This past week, the weather has been outstanding. Absolutely. Outstanding. The DC heat and humidity has gone, hopefully for the rest of the year. I worked outside the other day, with my lap desk, my feet up on one of the porch steps to give me some balance. I still want a full nice patio set, but they've been sold out or on backorder forever. I've been looking at the online neighborhood sales but haven't found one close enough. I also sort of feel wary of these sites. I love buying used stuff, but, I feel a level of sketchiness on Facebook or Nextdoor. Let's not even mention Craigslist. What a cesspool.
Last night after dinner, I said to Doug "is tonight a good night to have a fire, ya think?" He kind of made a meh face and I thought, oh. Okay. I'll.... just go back to working then? It's a bad habit, but after I finish dinner, I start working again.
He watched the news, got up, put his sandals on and sighed. He picked up the matches, some flyers from the grocery stores, and headed out to the pit. "I guess it's as good as it's going to get."
I finished my helpdesk ticket. I grabbed a glass of wine. I headed out to the patio.
We had been piling up kindling and loose pieces of wood onto the fire pit for weeks. Doug crammed the grocery store flyers under the wood. I said that we should take the wood out, and build an actual good pile of kindling and give it a chance to catch, we can't just expect the paper to catch ---
He lit the paper and said "It'll start!"
It took forever. I sat beside the fledgling flames feeding them smaller pieces of wood that I was breaking off from the pile. Twigs and thin branches, sliding them in under the bigger in the way pieces that were too damp to catch, and blocking too much airflow for the attempts at getting going. Eventually my corner of the fire pit began to catch, and we had ourselves a fire.
Boy Scout Mom knows what she is doing.
It was glorious. Doug had kind of a crappy week, so he has been on edge, which probably is what fed into his lackadaisical attitude to actually getting it started. Maybe if it doesn't start, I can just go back inside and watch TV. I've had an incredibly stressful several weeks and I just was relieved to set that laptop down and not work another ticket. I let go of my sense of "you have to do this... because..." and let the work/life balance thing take over my brain.
Geoff came out to sit with us, too. He had an orientation for next semester's clinical. He couldn't understand why it was so early, but didn't argue with anyone. It was in person, the first time his entire class group was in the same place at the same time since the pandemic hit, and their training had been somewhat derailed and delayed. They've had zoom classes but no one keeps their cameras on. So he hasn't been able to make the kind of connections he's wanted to with the group. He said it was really cool to see people, and his instructor said that even though everyone had their masks on, she could tell they were smiling.
He said when the program started, there were 24 students, but the group has dwindled to 17. He's not sure where some of the folks have gone. If they couldn't pass the classes, if they weren't doing good at clinical. He said it made him nervous.
He did 3 weeks at a local radiology department, now he's back at Georgetown, and then in Mid November will be headed up county to a different hospital, and in the spring, sometime, he'll be at a pediatric facility. He isn't sure where but the pediatric facility is Children's National. The program tries to get everyone exposed to as many different kinds of spaces as possible. The equipment and experiences and types of offices and facilities out there is all different. At the doctor's office where he just was, their equipment was much older and he didn't know much about it, but now he does. He also said he had a huge language barrier with most of the patients. They all mostly spoke Spanish and he speaks "Bueno. Bien. Gracias."
The girl he was working with spoke fluent Spanish, but was not a native speaker. She was a white chick. I asked what he took away from that. What should he be thinking of doing, possibly, to make his professional experience more meaningful or to make himself more attractive to employers. For the last two years I have been encouraging him to take a second language, even if he just plays with Duolingo.
You don't have to have the whole Medical Spanish thing down, but leg, arm, hand, head, turn to the left, turn to the right, sit up, thank you, I'm sorry, these things will make the patient's experience much better.
I told him when I went in to the doctor last year for my mammogram, there was a tech there who was in the waiting room talking casually in Spanish to a husband and wife. He brought me out back to get set up and I told him I was impressed with his language skills. He told me he was Pakistani, grew up near Karachi. When he was growing up, they all spoke Urdu and Punjabi, and a few other regional languages because of the nature of Karachi. He learned English in school and then went to medical school, and it was incredibly helpful for him to know as much English as he did. He came to the United states and saw the need to learn Spanish very quickly. Now he dabbles in French to speak with the Haitian patients. "There are a lot of people in our city here who are from Ethiopia so Amharic is what he'll be learning next.
I shared his story with Geoff, and of course Geoff's response was "why don't people just learn English while they are here." I said that is a good question, and maybe they should, but, if you're in a care position, you don't know how long someone has been here, how much they know, how they learn, if they've been successful in learning. Communities of people surround each other, keep their languages, and keep each other safe. The priority of learning English for a lot of people is minimized because they are doing just fine with their people.
"You should look at people with empathy, not disdain. You don't know what their journey has been. Meet them where they are, and show them you care for them."
Hopefully a year from right now he'll be hired somewhere. And he's thinking about further certification in CT scans or "flouro" as it were. And hopefully some Spanish, or something.
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