Seeking Serendipity 2/13/23 Guns & Drugs, Medical Crisis On Campus, A Baby Having A Baby, Student Down, Empathy, He Said Never Again, Cheryl, Unwanted Hair, Squirrels
Guns and Drugs
It was 1988. I pulled up in front of a house on the quiet street in a Connecticut city where I was working as a home health and public health nurse. Looking at the house from my vantage point, I saw nothing unusual or suspicious. The call had come the afternoon before from the local hospital social worker. A young mother had been discharged and the social worker was requesting a visiting nurse from our agency to do a home visit and welfare check to ensure mother and new baby were doing well. There was one catch. The home was under surveillance by the FBI. They couldn’t tell us why they were under surveillance, just that they were. When the case was brought to me, I was given the option to refuse it due to the potential danger of the situation, but I was young and adventurous and immediately agreed to go. I had called the day before and spoken with my young patient who agreed to let me come for a visit. I walked to the back entry of the house, as she had directed me to do. About a dozen or more motorcycles were parked there. Soon after I knocked on the door, it was opened by a huge, unfriendly looking man who gruffly asked what I wanted. I explained that I was there to see the young mother and baby. He hesitated, then stepped back allowing me in and motioned for me to follow him. He lead me through the living room where there were at least a dozen other men just like him who stopped talking and looked at me suspiciously as I walked through. They were obviously a motorcycle gang and were some rough looking characters. I was too young and stupid to be nervous. I tried not to stare, but the surroundings could not be described as anything but opulent. One would never have guessed what was inside by looking at the outside of the older house on this quiet street. Fur rugs, art work…the whole place was nothing short of luxurious. It all seemed weird and out of place for a bunch of bikers. As I made my way across the room I pretended not to notice the guns. I remembered to put on my “poker face” which young nurses are trained to practice during nursing school. A poker face is an expressionless face that does not give away the true emotion one is feeling. Several rifles and what I later learned were automatic weapons were propped here and there against walls. Pistols were on the coffee table and I could see my escort was armed. I assumed the rest of them were also. I grew up in a family of hunters so was no stranger to guns, but guns for hunting back home in Mississippi were limited to rifles and shotguns. I noted there were also small wooden crates stacked neatly against a wall. I followed my escort through the house to a back bedroom. The young 19 year old mother was sitting on a bed with the 3 day old infant asleep beside her, her hands busily fidgeting with something as we entered the room. As I moved closer to her, I saw that what she was fidgeting with was rings, lots and lots of rings, and they all appeared to be diamonds and gem stones. I pretended not to notice as she replaced them in a box. The man who had lead me to her turned out to be the baby’s father and he left us to talk privately, for which I was grateful. The mother was shy and tentative which was not unusual. The goal of the visit was to do a mini health history and physical on Mom and baby, as well as assess and identify any needs, including education about post partum and newborn infant care, as well as to refer to agencies that might provide needed resources such as food, formula or diapers. I found both Mom and baby to be healthy and all needs met. I watched her feed and diaper her baby. Part of the assessment process when a nurse does a home visit is to ask the patient if she feels safe and feels she has everything she needs. The mother denied that she felt unsafe. I was concerned about the guns but decided not to mention them, instead opting to report what I had seen to the social worker who would relay that information to law enforcement. I made plans for a follow up visit in 5 days. Unfortunately, the follow up visit never occurred. My calls went unanswered and messages unreturned. I dropped by unannounced twice, but although I heard sounds from inside, they did not open the door. I reported this to both my supervisor as well as the social worker on Friday. On Monday morning, I received a call from the hospital social worker informing me there would be no need to make a visit to the home. She shared that the parents of the infant brought him into the emergency room Saturday night. The mother, high on Cocaine, reported that the baby had been fussy all day so she and the father gave the infant cocaine to “quiet him”. When asked how much Cocaine, she couldn’t remember. When asked why she would do this she stated that “ a voice from the microwave told me to do it”. The infant, still less than a week old, was rushed to the NICU in critical condition. The parents were arrested. In the meantime, the FBI raided the house that night and arrested 13 men inside for gun and drug trafficking. They were a gang out of Indiana smuggling guns into Connecticut and New York. It turned out that the wooden crates I had seen during my visit were filled with automatic weapons and rifles that were to be sold to gangs in Connecticut and New York. I did hear that the baby eventually recovered and went to foster care. I never asked what happened to the mother. I suspect she was incarcerated for a while but I don’t know if she ever got her baby back. This was one of those experiences when you second guess everything you saw and did in a situation and wonder if you could have done anything different to change the outcome. In nursing, you have a lot of days like that. This was my first experience with drugs and babies and Moms but by far not my last. I have many more experiences about my work with drugs, pregnancy and babies which I will share in future blog entries..
Medical Crisis On Campus
The thing about school nursing is that no two days are ever the same and no day is ever boring, especially when you are caring for 1700 teenagers. I was a school nurse in a large and very busy high school. The bell ending lunch and signaling the beginning of 3rd block had just rung. My office phone rang. A teacher on the other end told me she was sending a sick and vomiting student to my office. Within the next 10 minutes, I received a dozen similar calls. The students, all males, filed into my office, sick, vomiting…and crying. I gave out garbage cans to those actively vomiting. When I ran out of garbage cans, I handed them plastic bags. I could hear vomiting in the boys bathroom across from my office and called on administrators to come and help, as I could see things were quickly getting out of hand. Nurses are not supposed to diagnose patients, but school nurses have to quickly assess every situation and decide if outside emergency services are needed. Sometimes we call them because we want another pair of medical eyes to look at our patient and do not feel we can wait on the parent. Before making that call, however, we must quickly assess the situation. My best guesses in this situation included food poisoning, drug sharing, alcohol, nicotine poisoning from vaping and one other possibility. Every school nurse in a middle or high school fears drugs and often when a “group” of students become ill at the exact same time, it is due to the sharing of drugs and/or alcohol. My assessment ruled out food poisoning. Vital signs and a good neuro check pretty much told me it was not drugs, alcohol or nicotine poisoning. Anyone who has worked with teenagers, knows that many of them are, for the most part, VERY good at lying. The look of honesty as they look you straight in the eye and tell you an “untruth” has fooled the most savvy adult many times. Fortunately, the other thing about those who have worked with teens is that they learn to recognize subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) signs of lying. There were a few common denominators here. All of the “victims” were 9th grade boys who had a variety of foods for lunch. They had severe GI distress and were emotionally distraught because of it. The phone was still ringing with reports of yet more students vomiting. Their lips were sealed. I singled out one who wouldn’t look me in the eye and took him in a separate room away from his peers to confirm something I had suspected. I had seen this before but not with symptoms this severe and not with this many kids involved. “Did you guys have a hot pepper eating contest during lunch?” I asked? “Yes”, he reluctantly replied. ”Good grief! , I yelled. “”How many participated?”. He shrugged and guessed aloud that it was probably about 20-25 boys. As I returned to the waiting area, I saw it had more than doubled occupants. They begged me to make the burning stop. The vomiting continued. The tears continued to stream down their faces. Much to the cafeteria manager’s dismay, we completely cleaned the milk supply out of the cafeteria as they poured down carton after carton in an attempt to put out the fire in their bellies. One by one, they began to stop vomiting and crying. The culprit in all of this was a 9th grader whose parents had returned from south of the border with a bushel of ghost peppers. He set up a contest to see who could eat the most ghost peppers. There was some betting and a pool of money involved. He was sitting quietly in class during the worst of it hoping he would not be mentioned as the instigator. I called the parents one by one to let them know what had happened. Most elected to leave their kids at school until days end and felt the physical discomfort was fitting punishment for making such a “stupid decision”. A few picked up their boys. One made a trip to the ER because he couldn’t stop vomiting and had developed a fiery red rash around his mouth. I would like to say that was the last hot pepper eating contest I experienced, but alas, it was not. Every year when you least expect it, a group of 14 and 15 year old boys hold a hot pepper eating contest with the hottest peppers they can get their hands on. Sigh…
A Baby Having A Baby
Every nurse has a passion or cause that is close to her heart. I have several but one that is nearest and dearest to my heart is teen pregnancy. This one particular experience planted the seed in me very early to do everything in my power to combat teen pregnancy which more often than not leads to a life of hardship for the mother and the infant.
During my last 3 years in college, I worked part time on an obstetrical unit in a small county hospital in the town where I grew up. I was a nurses’ assistant and my job consisted of assisting the nurses in Labor and Delivery, Post Partum and the Newborn Nursery. Not long after starting that job, I was working a 16 hour shift (known as a double) 3pm-7am. Just as I came on, I was told we had an admission, likely in early labor…and she was 13 years old. I would like to say this was unusual and a first, but unfortunately it was not. For me however, new to the field of obstetrics and medical care and 19 years old at the time, I was stunned. I went in to introduce myself to the patient and her Mom and explain the pre-delivery procedures I would be doing in preparation for her delivery. As I helped her into her hospital gown, I was stunned. Her small thin body was still that of a little girl. She did not yet really have hips. Her belly was the size of a soccer ball. Her breasts showed signs of pregnancy, but were undeveloped. She was still physically very much a child. I was not surprised to soon find out that she also had the emotional maturity of a child. It took a long while to get the preparatory procedures completed. She was understandably uncooperative and did not understand why she was not being allowed to eat. She had seen the snack machines on the way up to Labor and Delivery, and thinking like the child she was, had plans for chips and candy bars. Her mother shared that she still played with her dolls. As the night progressed, so did her labor. She needed to be monitored closely because if labor did not progress or there were any signs of distress, a C-Section would be performed. As labor picked up, she writhed on that gurney and screamed the walls down.It is very common for laboring women to scream as they enter the last stages of labor before the baby is born, but this was very early labor and her first baby, and she had just turned 13 years old. It is rare, but not unheard of for labor to progress quickly in first pregnancies, so the nurse decided to check her. She would not allow the nurses to touch her, much less do the required vaginal exam to check her dilation. She became really combative whenever the doctor entered the room, and wouldn’t allow him near her. Concern was increasing because for all we knew she could be almost fully dilated and for various serious medical reasons involving both the mother and the baby, we needed to know which stage of labor she was in. We were able to keep the fetal monitor on when she was not combative, which ensured us the baby was not yet in distress. Her mother tried, to no avail, to reason and plead and finally demand that she allow the nurses and doctor to check her. She refused repeatedly. At her wits end, her mother threatened to spank her if she didn’t let the doctor check her cervical dilation. I stood there in shocked disbelief. The patient immediately quieted. The threat of a spanking was the key to this 13 year old child having a baby allowing the nurses and doctors to check her progression of labor. Her mother repeatedly threatened a spanking throughout the night as she labored and each time she did, the patient calmed and allowed care. She delivered a healthy but small little boy just before I went home the next morning.
That experience is still vivid in my memory and it lit a fire in me that burned throughout my career, and burns to this day to do everything in my power to prevent teen pregnancy. I have spent many years of my career working with teens in the field of reproductive health and will be sharing some pretty incredible stories in this blog. I would like to say that she was the youngest pregnant child I ever worked with, but unfortunately, that award goes to a 10 year old. I will share her story at a later time.
Student Down
In each of my blog entries, I hope you learn something. I will try to address at least one medical issue that will be interesting and educational. The one I am about to share was a surprise to me and may be to you also…
Many years ago, I worked in a huge inner city high school in a high poverty area of Los Angeles. The health office was full. It was always full at that school. There were approximately 3000 students on campus at any given time and I pretty much ran my own little clinic/ER because many of these kids never saw a physician. Many of the stories I will share in this blog that occurred during my time at this school were the result of a lack of care or lack of access to care.I never knew what would greet me when I walked in the door of the school. One morning a student walked in and told my assistant that he had a terrible headache. Before she could take his temperature, he fell to the floor and had a grand mal seizure. Seizures are not uncommon, and are not usually a cause for alarm in patients with a history of them. We have standing orders for care that we follow in those situations. This student, however, had no history of seizures. Anyone having a seizure for the first time must be transported to the emergency room for evaluation. This student seized for almost 5 minutes before the paramedics arrived. They loaded him on the gurney and as they began to wheel the gurney out, he started to seize again!
The student was out for several days and returned with paperwork clearing him to return to campus with no restrictions, which I found strange. A doctor always writes orders for patients after they have a seizure in the event it happens again. As soon as the morning crowd thinned out of our clinic, I sat down to read the discharge paperwork. The diagnosis was Cysticercosis. Hmmm…I was not familiar with that term. I’d better look it up. What the hell?!!! I thought…a parasite? His seizure was caused by a parasite in his brain!!!? I immediately picked up the phone and called another school nurse who was not at all surprised. “Oh yes” he said. “We have always called it ‘worm in the brain’. It is actually quite common in undeveloped countries and occurs due to ingestion of pork that is not adequately cooked”. I was stunned. I must say it took a while before I would eat any type of pork after that. If you don’t already have one, get yourself a meat thermometer and make sure your pork registers 160-170 degrees in the thickest part before eating it! https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/taeniasis-cysticercosis
Unfortunately, all kinds of parasites play a huge role in the school nurse’s job, but this was one of my most memorable. More school nurse parasite stories to come later. Haha. Okay, you can skip those if you don’t have the stomach for it.
Word of the Day
The word of the day is Empathy. Empathy is imagining or understanding how someone might feel. I have strong empathy for children, animals, young people and those who are defenseless or targeted. I have often wondered (and pondered) why so many people do not seem to experience it. Why do some people turn their heads away for certain injustices but will fight to the bitter end for others? Examples include race, nationality, sexuality and biblical principals. Just something to ponder. I guess there is no one answer to this. It is complicated and multi-faceted.
He Said Never Again
My friends, my family and many acquaintances along the way have provided me with some pretty good information and stories to share also. THis next one is about my poor husband. Bless him. He has had a time putting up with me all these years…
Those that know me well know that there’s nothing better I like than bargain hunting. I have been that way since I was a young girl. To me, bargain hunting is like a treasure hunt. Nowadays I bargain hunt at thrift stores or at retail clearance sales. Years ago, I was addicted to garage sales. Being a Navy wife, we always lived near bases where people were coming and going frequently and often needed to get rid of their stuff for an upcoming military transfer. BC (Before Children), my time was my own on Saturday mornings. I would get up early and hit as many yard sales as I could before noon when most of them ended. Rick, (my husband), always refused to go with me, opting instead to play a round of golf. He was impressed with my finds each week and found it unbelievable when I returned home to tell him of all the tools, work benches, sports equipment and other manly stuff I had seen for dirt cheap. One Saturday morning, he reluctantly agreed to go with me, telling me that buying other people’s stuff was not for him. I assured him he would have a wonderful time and that he would change his mind the first time he snagged a bargain. We pulled into a neighborhood close to the base following multiple yard sale signs and arrows. It was a beautiful spring Saturday morning and many people on that street had opted to have a yard sale that day. The first one we saw had a large display of power tools, hand tools and yard tools. We had just bought our first house and needed all of these things. There was very little of interest to me, so I just stood there while he looked. Nothing was priced and as he saw several things he was interested in and started to gather, I noticed the homeowner standing just inside his garage suspiciously watching us. “Gosh, I hope he doesn’t think we are going to steal from him”, I thought. Making eye contact with him, he stepped out of his garage and approached my husband. “Look man”, he said “this is not a yard sale. I am just cleaning out my garage”. My poor husband turned multiple shades of red, apologized and quickly returned to the car. We went home and he has never, not once in all these years since, stopped at a yard sale and I’ve never asked him to. 😂
Cheryl
Have you ever had a memory that no matter how many years ago something happened, it makes you giggle every time you think about it? This is one of those.
In the mid to late 90s when we were living in San Diego, I worked as a classroom and clinical nursing instructor in a technical college for licensed vocational nurses (known as LVNs in some states and LPNs in others). Each instructor took a group of 8-10 students to a clinical site for training. Clinical training sites could be hospitals, nursing homes, clinics, home health, etc… Cheryl (a fellow clinical instructor), and I were assigned to take our students to a rehab facility. Now let me stop right here and tell you about Cheryl. She was about 5 feet tall, heavy set with short bowl-cut thick reddish gray hair and always wore a rumpled lab coat that came to her ankles. She ALWAYS, every time I saw her, even first thing in the morning, looked like she had just been in a windstorm. She was one of those people who made you smile, always chuckling and always in a good mood. The rehab facility was connected to a hospital. On the 3rd floor you could simply walk from one building to another (without going outside) along an enclosed hallway which spanned over the street below. On our first morning in that facility, one of her students reported to Cheryl that her patient for the day was scheduled for an MRI next door in the hospital. Cheryl asked me if I would cover her remaining students while she helped transport the bed-bound patient over to the hospital via a gurney for the MRI and I agreed. Well, about 5 minutes after they wheeled the gurney onto the elevator to transport the patient, a student called me over to a window. That window overlooked the busy street that ran between the rehab center and the hospital. There was a crosswalk for pedestrians who were going back and forth between the two buildings from the rehab center to the hospital. As I peered down at that crosswalk, I saw Cheryl in the middle of the street with her hand up like a traffic cop stopping traffic both ways while the student struggled to push the gurney across the street and keep the patient covered with sheets and blankets at the same time. The wind was blowing furiously and the gurney wasn’t cooperating. Those things are hard for one experienced person to steer straight, so the petite inexperienced student was having a time of it. Cheryl jumped over and grabbed one end of the gurney to try to assist in guiding it, all while still turning left then right with that hand firmly held up directing cars in both directions to stop. I think one wheel must have been locked because the gurney was beginning to turn in a circle right in the middle of the crosswalk. I guess I knew it was futile, but I tried to get Cheryl’s attention to tell her to turn back. She looked up and saw me but didn’t understand though and gave a jolly big smile and a wave. I held my breath until they finally made it safely across that crosswalk and wasted no time sending a student over to the Imaging Department to tell Cheryl about the covered indoor hallway she should use for the return trip. Now, there were so many wrongs in that situation, including jeopardizing patient safety and privacy of the patient, etc… Thank heavens no one was hurt, the patient stayed on the gurney, his modesty stayed intact and he got his MRI. However, every time I think about Cheryl’s adventure that day, it still makes me laugh. It could have been a scene straight out of a sitcom.
Unwanted Hair
Unwanted hair. We all have some. Unfortunately, with every year that passes, the hair we want and treasure disappears and unwanted hair sprouts with growing frequency from the most unexpected places. The answer to unwanted hair is often waxing. However, if you don’t know what you are doing, waxing can be a nightmare for the waxer and the waxee. Boy oh boy, have I ever learned that lesson the hard way. When my husband was in his early 30s, hair began to appear on his back. At first it was just a couple then came in patches. Summer was coming and we had trips to the beach planned. I told him we could take care of that problem, that I had seen waxing kits at the store and it looked pretty simple. The next Sunday afternoon, we started a movie for the kids who were about 10 and 4 at the time. Into the bathroom we went with a container of warm wax. I glanced over the instructions which were mostly pictures. How hard could it be? Smear on the wax, wait a while then peel it right off. Rick was a little nervous but trusted me, which turned out to be his first mistake. Since these patches of hair had sprouted in various places throughout his back, I pretty much covered the whole thing in wax with the little popsicle stick thingy that came in the kit. Just to be safe and make sure I had plenty, I put it on extra thick. Worried that it wouldn’t be effective in taking off all the hair if not left on long enough, I left it on a good 10 minutes, until it was cold to the touch. As I went back to remove the wax, I thought it would just gently peel off. It did not. It was a thick, cooled down layer of wax and it wouldn’t budge. We had just moved to a new area and had moved into an apartment while waiting to move into our house. I am surprised the police weren’t called by the neighbors through that long afternoon of peeling that wax off bit by bit from my husband’s back. He was quite noisy and our 4 year old exclaiming, “Mommy’s killing Daddy!” was surely heard by the neighbors. You would think I would never have touched wax again in my life, but after a few years, I got brave and decided to try some facial waxing on myself. I will save that story for another day.
Nature/Animals
Random thought here. I have often had a fascination with animals. In fact, I love most animals. With this comes a curiosity about why or how they do certain things, like what mechanism makes a cat purr. Today, as I am looking out the window on this cold winter’s day, I am wondering about squirrels. We all know that they store nuts and whatever else it is they eat, so they will have plenty for the winter. What keeps them from eating it all up before the end of November? You are a squirrel Mom with your squirrel children. It is boring and cold. How do you keep them from eating the whole winter’s supply in a day? Are they smart enough to ration it? I know they sleep a lot, but even in the middle of winter you’ll see them out and about when the weather is warmer. Also, what about the family of lazy squirrels who didn’t prepare like they should have for the coming winter? Do they steal from each other? Just some things to ponder…
Well, that’s it for now. If you have made it to the end, thank you for reading. I will post again soon. I am just getting warmed up and have a lot more to share!
