Bridges 46

Chapter 46

*Before…

It’s…it’s not a Cass thing it’s a me and the fixed real me taking some me time and slowly exploring myself and enjoying it.
Being my real self, exploring that part of myself and it’s amazing from start to my big finishes and after my second I’m panting and glowing and I clean things up and gather some of the blankets and slip them between my legs.
There’s more than a sort of finally feeling in the peace of things feeling right when I touch them or press into them without the wrong stuff in the way anymore.
It was easy to fall asleep smiling and think about my life and what’s coming ahead for me and actually looking forward to doing so much more than just surviving.

*And Now…

I woke to the smell of the coffee maker going through its program and smile at the smell of Tim’s coffee from home. It’s really my indulgence and after last might I feel pretty good and it’s a pleasure to roll over and snuggle into my sheets and my pillows.

They still smell like Cass but it’s that me post morning after some self-intimacy and it’s me being post op and rolling over without the flop and eeew touching the side of my thigh thing and it’s just really, really nice to be really and finally me.

And I am frankly still very much still enjoying it. It’s not gotten old one bit the feeling or just being right with myself and everything finally in its place instead of the way that it was wrong for so often.

I snuggle into bed for a few more blissful moments before I roll out of bed and onto my feet and pad downstairs grabbing a sleep shirt to cover my bare chest.

I know someday that I might get to where this is all normal and I’ll be blasé about the way my body is moving but there’s this really powerful sensation of things being right with me after way too long that I’m not even going to try to fight even if it sounds all corny and things.

Like some online story.

Well there’s truth to some of that fiction though…wish fulfillment and then there’s that pictured feeling of it all being right.

And everyone who has felt the lash of being dysphoric has thought long and hard and wished and dreamed of just being normal to where normal feels like it’s elation.

Me, Yeah I’m there.

Actually this feeling reminds me of that point in physio after I was wounded when I was first getting literally back on my feet.

You get something like mobility back and you have no idea in your head at just how much and how powerful and emotional a thing that is to have happen.

Post-op is like this right now.

Seriously, I just rolled out of bed and grabbed my top and I’m getting a coffee without any of the check and tuck or the eeewws from feeling them move when I moved, nothing touching things they shouldn’t and no aches if things that I never wanted…just getting out of bed and going.

It’s joyfully good and normal.

Honestly if I wasn’t the introvert that I am I’d likely be singing and dancing like that woman you see in that sleep aid pill commercial.

*Grins*

I get my coffee mug and pour myself a coffee and I go with a little creamer and I dig out some orange juice and I get a banana, two actually. I’m not on Spiro so I can have food with potassium in it again. I eat one half and put the other one and a half in the blender and then some Greek yogurt and some juice and I add a little honey to it and buzz it up smooth while I sip my coffee and take my multivitamins and one of those calcium chocolate chews and I pour half of my smoothie into my coffee mug and the rest into one of those metal drink bottles and put it into the fridge.

I drink it and rinse the cup and I head upstairs to go use the bathroom and I drink my coffee as I get ready for my run.

Tights top and leggings and then sweat pants that aren’t too baggy and then sweat socks and wool ones and then my splash suit which is a running suit so it’s reflective and I get my toque on and my headlamp and another onto my pack for a flasher and my running cleats and I head out.

It’s nice…and in that nice winter running that only a runner would get. It’s minus four Celsius and there’s little wind chill and it’s snowing but it’s those mid-sized flakes that are the kind of ones that melt when they hit you so you know you’re going to get wet and all of that in the pre-dawn dark with just the yards lights and the streetlights and I smile because I’m the first right now on my road and it’s just about an inch and three quarters of virgin snow.

There hasn’t even been a car or a truck yet and it’s just one of those things that’s perfect. I head off towards town first running to the t-section first and then to the gas station and it’s fairly empty of the regulars and I do what I usually do and I stop for a cheap cup of coffee and I get some milk while I’m there and Amy’s on this morning as she’s ringing me up and I get a few other odds and ends like a couple of scratch and wins and a 649 lotto ticket and I buy myself a square of Hersey’s chocolate and I eat that while talking to Amy.

“The guys aren’t around?”

Amy shakes her head no. “We’re supposed to get ten so they cancelled school.”

I shake my head. “Only here in B.C. huh?”

She nods. “At least now-a-days it’s all the might happen stuff, if it looks slippery it might get bad enough for the roads to be dangerous.”

I grin. “You almost pulled a ‘back in my day.’ There.”

She grins. “God it feels like it you get out of school and are working for just a couple of years and it’s like the world completely changed on you y’know?”

I nod chewing the last bit of chocolate. “Oh I know wait until the music you listened to and the cars you used to drive in school are all listed as classic cars.”

We both grin and I put my things in my pack and the tickets in a plastic bag and I head out for the rest of my run.

I don’t know Amy well her just being one of the people that works there and all but she seems to be good with me. Which is nice. I mean it’s not like I’m exactly a secret in town. Everyone knows who the trans lady is.

And yeah I still get looks and I still get grief now and then and it’s mostly dirty looks more than anything else after all the stuff had sort of blown over with the things when I met Brandon and Cass.

My biggest advantage is that people are self-centered, and they are too caught up in their everyday to bother with me. Especially since there’s the message loud and clear to the bigots from my friends and the police and some others that bigotry’s not going to really be a popular thing here.

Which is good, which has me getting into my running a little more heading home and I put on some more speed. I love to run, it helps me. It’s good for me, it keeps me in shape and that helps my self-esteem a lot but it’s also too that running lets me get rid of my demons, like I’m running and they can’t keep up the more pure the run feels and it’s like they sort of get sucked back in my wake and then they get dragged along behind me until they get torn up by the road rash. Even their little hooks they have inside of me are getting out as they either tear away or I sweat them out like poison.

I have literally ran and cried.

Like for no other reason other than I’m getting free of shit and I’m doing something pure and unclouded or unhaunted and it will come out those runners tears.

That high is great too…that runner’s high the boost from exercise and fresh air. It’s stuff that helps flush out the stuff that builds up inside of you from depression. Now I’m not saying for people to run or go off their meds and things but there are chemicals that your brain gets used to having while you are depressed and then it’s not producing either a lot of the good chemicals that you need either so…anything that fights that works.

Or it does for me and with a baby on the way and being a mom to be and everything I have a very real self interest in getting my head on straight.

I pass our places and the snow’s still light and shallow so Brandon has the horses out again and there’s that whinny of happy and challenge from his horses that are out as they see me and they race me along their fence line and I turn it on to a sprint to race them and I don’t have a hope in heck of winning but they actually look for me to come and for me to do that and they like it.

I like it and that length of pasture is just long enough to get my heart hammering and my lungs burning and once I’m past it I slow to a jog, a slower than normal jog but I keep moving and get my wind back before Ai go around the big turn ant the end on my road and start climbing the hill.

It’s that dawnish sort of lavender light right now with the fade from twilight into dawn and it’s snowing and cloudy and but it’s the hill so it’s snowy open bits of fields that lead to stand after stand of evergreens and they’re snow touched and the snow’s in the air and it’s just me, this, the road and the hill.

And the hill is deceptive too because you run a good half a mile up it and it’s quite steep but then where there’s the crest there’s just a flattening off and then you get the second half of the hill.

I run the whole thing and keep going pushing myself too and follow the road as it goes straight for another two miles or so and then there’s another corner and one of those green painted highway safety bridges up over the creek.

That’s where I stop and I dig out my granola bar I like the sort of salty ones for this with the peanut butter in them and the extra nuts. The running and the protein and everything is a thing and you need a little of it while doing stuff like this because you don’t use it until you’re really done your run but if you have a little while you’re doing this you’re not as nearly wiped out through the day.

And I have a full day ahead of me.

I eat and walk and pace and eat while drinking water and keep loose while I have that break and when I’m done I head back home. Now I and I’m speaking for myself here I cross the road and run facing traffic on the way home since it’s getting busy and I was just passed by two log trucks and a few work vehicles and I’d rather see things coming and I’m going downhill in snowy weather so I keep to the shoulder of the road trusting my ability to stop on the gravel more than the chipseal with the snow down and all.

But…I let the hill pull me and I do run really fast and I enjoy it too and I don’t even really slow too much on the flat part of the hill before I am going downhill again and then there’s the run home.

I’m rubbery in a good way and soaked or my splash suit is and I get undressed and I’m sweating like mad while getting undressed and I got right in for my morning shower.

Steam…heat and sweat. I do that adjusting to the air coughing for a bit but I just stand under the water letting the streams flow right down and over my body and let all the stuff inside sweat out and wash away before I even grab my puff and the soap.

Then it’s the morning ritual of getting ready and only it’s the old ritual of getting ready with me getting into scrubs and my nursing kit. My kit’s just the clothes and my ID lanyard and of course decent socks and I have my good steel toe sneakers and lots of powder. Those get bagged because you don’t wear outside wear into work if you can help it and I have some Velcro pockets on my scrubs that I make sure I have a few things in then like Band-Aids, some of my own gauze, and a folded square bandage and a pack of gum.

The bandages are just something from the service that we always have something handy and that’s habit. And the gum is for my breath, the patient’s breaths or just other smells.

I pony tail my hair and I pack my books and a change of scrubs and some other things like toothbrush and paste and mouth wash and a bunch of other things and I head down and I get some breakfast.

I cheat honestly and I have some Jimmy-Dean sausage rounds and I fry them up and cook two Eggo waffles and I put an egg that I scramble in the microwave and a processed cheese slice and I make a sandwich which I hunker over the sink and eat and for my break lunch at work I take my shake and two apples and I shake some potato chips into a zip-lock bag and I finish that and I brush my teeth and check myself over in the mirror and use the bathroom once more to be sure and head out locking up the house and head into work with all of my things.

It’s very strange pulling in and parking in the staff parking lot and then heading in. I did a lot of field work but I did actual hospital work too and I sign in with security and then off to the locker rooms which leave me with this sigh of relief.

They have card scan chip locks and I use mine and it’s in the women’s locker room and I go to mine and I stow my stuff and all of my extra stuff for just in case things.

Like having a dementia patient throw their catheter bag at you. Or a good strong arterial spray all over you or vomit.

Actually you develop a pretty good instinct of what to dodge and when.

I meet up with the girls in ER and I’m greeted with a few nice smiles and some indifference by the coffee-hasn’t-kicked-in crowd and we have charts on the boards already and I get a coffee and look to….Tina, she’s the head ER nurse today and she beams at me. “You’re the new girl so you get triage my dear.”

She gestures to the other wall where there’s a whole bunch of front-pages waiting for me and I grab a busy board and a file folder and take them all.

A busy board is an aluminum clip board with a base that’s actually a box. It’s like only an inch thick but the idea is that you take the charts that you finished and you put them inside after you assessed them and that way you can sort of keep going.

I smile and take the charts and I head out to the triage room which is actually out front by the waiting area and the admitting desk and I see it’s already pretty full with those that get all of the loveliness and stuff during these days of a wet and damp winter.

I stop at the admitting desk. “Hi could you do me a favor?”

“Sure…?”

“You have an extra-set of Post-it’s and a marker?”

“Sure…” She passes me some hot pink Post-it’s and a felt marker.

I go into the triage room and I sit and I read through the sheets really fast and I get them in order of when they got here and I make sure the place is wiped down with the anti-bacterial wipes just in case and I head out through the triage room doors to the waiting room.

I say in a loud military command voice. “Hi everyone, I am Sam Chase and I’m your triage nurse and I will be calling you here in order of when you arrived and registered and I will be giving you an number on one of these. (I hold up the Pink-Post-It with a smiley face drawn onto it.) this will have a number, this is the number in which outpatients or emerg will be calling you at and this will not change. Any critical or acute need patients will get a pass just like in monopoly, and no matter your number the order will not change even though wait times might change depending on whatever medical emergencies happen between now and then. Bothering the admitting clerks or the front staff will not make going down happen faster, harassing the staff will not get you down faster. Now does anyone have any questions?”

There’s a few that look like they have complaints.

There’s a few that look like they might get frisky or pushy and security having heard my bit came out during that time and he just sort of looked out over the bunch that might be trouble.

I do this for a reason, you lay down the law and they know what’s going on. Every shift you get people tired of waiting wanting to know where they are in the queue. They almost always cause trouble or get loud or upset the staff it happened a lot in Afghanistan and the same ones were the complainers and that’s the ones with the self-important sort of looks on their faces.

If you give then the how it works then you can actually run things smoother, and the staff doesn’t get hassled or intimidated and also…also the message of they don’t mess around will spread after a couple of weeks or so.

I call out the first name from the first sheet I have and they actually sort of do a bit of civilian hustle getting to me.

I give her a smile. “Alright you’re my first number and that’s a fourteen.”

I give her a Post –it and I start to triage her and write down my notes.