JulieLeung.com: a life told in tidepools

The other day as we came home from Seattle on the ferry, I spied the Bainbridge crew practicing in Eagle Harbor. Little did I know that they were breaking the law: an article in Saturday’s Review revealed that rowing club members, training at 8 or 9 knots, are still subject to wake restrictions limiting all watercraft to 5 knots. On Tuesday March 1, an appeal to the Harbor Commission to change the ordinance allowing watercraft propelled by only human power (to) exceed the uniform speed limit. was denied, citing safety concerns.

Seattle’s Virginia Mason Hospital made headlines last December when a patient died due to a simple medical error.

A Seattle hospital’s recent decision to switch antiseptics from a brown solution to a colorless liquid appears to have played a key role in the death of an Everett woman.

Mary McClinton, 69, a tireless worker for the disadvantaged, died early Tuesday. She was mistakenly injected with antiseptic — rather than a marker dye — during a brain-aneurysm procedure at Virginia Mason Medical Center 19 days earlier, on Nov. 4.

The hospital this week took the unusual step of publicly explaining, and apologizing for, the error.

At that time our daughter’s surgery date was approaching so I noticed this story with horror and fear: what if that happened to our family? Thank God it didn’t.

However, Virginia Mason entered 2005 with a public relations problem, at least in my mind. How will this hospital recover from such a publicized, preventable and deadly error?

In a recent bill from the clinic, I found the hospital newsletter with its theme for the year: Ensuring the safety of our patients.

I applaud Virginia Mason’s disclosure and public apology. I’m grateful the organization wants to focus on patient safety. Our family has received good care at their clinics.

However, whose job is patient safety? Below the message from the CEO is an article describing how Patient Safety Starts With You, listing ways you can be a safety inspector.

Anyone who has undergone intense medical care, such as surgery or birthing a baby, may not be in the best mindset to scrutinize what the staff are doing. Furthermore, I’ve discovered that if I ask many questions, it might seem that I don’t trust my staff and physicians. That too can create tension and issues. While I appreciate Virginia Mason’s suggestions, as a former patient, spouse of a patient and mother of a patient, I know that patients and their families aren’t always able to notice, speak up or effect change in medical care. Emotional and physical fatigue take their toll. We lack information and experience. Personalities can clash. Communication can be ineffective. Shouldn’t we be able to trust the hospital staff? Doesn’t the staff want us to trust them? How do we build the proper bridges between imperfect people in a hospital?

In light of the mistake made at Virginia Mason last year, I find the claim that Patient Safety Starts With You could be interpreted as putting the blame on the patient for failing to prevent a situation. Should Mary McClinton have asked the staff whether the injection contained dye or antiseptic?

Indeed patients should be involved in their care. I try to be a conscious medical consumer, asking questions, researching answers, permitting procedures only when necessary. Yet I know I can’t know or observe everything. I have to trust my doctor and staff, sometimes even blindly. For example, during Michaela’s surgery, we were not allowed in the operating room.

Trust is a delicate dance. Major mistakes result in litigation and more importantly loss of life. Community bridges break. How do we as patients learn to bear our responsibility appropriately and encourage our medical care providers to do their jobs as well as they can? How can we waltz and walk together with grace?

From U2 LOG.COM:

U2.com members have received an e-mail to inform them of Monday’s official announcement of U2’s Fall tour of North America.

So everyone who couldn’t get tickets for the spring dates…

In the land before time, in the Redmond before Microsoft, horses ran through fields along the side of the road. The girl would watch them from the van as her mother drove her baby brothers and her home through the boundary of Bellevue. Seeing the horsies in their pastures was the delight of her day.

The girl had purple-framed glasses she didn’t like, acquired at the start of kindergarten, and long hair her mother would sometimes comb into pony tails. The girl’s favorite outfit was pink plaid. She liked books better than most things in life except her family and friends, especially days when Daddy was home.

The girl would grow up and have her college interview at a restaurant in a Redmond parking lot with someone who worked at Microsoft. The girl would spend her seventeenth summer moving mop and broom cleaning a store across the street. Those blocks of intersections on the city border, between Bellevue and Redmond, would mark milestones. It was a time of transition for her and for the area itself, intense growth yet to come.

But all she knew at age six was that she liked Sears. Sears with its large red letters on brown brick box. Sears had a pet store where hermit crabs crawled across sparkling sand and neon fish darted in a tank. She hoped her mother would shop at Sears so she could peer into windows along the wall as they walked past and see the creatures.

Sears also had a candy store. Sometimes on Saturdays her father would take her shopping with him. At Sears, he bought her a bag of Swedish fish, chewy candies in red, yellow and green, shaped like fish, complete with eyes, fins and scales. The treat was a silly celebration of their Swedish heritage, a smidgeon of the mix inherited from her father’s family. It was a celebration of Saturdays and special time with Daddy.

The girl forgot about Swedish fish. She grew up and Redmond also grew up, buildings and subdivisions filling the flat pastures. The horses disappeared. Sears lost its candy store and pet store. Her father moved away.

The grown-up girl moved to the other side of the Sound, and had her own girls. One day she shopped at a warehouse known for affordable furniture. The store was like a labrynth but one of intense mediation not meditation, a lengthy maze to negotiate and an adventure in purchasing. Furniture on display as comfortable chairs and sturdy tables would be bought in boxes, for assembly at home. It seemed strange that three dimensions could be reduced to two. Who would guess what could be created from flat pieces of cardboard sandwich filled with bits and pieces. What could come from what could be seen now, she had learned she could never imagine.

At the checkout, after what had been a marathon morning for her girls, she spied a snack and out of exhaustion and hunger tossed it onto the belt. Swedish fish. These fish were small and red in color. It was a new taste for her daughters but a familiar one for her.

The girl was a girl again. The girl remembered. Pushing the cart through the parking lot, she declared to her daughters: You are Swedish! Her kids stared at her, surprised. At home they spoke German and ate Chinese food, continuing the dominant heritages, the cultures of the girl’s mother and her husband’s family. Somehow the girl had forgotten the slice of Sweden she and her kids also carried within them.

They all sat in the van for a moment, the grown up girl and her own three girls, resting and sharing candy fish. She picked up the map and looked for the route they would take to their next destination, tracing the roads with a finger. She thought about the furniture turned into boxes turned into furniture again. She thought about the taste of Swedish fish and rural roads in Redmond where horses once ran. She thought about the past and the future, what had been, what was to come and what she couldn’t see.

——

Laura described the restlessness of snow days spent at home:

When the class parent called this morning to announce the cancellation of school, she groaned. “What am I going to do with them today?,” the parent wondered.

I have dressed and undressed the kids three times for the outside; shoveled the driveway; did a puzzle; made breakfast, snack, lunch; read stories; given timeout; drove in a large circle for a carnap; and wiped tears.

There are something like 8 million home schoolers out there. I admire the parents who do that. It’s hard work, and homeschooled kids seem to be doing quite well. Hats off to them, but that’s so, so not for me.

Laura’s post reminded me of a revelation I received before I had children. One day, as I was preparing to babysit for a friend, I confessed that I sometimes didn’t know what to do with kids. I felt ashamed, as if this must make me a lousy sitter and potential parent. However, my friend replied that sometimes she didn’t know what to do with her child either. Amazed, I felt comforted that parents could be as clueless as I was, wondering what to do as the minutes passed.

Katherine began a list in a post titled And for my next trick…

I will simultaneously satisfy all of the following roles:

accountant
administrative assistant
arbitrator
beautician
ceramic/metal cleansing technician
chauffeur
chef
child development specialist
child psychologist
confidante
florist
guidance counselor

The list continued. In the comments, I added a few of my own and Katherine’s husband noted which roles he preferred…;-)

Bernie DeKoven inspired me yet again with this one:

Yeah, this “making a game out of it” idea – it’s something we need to talk about, a lot. It’s probably the first step towards making things more fun, or at least more endurable.

There’s a next step I’d like to invite us to meditate on for a while. I think it’s deeper, or steeper, or something, because it’s not as inviting. But I think it might take us to an even happier place. And that’s the step we take to discover the fun that is already there, in the things we don’t really want to do. Take dusting, for example. Or washing dishes, even. There’s something almost fun about it. I admit, you have to do a lot of looking. But it’s there. OK, maybe you have to, so to speak, lower the proverbial fun threshold, but at the heart of it is a kind of peace, a quiet, a time away. And during that time away, there’s the reward of things getting done, of watching the dust go away, of seeing the light return, the shine, the sparkle of rightness. And when it’s over, and you come back to whatever awaits, it’s almost as if you’ve been someplace else, some deep, quiet, bright place, all your very own. A place where you were having something very much like fun.