225) Dancing Feet

March 8, 2008
Saturday

El Milagro: I called and am able to come in “…in 20 minutes…” so I rush around and am here at 1 o’clock today. Rosie is in a dog shirt, working the other side of the room… Debbie the Tech is here today, as is Gladys the Tech. Rita the Nurse cannulates me and does my nursing eval. She is evidently one of the nurses who doesn’t mind “lowering herself” to do the poking.

The other day in our PAC (Patient Advisory Committee) meeting one of the complaints of the patients to the administration was that some of the nurses won’t cannulate people because they feel it is below them. This was brought up while discussing the patient complaint that the center is way behind on getting people on the machines on time, and some of the PAC members think that the scheduling could be better accomplished if certain techs weren’t sitting around B.S.ing with each other rather than working diligently to get all the patients on the machines. This is complicated, according to these folks, by nurses who see it as below their station to hook patients up on the machines. My comment: Do you really want a nurse who doesn’t want to hook people up, hooking you up?

So, anyway, Rita is a 'hookin-up nurse'… and she hooks me up deftly and quickly. I’m listening to KUT’s Folkways and they’ve playing a lot of pre-SXSW* people today. Maggie Walters (Midwestern Hurricaine), James McMurtry (Just Us Kids), Bo Bice, Joe Ely, Justice Townes Earl, etc.

I’m eating apple slices from home today… unusual for me to have anything to eat here aside from the hard candy rolling around in the bottom of my bag. Lizzie cut some apple and bagged some cookies for me to munch on, since I hadn’t eaten lunch before I left. I munch with Justin Townes Earl crooning about “…the good life from now on…”, and I am glad to have such a juicy snack. Lizzie is the BEST! Of course, everyone who knows her knows that… it is still surprising to me that she chose me to hang with, I say to myself smilingly.

I munch and listen and read the new Time about Hillary’s return to the race… seems like women put her back in it… I read and then doze…

The Bluerunners** are playing live when I come back around 2… Cajun band… good beat makes my feet dance out from under the red, Mexican blanket covering them. I look down and watch them feets jumping around, almost as if they were independent of the rest of this body. It’s a weird sight and gives me that sense of the largeness of the body… like when you realize that this body is just an incredibly long line of cells joined together by some sort of mystical energy called life. When I look down that Levi and flannel covered collaboration of cells across the universe and see the maroon socks poking out from the end of the ragged blue jeans under the Mexican blanket… they seem to be light years away from these eyes in my head. They are dancing to the beat of the Bluerunners' rhythms in my earphones… so there must be a stimulus response thing going on that is devoid of conscious thought… I feel like Steve Martin*** when he has crazy feet… (You can't actually see Steve's feet in this pic, but I like the idea of cat ironing).

I watch these dancing feet of mine through the rest of the Bluerunners’ set and at some point notice that a diabetic amputee across the way seems to be watching my feet and I hallucinate that he is wishing he had dancing feet too. The slow impact is that somehow my brain of brains reconnects with my unconscious rhythm-meister and those feet slowly slow their jigs down to a calming stillness.

I decide to click off Folkways and turn up the TV, which has been silently showing various basketball games. I find a movie, then a music video of Bruce Robison****, and finally settle on the Discovery series, How’s It Made about making winter coats, stoves, and canisters for pre-formed potato chips I can’t eat. Oh well…

Another Saturday… Onward through the Fog…

Notes: In at 76.4 and out at 74.7 Kgs.
* South-by-Southwest - SXSW - online http://sxsw.com/
**Bluerunners online at http://www.bluerunners.com/home.html
*** Check out Steve Martin's website --> http://www.stevemartin.com/
****Bruce Robison online at http://www.brucerobison.com/
New Readers: For an INDEX, click January 2008 on the Sidebar and page down to post # 207.