I don’t know how to say this so I’ll take a phrase from Gin, Shit Gd! EMT class kicks your ass forgets your name and knocks up your mother all in one night. Well ok perhaps not so much. All I know is that I’m loving the hell out of this class and that I feel a lot better having taken my first two tests. (In one night. yeah I’m impressive like that) 88% on MOD 1 (which most people failed the first time), and 80% on MOD 2.

We’ve been having practice night more and more, and I like them so much better than lecture nights. Not that those can’t be funny as shit, it’s just that practice nights are so much more hands on. We run rapid trauma assessments, skills tests and just stand around listening to our adjuncts war stories. I forget to take my breaks on these nights. That’s how it is. …

I feel like this is what I’ve been missing out on working at my day job. Something social and mentally engaging. I’m finally getting a hold on everyone’s name or at least everyone that I talk to. Out instructors told us at the beginning of class that this field is tight. Not so much like a tiger but more like a family of arrogant elitist bastards gettn’ shit done and done right. …. Yeah that’s the sort of family Gin and I will have not so much a representation of the people in this field. Still though, feels great (making Gin proud)

. On a side note, I now understand why when I lived in Columbia my father Lincoln couldn’t go anywhere with out running into someone he knew from when he was a paramedic/firefighter. He’d always stand there talking for 20 minuets and my mother and I would stand there and wonder where the hell he know half the whole damn town from.

Other than that Gin and I are trying to get our head together to decide where and how we are going to live for the next couple of months till we can qualify for a house loan in the right amount. Then we still have to find a house close on it quick and move in before Christmas ideally. I think I’ll have to keep my job at the hospital so I can have at least a 1 year job history at my current place of work… however I don’t’ think that once I’m done with class and licensed as and EMT in Missouri that I’ll stay in the department I am in now. I’ll probably transfer to the emergency department if the part time “emergency medical technician”. If the job is still open.

It’s crazy cause it’s just us and we have hardly any help. Our support system is just s poor as we are and the shit just keeps piling up on us. But here is were I’ll borrow another of Gin’s phrases and say “We ain’t bovered”

Working at a hospital you learn how everything really works and how just like that massive McBurger on your television screen the reality of things are quite different. From doctors who walk around expectorating on everything from the walls to the floor, to the system that gives you stickers when you “go above and beyond” when you’re really just doing your job. Some things you just can’t believe. You look at it and wonder as to how anyone ever thought this was a good idea. Because when the hospital spends millions on their sticker campaign and then you get notified that your being transferred because your position is beyond eliminated since there is not enough money well… it’s just amazing how anything functions at all.

Now this is not the worst thing I’ve seen and from a skewed angle it can make since. That I do admit. However, when the housekeeping department switched from clean looking white rags to awkward brown ones my first thought was “ok so you will wipe up shit with shit colored rags”

Perhaps that was harsh but in my view you want a hospital to be clean. Or at least appear clean. That’s why the renovated parts of the surgery department are all white. Because most people associate white with clean sanitary and pure. So in that same school of thought you would not want to make a patients room or even one of the OR’s sterile with something that looks like it was made to wipe and ass with.

I’ve included a picture as you can see.

Now onto the angle where this absurd change makes a tiny bit of since >>>

According to the powers that be (supervisors in the department) : The change from white rags was made so that the brown rags would match the brown uniforms of the housekeepers and so that the rags would not require as much effort to keep clean.

Ok so the rags match the uniforms of the floor care people but what about the housekeepers that work in the surgery department will they get blue rags to match their blue scrubs?

Answer: No they get to sterilize operating rooms with the same brown rags that others use to wipe down patient rooms beds and so on.
Well at least they will cuts some cost on not bleaching loads and loads of rags from time to time… or maybe not so much since I think colored rags cost more because of the die required to make them brown…
It’s stickers all over again.

Now on the dreaded N1H1 (previously known as the swine flu). I know that fancynewgin  has told her friend that she’ll defiantly get it since I work at a hospital.

But I’m sure that even if she got it she’d still look hot.

I on the other hand fear coming home looking like this


Thank god I got my free employee flu shot…

Anyway so I read an article the other day, on the murder of Brandon McClelland.  He was as the article described “a 284-pound gentle giant” and a “devoted family man”. Now the investigation into his “brutal death” is as I understand still in progress.

His two friends (whom he was with last) are in jail awaiting trial this spring. The article however, and this post are not necessarily about Brandon and the evens surrounding his death, but instead of the “racial tempest his death provoked”. Now McClelland was African-American his two friends were white.  Although the article states that “McClelland may have been a victim of drunken rage more than racial animosity”, it appears that the town of Paris, Texas has suffered an outbreak of racial tension.

                 The article tells of the towns “turbulent racial history”.  Where it give past examples such as when Paris was under the national spotlight due to an incident of “A black 14-year old freshman with no arrest record, she was sentenced to as much to seven years in juvenile detention for shoving a teacher’s aid.” When around that time a white student who admitted to arson “received only probation”. 

Then it goes on to give examples of recent events including everything form KKK death threats spray painted on the side of a mans apartment, to a police report of two white men assaulting a black man when the two apparently broke into the mans home and stabbed him.

 

My point in bringing all this up is to ask if anyone thinks that people will ever move wholly apart from this. In a society so focused on appearance as ours is; can we ever evolve past race?

Our recently elected president is considered black, and his election for many heralded a new age and the realization of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous dream as well as the dreams of many civil rights activists. I remember watching the inauguration and seeing all the people in the crowd and how moved they were.  It just stands out to me in such a stark contrast that the events in the news article I read and the election of the First black President  are happening in the same world.

 

I don’t expect the election to change racial tension between people in places of the country. I just always expected that when we reached this point it would have been over. I wonder if my assumption that the racial division among other things would decrease by generation. I mean that seams to have been the case with most things right? You wouldn’t judge me for dating an Irish girl now would you? Of course not that’d be ridicules… but it wasn’t always that way.  I just hope that one day we can have the same attitude towards racism.

 

 

(The article:  Problems in Paris, Texas by Gretel C. Kovach and Arian Campo-Flores of Newsweek February 9^th 2009)