So last week, Kyle had his eye thing
that was like over two weeks. My kid got a bug bite on her face
that got infected. And it was like half of her face and she looked like
half a chipmunk. My mom came home from her trip and basically
almost immediately went to the emergency room. Cause she was sick as a dog.
And then I left the emergency room after they transferred her to another
hospital and was back less than 12 hours later
with Nessie. That was another experience altogether.
And then my mom's been in the hospital the whole time. Ness was out of
work for five days for
just basically being a woman. Bullshit like that. She came back to
work yesterday. Last night her grandmother fell. She lives with her
grandmother, broke her leg, which is the other leg from the one
she broke a year or two ago. Oh, and my kids are in camp this
week. My kids who do not leave my house, they leave my house. But like,
only with us, who have never been away from us, literally ever
unsupervised. Unless it's by like Kyle's mom or
Vanessa. That's it. They're in camp this week. So not only am I like running
back and forth to the hospital, which is 30 minutes away, I also
have to have my kids to camp by 8am, which is not a problem.
And then somebody has to pick them up at 3:30 every day. So this is
three. Three things I have to do every
day. Three things that I have to like, keep in my brain that
I have to find time to do every day. And if I have one thing,
I'm useless the whole day. So poor Vanessa last
night texted me and was like, my grandmother fell. And I did the appropriate thing.
I did the right thing. And I was like, oh, no, that's not good. What
does she need? And she told me. And then after that I was like,
but she's at the hospital. And she's like, yeah, the ambulance is coming to get
her. And I was like, cool. Your family's there? Yeah, everybody's here. You guys have
everything you need? Yeah. Cool. Turn off. Brain is full.
No space. We have no space. And then this morning, Kyle was like, have you
heard from Vanessa? And I was like, maybe. She probably texted me. He was
like, did you want to check? And I was like, maybe. And then he took
over from there because he was like, you're not going to process any of this
information, are you? And I was like, nope, nope, Nothing. Nope.
So both fortunately and unfortunately, I say fortunately, not that I want my
mother to be in the hospital, but fortunately, in that this is where she needs
to. To be right now. She's sick. I'm glad that we were able to get
her into the right place to get well.
Obviously, nobody wants to be in the hospital, but it's definitely where she needs to
be right now. So, unfortunately, she is sick.
Fortunately, she has access to good medical care and is in a hospital
where they are taking great care of her. Whenever she gets sick, she gets
admitted to the transplant unit at
the hospital where she had her transplant
done. Not that she is currently having any trouble with
that organ. It's actually Knockwood doing really
well. But once you've had a transplant, they treat everything
as secondary to the transplant. So she got
admitted to transplant unit, and she's been there,
I don't know, a couple days now, maybe four. Four days. You're supposed
to lose track of time and space when you're in the hospital.
I, however, am not in the hospital and have no sense
of time and space. She's been there sometime between, like, three days and a
year, let's put it that way. It's somewhere in there. I'm not entirely sure where.
I went up to see her the other day, and she has this nasty cough.
And so, like, I feel bad making her talk.
And so I, like, find things to do while I'm there. I
just, like, scroll my phone or, I don't know, tidy up things around her
room. Because it really is just very difficult for her to talk.
She got a little frustrated with me the other day. Cause she's like, you come
up here and you don't even talk to me. And I'm like, talk. And she
started coughing, and I was like,
you see what. You see that? Do you see that? Sometimes I know what I'm
doing also. I don't want to talk to anybody anyway.
Especially when you're on a transplant unit, they have nurses that come in all the
time. They have all sorts of people who come in and check a bunch of
things. They check your weight constantly because they're worried about fluid retention,
whatever. And so the nurse comes in and
she needed more labs done. And my mom
has just horrifically bad veins, horrible
veins. And she only has one arm that you can pull labs out of, because
the other arm has, I think, has her dialysis port
in it. And she doesn't use it anymore. But you can't pull
labs from it anymore. Or you can't pull labs from that arm because there's no
access. It's just like a whole thing. Every time she has to get blood drawn
It's a whole ass thing. So this nurse comes in, though,
and she's doing all of the things that she has to do, which is so
many things. And she says to my mom,
somebody told me that you were a phlebotomist. And my mom's like,
well, yeah. And to be clear, she was a phlebotomist
50 years ago. Approximately. Pretty close to 50 years
ago. She has not worked as a phlebotomist, at least during my
entire life and probably for 10 years before
that. 50 years. That's terrifying. But 50 fucking
years. She looks at her and says, somebody told me that you were a
phlebotomist. And my mom says, yeah. And she goes,
I'm really bad with tricky veins. Can you show
me? She's like, can you talk me through? Because I also know you pretty bad
veins. And she's. It's just. I'm just not very good at it. Can
you show me? And my mom was like, yeah, I can show you. She's like,
do you want me to draw it on myself? And she goes, no, I want
to do it, but just, like, talk me through it. So my mom
goes, okay, I can do that. And so she walks over to my mom,
doesn't give her any of the materials, but she's like, I'm just going to pretend
like I don't know what I'm doing, and I want you to tell me exactly
where to start and, like, how to find the vein, how to identify it before
sticking, and then what I do after. My mom walked her through the whole thing
took probably 15 minutes of just, like, talking. My mom was, like,
super engaged the whole time. My mom is sharp, but very
clearly feels sick, and so she's foggier than she normally is. I just want to
be clear about something. This woman probably takes labs 20
times a day. She does not need help from my mother.
She did not need help from my mother at all. She
knows how to take labs. She knows how to draw them. She is
fine with tricky veins. When you have trouble finding the vein,
you call the rn, because the RN knows how to do it. The
RN is good at it. I think my mom was, like, just sick
enough that she didn't realize what was happening, which
is that this woman was just trying to get her
engaged and make sure that her brain was still working and that she was able
to show her how to do something. And I just sat there the
whole time, just, like, marveling. Who thinks of that? Who
thinks of. I'm gonna have this woman teach Me
how to do something that is so far ingrained in her
brain wrinkles just to get her brain working, just so that she
has some sort of stimulation so she's not staring at the TV
for 23 hours a day between naps so that
she's engaged and feels just a tiny bit better
about this whole shit ass situation. After
she was done, she, like, made eye contact with me. And she didn't really
wink, but she, like, might as well have winked. And I was like, I see
you. I see you. All that to say we do not
deserve nurses. We do not deserve nurses. Who
thinks of that? Who is like, I'm gonna
have this woman teach me how to do something I've done
27 times today because it will make her day the
tiniest bit better because it will make her feel competent and
capable. And like, there is something on the other side of
this very long hospitalization. Who thinks of that? Who
thinks of that? We do not deserve nurses. We need
7,000 people who are more like nurses
and more. Probably more like 7 million people. Not 7,000, maybe even
7 billion. A lot of people. A lot of people who are that cool. We
need more people who are that cool. I can't do dates. I can't do numbers.
I can't do time. Can't do any of it right now. But I know we
need more do that. But, yeah, we do not deserve
nurses. Do you ever, like, forget what it's like to be around normal people
and then say something that either makes sense to you or that you
think is objectively funny? And forget that
this person does not probably understand your sense of
humor at baseline, and then it comes out of your mouth and you're like,
oops, probably shouldn't have let that one out into the world
without qualification. That's a blast.
And like, you guys know I don't like the term normal
because I don't think normal exists, but there is kind of like a
baseline for things that are socially acceptable to say, and this is
probably not any of them. I had a moment yesterday where
my mom's nephrologist called me,
and it's not her normal nephrologist. It's her hospitalist nephrologist, because she's in the
hospital right now. So he called me to talk about her kidney things, because anytime
she's hospitalized, the first thing we have to worry about is the kidney, because she
went and got this extra kidney a couple years ago, and it's like a big
thing that we have to worry about anyway. So it's like a whole ass thing.
And so he called me to basically give me the update. Cuz it's just, it's
impossible to be at the hospital enough to catch all of the doctors. She, she
has so many doctors right now. She has a
nephrologist, she has a pulmonologist, she has an infectious disease doctor,
she has an endocrinologist, she has a cardiologist.
She's like just a hospitalist, which is internal medicine. There's just so many freaking doctors
and it's impossible to catch all of them. I said to the nurse, like when
doctors come through, they need to call me because she's not a
reliable historian and I want to
make sure they're doing shit correctly. And I also need to threaten them
personally. And by threaten them I mean if you don't figure
out what's going on, I'm not bringing her home, which is a personal threat.
They take it as a threat, let's put it that way. I don't actually threaten
them. I would never actually threaten a doctor, but however, I would threaten them
with having to take my mother home with them. And they would be like, oh
God, no. So he calls me and he's like, hey, hey,
just wanna let you know, her kidney studies are fine.
Creatinine looks good. Everything seems to be working right. We're working a
little bit on her anti rejection meds. Cause I think from being sick they
got a little wonky. But he's like, everything looks fine. And me
being me replied to him, oh, so kidney Poitier
is fine. The pause, it was the pregnantest
of pauses as he processed what I just
said, said to him. And he goes, did you just call her
transplanted kidney? And I said, yep, yeah, I did.
I did that. Yeah. I'm just gonna, I'll be over, I'll be over here
if you need. I'm just gonna. That came out of my mouth. Yeah. And to
be fair, when she got called, then they said they had a
kidney for her and she was rushing into the hospital, it was like mid Covid.
So I didn't go with her and I was just like, okay, tell kidney
Poitier that he better get his shit together. And since then, that has been the
kidney's name. It is what we call it. She got an
extra kidney and we named it because of course, you name it. I
forgot that this is like a professional person who
probably does his best to keep a straight face most of the
time when he's working and talking about very serious
things and I just flew out of my mouth,
as if he knew the context. I guess he technically
does know the context because he
knows that she got herself a new kidney. So after he
processed what I said and my response to it, he did start laughing, and
I felt better. I was just like, man, the pipe between my brain
and my mouth seems to be closed. Maybe it's
not closed. Maybe it's open. There's a filter that's supposed to be there that has
gotten knocked off or something because it just flew right out.
No context. Didn't tell him that's what we call it.
Just addressed her extra kidney
as Kidney Poitier to a complete stranger who took
it like a champ. So anyway, have you ever done that?
Have you ever just, like, said something in front of somebody who had
no context, forgetting that it was gonna sound
unhinged, and then realized how unhinged it
sounded? And if so, welcome to the club, and
we've been waiting for you. So we have a small talk question
from Opal in Georgia. Opal asks. My oldest
friend and I have been close since we were nine years old.
26 years. And lately, when I hang up after our calls, I
feel tired instead of full. Like I gave something, but
nothing came back. She's not a bad person. There's no
big falling out, no betrayal. We've just become very
different people. And I think I've been maintaining the friendship out of
loyalty to who we used to be rather than who we
actually are. Now I feel an enormous amount of guilt even
admitting this, like acknowledging it means I'm ungrateful for the history
or disloyal to a girl who was my whole world at 9 years
old. How do you let something good fade gracefully? Or
do you. Is there a way to say something honest without blowing it all up?
So people evolve beyond each other. And it also doesn't
mean that not being in the same place now means you're never gonna be in
the same place again. So I think that's really important to keep in mind,
is that you're talking past each other now. You're in two different
places, and you need different things out of a friendship, and that's okay. That's
the evolution. That's growth. That's all of it. And this person's been in your life
forever, and that doesn't mean they're not going to be in your life tomorrow, even
if today is not the right time, or you need them in a different capacity
that you needed them before. I don't think it needs to be A
big thing. I think you can just make different choices.
I think if you're going to cut off contact, which it doesn't sound like you're
going to, that should be a conversation, because ghosting people is really
hard. I had that happen to me in a friendship, and it really wrecked me
for a long time. This was somebody I was, like, inseparably close with. And just
one day, I think realistically we had grown apart,
and one day we just were miles apart, and I realized we hadn't
talked in a long time. And I thought it was just accidental. And then
it turned out to not at all be accidental. And so don't do that to
somebody, especially somebody who is
invested in you and your success and your life and has been a huge part
of your life. But it's okay to just take some time and space
and pause and reassess and give yourself an opportunity to
miss somebody. That's a hard conversation to have because they may not
understand. Telling somebody that you need space, an
indefinite or an imprecise amount of space,
is a weird conversation to have, but you can take it for yourself. If
they ask, just say, like, things are really busy right now, and I just. I
don't have a lot to give. And so the level
that I'm engaging at is where I am right now. And it doesn't mean I
don't love you. It just means this is where my life is right now. If
you have the type of relationship where you can have that kind of conversation
with them and just say, like, it feels like we're in different places and I
need a little bit of time and space, that's fine, too.
But I don't think it has to be a production. I also think it's probably
shorter lived than you realize. And then there's also the part, like, it sounds like
your friend might be going through something that is making them focused
on one thing that maybe is not something that you feel attached to
or feel like you want to be engaged with. And that might be a conversation,
too. Hey, we're talking about this one thing all the time. I'm
concerned that it's affecting you in a way that is not the way
it typically affects you. Is there something going on? Do we. Do you need help?
Do you need something? But it's also okay to just, like,
pause and answer less and
protect your peace. You don't owe anybody an explanation for why you're
taking space. You can give it to them. They will often
misunderstand and take it very personally when it Sounds like it's not personal at all.
It's just what it is. And so protect your
peace, take your space, give it a short timeline for
two weeks. I'm really not going to engage too much. Maybe it can coincide with
something that you have going on that would realistically keep you busy for two weeks.
That's totally fine. And maybe you find out after those
two weeks, there's not anything you miss and it was a good
break and you continue it. I don't know. But you don't owe
anybody an explanation for why you're choosing to protect your piece, why
you are choosing to prioritize yourself. And as long as you have done everything
to make sure that this person is okay, that they have what they need, that
you're not throwing them to the wolves in a time that they
clearly have a need and there is a way to meet, it doesn't
mean that you have to throw yourself to the wolves to fix whatever their problem
is. But don't leave somebody suffering without
pointing out or without doing whatever you can reasonably
to try to help. But beyond that,
your peace is your own. And if something doesn't feel right, it's not right. And
you can come back to it in a month or a year
or 10 years and get right back where you
started or where you left off. Because that's how a lot of
friendships work. And that's just okay. That's just the reality of it. You're
allowed to evolve past people, but you also just need to need a break.
Oh, I think one week we should have a small talk where the question is,
like, really super long, and my answer is just no,
that's it. I think it'd be really funny. I think that'd
be really funny. You could just be like, should I trust
RFK Jr. With my medical records? No. Next question.
You give me so much credit for having any fucking idea what I've
said previously. Like, I listen to my episodes
not because I like listening to myself, but because otherwise
I have no idea what's on them. And people will
text me and be like, oh, my God, this resource was so
helpful. And I'm like, did we talk? Was there? I
don't. What? Your podcast. I have a
podcast. Oh, is it Wednesday? Oh, that's new and
different.