Card Sentiments That we Really Need

I am not a typical woman, sending soppy greeting cards for even the slightest event in one's life. You know the kind- the covers are usually graced with butterflies, sailboats in the sunset or still lifes, most often with kittens in the foreground. On the inside, they have VERY long verses, so long that they have to be written on both sides of the card's interior. Face it, no one reads that. Usually the nausea starts kicking in too strong halfway through the first side for the reader to go any further and the rest is skimmed to the ending to see the business end- what the card is trying to convey - Happy Birthday, Congratulations on your new baby, etc and who sent the card. I do not send those cards. That said, I do not send fart joke cards either. I have some degree of taste. I will send humorous cards, just not Delta House frat boy cards.

There are cards that I would have liked to have sent, but did not for reasons of family unity, world peace, decorum, etc. I know there are some who will send those "I can't believe he did it" kinds of cards, I have seen it happen. A friend in college sent a sympathy card to a friend who married a woman with a case of raging borderline personality disorder. Was it the right thing to do? Probably not, but it was funny as hell and none of us in our social group got along with his new spouse very well. We hated to see him suffer and new that as long as he was with her, that was what was going to happen to him, so it did seem appropriate.

There are a lot of card sentiments that really could be put to good use by those of us who are gusty enough to send them. If only they could just divert the poets long enough to write them. For example:


Congratulations on your new baby...

-Too bad he/she is so damn ugly.
-I think he looks like the mailman, how about you?
-Maybe this one will beat the odds and have brains.



Congratulations on your Marriage...

-we wish you the best, but he is sleeping with your maid of honor so we all know were that's going.
-maybe this time it will last.
-It had better last considering the washcloths on your registry cost $90.



I'd send you flowers on Valentine's day but...

-I think you're and asshole.
-But I figured we might as well skip the dying flowers and get to the point so I sent condoms.
-I sent them to yo mama.



Happy Birthday!


-Try not to puke in your designated driver's back seat this year.
- You don't look a year older than 100!
- Don't forget to check your blood sugar before you eat that cake. Remember how you ended up in the ER last year in diabetic ketoacidosis.



Happy Father's Day


- I got you your favorite- cheap beer and generic cigarettes!
- even if you did beat the crap out of me and mollest my sister whenever Mom went to visit Grandma.
- I hope you enjoy your card because if you do not stop whining about the condom breaking, this if the last one you will see.

Happy Mother's Day

- to the Travel Agent for Guilt Trips of the Year.
- even if you did like my brother better.
- I liked you a lot more when you were still in the State Hospital.

Card Categories that should exist but do not

Rather than
-For the Happy Couple
try
-For the Unhappy Couple


Instead of
-New Baby
we need
-New Crack Baby


Instead of
-"Sweet Sixteen" birthday party invitations
we need
-"Sweet Sixteen" 10 Kegger While the Parental Units are in the Bahamas invitations



Instead of
-Baby Shower cards
we need
-Unplanned Baby Shower cards



Instead of
-Wedding invitations
we need
-Shotgun Wedding invitations



Instead of
-Mother's Day cards
we need
-My Baby Mama Day cards



Instead of
-Father's Day cards
we need
-My Baby Daddy Day cards



Instead of
-Generic "Happy Holidays" cards
we need
-I hate the F#&*ing Holidays cards



Instead of
-Ridiculous "Happy Hanukkah/Christmas/Kwanzaa/Chinese New Year/New Years Eve/Some vague Catholic Saint that no one has ever heard of day cards
we need
-Let's All Go Act Like Douche bags for Two Weeks at the End of Every Year for World Peace cards

Instead of
-Valentine's Day cards
we need
-I Bought You This Card Because You Would Think I'm a Dick if I Didn't Day Cards.

Instead of
-Happy Sweetest Day cards
we need
-Happy Increase the Profit Margin for Hallmark by Creating Another Stupid Holiday Card.

Next entry- card sentiments that we really need rather than that soppy Hallmark poetry crap that no one had the patience to read.

A Child's Love

In our busy days we sometimes forget the innocence of children. My son knows that I am a doctor and I have tried to explain what a psychiatrist is, but it is certainly hard to explain what depression or psychosis is to a four year old who has not experienced it first hand. He has been up to the staff lounge where I work briefly, but because of confidentiality reasons, not to mention safety, he has never been on the actual unit proper. He has no idea what an inpatient psychiatric unit looks like. All he knows is on weekdays, Mommy goes to the "hosipal" to help sick people who are sad. He also knows there is a helicopter outside Mommy's window and that is pretty cool.

Fortunately, with the exception of the month he spent in the NICU after he was born, he has never been admitted to a hospital. He has visited some very nice ER's though, where he gets stickers and people tell him he is cute and a very brave boy and he gets to lay or sit on a special bed with bars with Mommy or Daddy. Once, he even got "a big pill up my butt", a fact that, rest assured, he will tell you about. In all three of those visits, he was sent home with more stickers and people telling him he was a brave boy. It never occurred to me that he did not realize that people stay in the hospital as inpatients.

I discovered that earlier last week, the last time I had to take call. I took a call from the ER about a potential admission. Business has been good and we have been running full. "Do we even have a bed?" I asked. Once that was clarified, I accepted the admission. My son overheard the conversation and his response was not what I expected. He gave me a quizzical look and asked "We have a bed upstairs?" Of course we do not. Our house is a ranch house without an attic and I could understand his confusion as he does not always separate telephone conversations from the one in the room. I explained that I meant, do we have a bed on the psychiatric unit where I work, which is upstairs from the ER. He still seemed surprised by this and had to tell my husband. "Daddy, they have a bed upstairs at the hosipal!" followed by the question as to why we kept beds in the hospital. I explained that these were for the patients to sleep in when they stayed there. "They stay there at the hosipal?" I did not realize that he did not know that patients stayed at the hospital. His only experience with hospitals that he would remember are the ones above. He had never been exposed to a situation where he had to experience someone as an inpatient. This idea was all new to him. I got a good laugh about this and went to work with a new "my son said something this morning that was so cute" story and went about my day.


I thought maybe I should show him some pictures of his month long ordeal in the NICU when he was first born. He had been told he was a "preemie" and spent a month in the hospital before but never paid much attention before. I asked him if he recalled being told about being in the hospital for a month after he was born which he really did not have much memory of. This time was interested to see the pictures. I showed him pictures of the warmer he stayed in at first, then the small crib where he was kept tightly swaddled to help with muscle development in a premature baby. He saw all the tubes, heart monitor leads, oxygen monitors. I told him that we came by three times a day to feed him and that the nurses fed him with a tube the other times. I showed him the feeding tube. That's when his response really moved me.


We probably felt worse leaving our son than he did being left behind. Preemies in general cry when they are disturbed too much. They have important things to do, like grow, so they do not mind being left alone. The mind of a four year old is different. When I told him that we came three times a day to visit then went home, he started crying and said that he missed us when we left. It was very touching. I reassured him that babies that little do not have that kind of awareness but he insisted "but I really loved you guys and I didn't want you to leave." Of course at his age, it is hard for him to process having feelings any different than the ones he has right now, but I also know from his response how much my husband and I are loved by our son. That means a great deal to me.

Money can buy you things that might make you happy at times, but a child's love must be earned and will bring more than happiness. It will give you a reason to get up in the morning every day.

Why I Changed My Name

Artistic license only goes so far in medicine and I have run into a road block in that arena. The dilemma I have run into is that the powers that be have concerns about the content of my blog possibly compromising patient confidentiality and have put limitations on what I may write in the blog. While I understand their side, it does put fairly strong limits on what I am able to write about. I am fearful of writing anything that could offend them. The end result is the vast majority of things that I write about do not have anything to do with psychiatry at all. That or if there is any psychiatric content, it comes out more like a textbook than anything of much interest.

I felt that considering this situation, it would be best that I change the name of the blog to one that is more suited to what I am really writing about. This will allow me to write my posts without the pressure of trying to find a completely neutral topic in psychiatry but end up with one that is not very interesting. There is plenty of things to talk about in my life here. I am, after a big city girl who is essentially stranded in a small to medium size town in the middle of nowhere with very limited access to Nordstrom, true fine dining and cultural activities. What they do have is hunters with guns. There are also monster trucks with deer head decals on the back windows and rubber testicles hanging from the trailer hitches. There are critters here that we do not encounter in Ohio, like bears and bobcats, some of which tear down birdfeeders and poop all over our lawns during the Spring and the Fall and the people here just accept that as the way it is. There is also another fine selection of critters to dodge on the roadways, not the least of which is skunks. I could go on and on about the differences of the area in which I reside and the area in which I grew up but suffice to say that there are a lot of things to talk about. Which is why I have chosen to change the focus of the blog. Therefore I give you...

Lost in Central Pennsylvania

An Old Home Dies

On a busy corner of a main street in my town there sits a blighted house. Not much different from all of the hundreds of other blighted houses out there, but this particular house sits near a friend's shop and I drive by it quite frequently. Devoid of all exterior coverings that one would expect to find on a home, it is particularly hideous in appearance.

She tells me that it was reputed to have last been occupied by drug dealer. Once he was caught, the occupants disappeared and the house has been vacant ever since, at least by official occupants. Empty homes are a magnet for rats, pigeons and mice. Not to mention unwelcome human visitors who find such homes a good shelter from busy eyes, therefore useful for drug dealers and "shooting galleries".

Not that the house is totally without value. When I drive by, I see pipes, wires and windows, all which could be reused. There are two Satellite dishes that appear to be in good condition mounted on the side of the home. The pipes could be stripped and sold for scrap metal. Some of them may be reusable. The windows appear to be recent installations, albeit done shoddily in plywood nailed onto the original window frame. It is possible that they could be reused. If not, the glass could be recycled, as could the metal frames. The house is obviously quite old and on the interior there could be some quite beautiful light fixtures, hardwood flooring and other pieces that might be reusable. Of course those sorts of reclamation type demolitions take money. Old walls bear lead paint. Old tiles and insulation have asbestos. But eventually, that house is going to have to come down.

As do probably a couple hundred other blighted homes. It bears a red condemned tag on it as do all of the condemned homes. Most of the red tags posted on homes like these have long faded to pink or even near white. The owners are supposed to bear the burden of bringing the homes back to code or demolishing the building, but the cost to tear down the structure is greater than the cost that the property would sell for. In some cases the owners have simply died of old age and their children, if they had any do not want anything to do with the property and simply abandon it. The city is supposed to give the owners every opportunity to reclaim their property before razing the building causing even more delays. Federal stimulus money did have some benefit to the community in allowing several houses long awaiting demolition to be brought down and cleaned up. But the hundreds more waiting have yet to be touched.

The number grows every day. The area's long standing Republican representative does not live in the city proper and never sees the decay that his constituents see every day. Riding in on the coattails of his father, his long time tenure as Representative to Congress has done nothing to improve the economy in the area and the layoffs in the area grow daily. This is a working class community to begin with and many of the homes in the city are of little value on the real estate market. Certainly nothing worth fighting for when the foreclosure notice comes. The end result is another home is left to decay.

The recent removal of some of the blighted homes in the area of the city surrounding the downtown area has removed a few of the eyesores around town but it is only a drop in the bucket compared to the growing numbers that remain. The holes they leave look like the gaps in a line of poorly cared for teeth. This always leaves the question of what to do with the property. For the adjacent owners, the property would probably be a welcome addition to the anemically narrow lots they survive on. Homes from this era were built with little more than a few feet for a walkway to pass between them. The problem is that most homeowners in the area are either slumlords who do not care or poor homeowners who cannot afford to buy this land. The areas are too run down to redevelop without tearing down the entire area. The end result is displacing an entire neighborhood of people who can barely afford what they have. In some areas, local businesses have bought some of the properties, largely to pave over as parking lots, but the land does not go unused at least.

In one area where a large enough strip of land was cleared to be useful, the city made the decision to convert the area to a park. This, on the surface sounds like a good idea. To someone who has seen this before, it is a terrible one. I have lived in a big city long enough to see what happens in a small park surrounded by a decaying neighborhood. The children do get a playground to play on but the drug pushers quickly find a new whole new location in which to pick up customers. Get them young while they are too naive to know better and they become your slaves. Driven to dealing themselves to support their own habit, an entire new and growing network of addicts is born. There are always abandoned houses to hide in to shoot up.

I know what this city needs. We need jobs. But bringing jobs in is a lot easier said than done.

Can this city be saved?

Things I Tell My 4 Year Old that Nurses Tell Our Patients

-Put your underwear on!


- If you are not going to wear clothes you are going to have to stay in your room. Nobody wants to see you naked.


- Stop playing with your penis in public.


- Don't use your sleeve as a tissue. That's what Kleenex is made for.


- You need a shower/bath. .... No you are not clean. You stink. And it does not count if you do not use soap. I know if you haven't used soap so do not try to sneak.


- Dinner is here. WASH YOUR HANDS before coming to dinner. I don't know where those hands have been but I know it is somewhere pretty disgusting.


- If you are going to yell like that you are going to need to take a time out in your room. (NB: 4 year old's who refuse get privileges revoked. Some patients get prn medications if they get really bad so there is some difference here.)



- Pull those pants up. Your underwear is showing. (Of course the 4 year old's reason for droopy drawers is the more benign thin body build while the adult/adolescent patient is just trying to play the "gangsta" role.)


- Stop picking your nose/butt at the dinner table.


- No biting!


- Watch your language!

-When was the last time you took a brush to that hair?

-You need to brush your teeth. Your breath is disgusting.

Internet Party Tonight

"TV party tonight
TV party tonight"

"Don't want to talk about anything else.
We dont wanna know
We're gonna watch our favorite shows."


The song resonates through my head as clear as day. Like I was listening to the grainly old tape itself.


"Be back soon! We are down due to connection issues. We are sorry for the inconvenience."


That was the message the greeted me at the top of my ISP's home page when I sat down for my evening ritual of computer time. I have little time to use the computer and the brief time after my son has gone to bed and before I do is my time to catch up on email, Facebook, my blog and Twitter. Until this unwelcome visitor greeted me above.


Is is a tacit assumption that most readers are not familiar with the Black Flag song "TV Party" so I will explain the lyrics above. The song surrounds a group of pathetic losers who have essentially no lives and do little with their day but "watch TV and have a couple of brews." Their lives are totally devoid of any value and they take great efforts to avoid dealing with the reality of the world. When the TV breaks, their lives fall into chaos and they are forced to actually talk to each other, something they have never had to do before and are at a total loss on how to survive.


When I saw that notice about the internet being down, my first inclination was to actually play video solitaire rather than do something of real value. I realized then how my addiction to the computer and the internet, especially Farmland, had overtaken me. I have been able to cut back my use of Facebook and Twitter to a low roar, but Farmville is a consistent addiction. I HAVE CROPS TO HARVEST, FRIENDS' CHICKENS TO FEED AND GIFTS TO SEND! I need to stay on top of this as I need 2 MILLION COINS to get the HUGE farm. Whithered crops are just wasting money and that just will not do.

My mind pleads for mercy- "My Lord! How have I offended Thee?"

I think his response would likely have been "Do you want the whole list or just the top 10?" Fortunately, I was not that high up in his priority list to warrant a response.

So I am a pathetic loser. I could write these thoughts down now and transcribe them later (which obviously I did). I have done it before, I can do it again. There are always other things that need tending to either way that are of far more importance that electronic solitaire.

Then a light turned on in my head...

...I can still access the internet from my IPod and at least harvest my crops.

And another display in my mental Hall of Lame is opened.

"We stay tuned to the TV set all night-
and every night.
We don't go out into the world at all-
it's such a fright.
We've got nothing better to do than to watch TV and have a couple of brews."
Lyrics: Greg Ginn Performed by: Black Flag