Learning Balance from the Stress of a Hibiscus

I suppose you could say COVID has changed even my daily life despite being a healthcare worker.  During the height of the pandemic something very unusual happened for me.  My urgent care was not busy.  Coverage was cut and I found myself with strings of days off.  Kids home.  No school.  Vacation cancelled.  No place to go.....  attacking the laundry list of home projects that had piled up during my year on the road for work it was.  I attacked these like I do anything else, 100 mph of throwing shit away, scrubbing nooks and crannies and replacing old broken crap.  I think I truly frightened the children, as they feared they would be tossed out next.  With the biggest of the projects finished it was time to turn my attention to my yard.  If I am being honest, my other half's heart surgery two years ago coupled with me on the road for a year for work, had left my yard in sorry shape.  With little else to do,a few weeks ago, I would find myself frequenting the garden center.  One trip adding lilies, another hanging baskets,  and multiple trips later to get a total of 82 bags of mulch to finally get my yard to be presentable.

I have to say, I don't really have all that much experience with this sort of thing.  In my adult life, if I had flowers it was two things.  It was typically something in the bulb family or hanging baskets.  I found bulbs to be simple plants that are fairly hardy, tough to screw up and come back year after year with very little effort.  Hanging baskets were similar.  Simply read the label, consider the placement and see how much sun they need..... and done. 

In the past couple of weeks, work has been very busy with the start COVID testing, so simple watering here and there was all I really needed to do to keep things going in my yard.  This week though, I took the leap.  I found myself with an unexpected few hours off.   A little time on my hands had  me wondering what I could put in on my newly appointed outdoor space brick patio (It had been power washed, redone and fire pit added on a previous pandemic boredom day).  A simple trip to the garden center and I would find myself with two braided hibiscus trees, a peach one and a pink one, well according to the label.  Neither had bloomed yet.  What exactly did I know about hibiscus trees?  Not a damn thing, but the braided trunks looked cool for sure. 

So, I did what I always do.  I bought some dirt designed for trees and shrubs and plopped them in that and watered.  Easy peasy.  Then it happened.  In the days that followed, the peach one would have a few leaves turn yellow.  Then they began to fall off.  I would pull off the dead stuff and the next day there would be more.  The pink one did not have that problem.  In fact, it had a bloom.  A simple consultation with Google would tell me my poor peach hibiscus tree was "stressed."  Ok.  A stressed tree?   It gave me multiple different explanations as to why.  Too much water, not enough water, too much sun, not enough sun, some variety of spider, the PH was wrong......  and go.  It was my job to figure it out.  Well crap.  I have clearly left the simplicity of bulbs and premade baskets and entered the deeply emotional world of the hibiscus.  However, I like a challenge and was not ready to let my little tree die. 

Multiple times a day I found myself babysitting my hibiscus tree as if it were my own child.  I test the soil.  No, it's moist.  I let it dry out a few days, as maybe it was too moist, no change.  Soil PH?  I got nothin'.  More leaves falling, no blooms.....  Now I'm stressed right along with my little tree.  Was my tree going to make it?  Yet here's the pink one on flower number three, with a few yellow leaves that were there when I planted it.  Yesterday, before my shift, I found myself just staring at the trees.  I was determined to figure this out.  What was the difference?  Same soil.  Same water.  Same flower food.  It was then I noticed it.  The peach one was placed in a corner.  It made sense to have one on either side of the patio door for the sake of symmetry.  Then I realized, that same symmtry meant far less sunlight, so  I moved it next to it's sibling.  This afternoon, just 24 hours later, I would walk out to no new yellow leaves and the most beautiful bloom I have ever seen, with new growth on all of the branches and my tree was back in the game. 

All of this shuffling around and concern for my stressed out tree has me thinking about how many times I take life at 100 mph.  I carefully balance working the long shift, taking on school for the kids, home obligations, running a business and race training.  Every minute of every day snatched up with a list of tasks so large I could never possibly get it all done in the time I have.  I'd love to say it doesn't end up for me the same way as it does for my stressed out tree.  I'd love to say I don't have insomnia or that there are not times that clumps of my hair come out in the shower much like my stressed out leaf shedding tree.  As my work hours have ramped up lately, I can neither confirm, nor deny that has been the case as of late.

However, this weekend I had on my list a virtual 5K.  A race put on by some friends who always support me, and as it was a good cause so I had registered twice.  So, yesterday, I found myself at the trail head staring down the 10k with a bit of anxiety as most of my long runs as of late have been cut short due to other obligations.  I would set out on the trail and run solid for an hour and 18 minutes.  Along the way, I found bright sunshine, cool temps, even splits and even saw a gigantic turtle.  At the end, I would see a good friend running the same race and she would cheer me on to the finish.  All of my other friends did the run as well and posted their results in a community effort that felt like the first normal thing this spring.  In the shower that followed, there were no hair clumps and last night, despite my mild sunburn from a glorious run,  I admittedly slept a bit better for the first time in a while.  I suppose we all need to pay better attention to the times our own proverbial leaves are falling off, and our blooms of progress are no longer present.  We need to see that at times, although the design of life appears to be logical and symmetrical, strictly adhering to it at 100 mph can leave us in the dark corners of stress actually achieving very little balance and stunting our own ability to move forward and grow.  Maybe the trick is to find those people in our lives who can help us to pump the brakes a bit, pull us from the dark to join them in the light so that we can once again find balance and  burst into full bloom just the way we were meant to.  It is only in those moments we will see the best is yet to come. 

Doing the Awful Thing

When I graduated from NP school, I had two jobs to pick from.  One offered to me in an elevator on the fly one evening as I headed to the ER for one of my last RN shifts, and the other a formal interview and vetting process.  Me, being me, went with the on the fly offer and hoped for the best.  It happened to be in neurosurgery with a doc I had done some stroke research with and was regarded as the greatest local surgeon of that time.  He was an iconic member of the medical community and the most well respected guy around.  I suppose that's why the late night elevator offer seemed perfectly reasonable.  Besides, I kinda knew the guy so that made it easier out of the gate.

I would start my eight years there with no idea what I was doing.  Dr. B patiently took me under his wing and taught me just about all there was to know about the nervous system and the various pathologies that existed under the realm of surgery.  There were disc herniations and brain tumors.  Hydrocephalus and traumatic bleeds.  As for me?  I grew to love every minute.  There is a certain order to the body's wiring that clicked perfectly with my fairly linear brain.  Besides, I had a mentor that had a love for fast cars, which went perfectly with his work life which was pedal to the metal, 100mph at all times.  Coming from an ER background, and a self proclaimed adrenaline junkie, this suited me just fine.

Over time we developed sort of a dance we did.  On surgery days, I handled the office, hospital rounds, and the ER, and he would catch up with me between cases to handle pressing things.  Those calls always went the same way.  I gave him the rundown of the day, and ultimately would present cases waiting in the ER.  Early on I tried so hard to be prepared, ready to answer any question, preferring not to get stumped by the master.  I had my facts straight, like "62 year old male anticoagulated on plavix with a right sided subdural hematoma with 4mm of shift...."

Oh yes.  I had this.  That is until he would stop me,"Amy...."

"Yes?"

He would ask,"Did you do that awful thing?"

"Um..."

He would then ever so gently say,"Go look at the patient."

I learned early on that he had been trained in an era there was no CT scan, no MRI, no fancy lasers or 3D imaging.  There was him and a patient.  Period.  He would teach me that your patient will always tell you what is wrong with them if you ask enough questions and do the right neurological exam.  The only reason to get imaging is to confirm what you already know. As he would say,"we don't treat films, we treat people."

I would come to learn that very often the patient did not look anything like the scan.  They were talking when they shouldn't be or unconscious when the studies did not necessarily support that and the studies we had were not capturing the problem.  I would also come to learn that his practice style was unique in an age where limitless imaging was available at our finger tips.  I would see other physicians ordering bunches of tests.  I asked him one time why they would do that.  He said this,"It's like this Amy.  If you fire a rifle into a tree full of birds, eventually you are going to hit something."  In other words, searching for a diagnosis without really listening to your patient.

I have been thinking a lot about this lately.  How many times do we look at our own health and get so desperate for an answer that we get wrapped up in the diet plan, the number on the scale, how fast our mile time is, counting macros and a million other measurements? I am wondering what would happen if we put down the proverbial rifle, walked away from the tree full of birds and did that awful thing of really spending time asking ourselves the hard questions to see where the root of our health failures lives.  Is it late night snacking?  Is it relying on past failures to hold us back from trying one more time?  Is it not trusting ourselves to be successful?  or a support system that really isn't all that supportive?  Only by working through these things are we able to systematically take control and figure out which of those birds in the tree it truly will take to make the changes lasting.

I have come to learn that Dr. B was right on a lot of things.  Nineteen years later I can honestly say he made me the provider I am today, and taught me a lot about life.  I was proud to call him mentor and friend.  Dr. B passed away today, leaving a hole in the hearts of thousands of patients and colleagues, not to mention his family.  Thank you for all that you taught me, RIP old friend, and I hope I continue to do you proud.  Don't forget to always drive fast and stay in your lane as the best is truly yet to come.