Tom and I had a fantastic Christmas in Sacramento: Christmas Eve at Ann's with her and Steve and Julie, Christmas morning at Paul and Eva's with everyone, and Christmas dinner at Robin's. She is Steve and Julie's next-door neighbor and now a close friend.
A few days after Christmas, Carol-Joy came to town and we had brunch at Santaneca, went to Costco for cashews, saw The Shape of Water and I, Tonya, and had lunch at Fuzio. At Santaneca, I had one bean pupusa and one with queso and loroco, and at Fuzio I had a really tasty Greek salad with feta and olives and also sun-dried tomatoes and croutons.
The last Friday of the year found me at County Hospital by myself—no other volunteer was there, and even the staff were all gone by mid-afternoon, so I got to see my very first palliative care patient and also got to go to the abortion clinic for the first time. I visited an old, wrinkled, mustachioed and bearded woman (not at the abortion clinic), very hard of hearing and shocked at finding herself in the hospital, unable to function as she had just a few weeks earlier, and feeling lonely and uncared for. I spent a good amount of time with her. I asked if she'd like to hold hands and she immediately thrust her hand at me, through the railing at the side of her bed. By chance, I saw her again a couple of weeks later, just as two transport workers came to take her to a nursing home. I was glad to be able to see her off. She said she felt scared.
Anita, my CPE supervisor, and I took a walk in Golden Gate Park one day and had lunch at Lemonade, and on the very last day of the year, Charlie and I took a walk.
I spent the first day of the year at work, by choice, as I have the idea that what we do on the first day of the year sets the tone for the rest of it. That meant going to sleep at 7 or so on New Year's Eve, but I knew when it was 2018 from all the fireworks exploding outside.
At work, there were horrible life-changing injuries and amputations and people decades too young struck down out of the blue. In the afternoon, I was paged to another campus to visit the family of a patient who had died, but it took so long to get a cab (the mode of transportation my employer pays for) that when I got there, the family had departed with no plans to return. I visited the patient for a couple of minutes, anyway. I was pretty sure he was no longer in there—he looked really dead—and I prayed that he is in a place of love and tranquility, and for peace and solace for his family.
In the charting room, I heard a male nurse grumbling to his colleagues about a difficult patient. As if speaking to the patient, he said, "Lady, I'm on two packets of Metamucil."
My friend Lesley and I agreed to meet one afternoon at the Embarcadero Cinema. I arrived about three minutes before the hour and waited until 15 minutes after, with no sign of her. Finally I turned on my phone and texted her and heard an alert 15 feet away. I leaned forward, looked to my right and saw her feet. She was sitting on the same long bench I was sitting on, with a big vertical beam obscuring our view of each other. She said she had arrived even before I did, so we were sitting there on the same bench all that time.
She is an OT, so I asked her about how she deals with compassion fatigue or secondary trauma, but she said she finds her work, with psych patients, stimulating and doesn't really experience that. I described about half of one of my days and she said, "Oh, my. No, my work is nothing like that!"
We saw Lady Bird, which we both liked, and had lunch at Fuzio and walked to the Ferry Building to go to Sur la Table.
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