop (Aurora is a phenomenal cook) and just gabbed and laughed and loved, with the family. My grand-niece, Vayda, is a treat - just a little over a year old and with a joyous "Hi!" when she sees members of her family. Neelima and Andrea picked me up from there and dropped me at the airport, which I greatly appreciated.

Scott was here to get me, and we got home. I cooked a vat of food the next day and we had 30 people over that evening - colleagues and friends. Everyone was jammed into our tiny apartment ("Bring your own chair") like a fraternity party, and as a colleague said later, *had* to talk to each other. It is nice to interact socially with colleagues, lends a nice dimension to the work relationship.

Work has been nice; taking care of the truly sick is good. When they start talking about wanting prescriptions for their Percocet and Xanax, it is time to say, "I'll leave that to your family doctor, okay, we are treating you for cellulitis here."

We had an unfortunate gentleman with pulmonary fibrosis. It is a disease where the lungs get "fibrosed" and don't expand well. The only effective treatment is a lung transplant and this patient did not have any health insurance, either. He was discharged, and returned a couple of days later, with worse shortness of breath. He was put on a ventilator with little hope of recovery; his brave wife waited for their 2 sons to gather and then took him off the ventilator. He died shortly thereafter, at the age of 59. No age to die, really, but serious illness does not discriminate, does it now.

Navin came home for Fall Break and that was nice. I worked a night shift there, as the team was desperate for coverage. The family and I did manage to watch part of the ball games - it is nice to watch sports, which I miss in India. After that shift, we saw a bunch of movies in the theater, as I was fortunate to be off when Navin came home. We got together with my in-laws for Game Day, and that was riotous good fun - with everyone's senses of humor perked up for the occasion, and occasional bawdiness manifesting itself. We stopped by the farm to say Hi to Scott's aunt and uncle, and that was also very nice.

Naren is well; he had a theft of money from his closet at home and is rattled. All of us suspect someone close enough to be family, but she has never stolen from us before - that we know of. I phoned Naren and told him such lessons are priceless and trusting no one is a good adage to live by. Difficult, but good.

I am picking up another half-day shift today, so let me wind up. Hope all of you are well.

Unw -

R