Weatherwise it's such a cloudy day........

I can count myself among the insured now. Today I received my UP Blue health insurance card in the mail, shiny and new, just waiting to be used. So hit me with your best shot, disease! I got you covered, after the deductible.

We have not had a single ray of sun for at least a week now. Every day is just a monotomous grey which begins at 8 and ends at 4. So at my best, I get a good 4 hours of dissipated, filtered and weak sunlight per day. I think the UP should have establishments known as "light bars", where you can go get some sort of uppity drink and sit, partially clad, before a brilliant fake sun for a half hour or so, just to cheer the day up. We have tanning beds, but according to research, they don't do much of a trick. Personally though, I do enjoy a nice 15 minutes of sweaty flaming heat, encased in a plexiglass casket, and afterward I do think I look a bit more appetizing with a soft brown tan, even if I do smell like burnt skin for a few hours afterward.

Work has been a whilrwind marathon of sorts. I have been trained all over the map. My brain has grown new areas in which to store insurance card information, countless pages of instruction, and even the names of some of the people I work with. I am terrible with names. You could introduce yourself to me as Rocky, Cheesehead, or Vampira, and it wouldn't matter - the name would escape me within 20 seconds. That is one of the banes of working in an environment of hundreds of employees, at least for me. I can put health policy coverage information in my head, and the dates of every major war, birthdays, and the number of steps to my upstairs (I count stairs, always) but I can't remember names. It is a terrible affliction to have, because it never ceases to cause awkward situations.

I also saw my first dead body in Emergency last week. Granted, I have seen dead bodies before, at the occasional funeral. But somehow there is a difference when that dead body is still fresh with the life just draining out of it. This fellow was the victim of a car crash, and I saw him only from the open door as I brought in his tag. The nurse was kind enough to put it on for me. I didn't see much trauma or anything too unusual - in fact, if I hadn't known he was dead, he looked like any other patient, at least from my angle. But the fact that I knew he was dead, and anticipated his death as the trauma room door was opened was enough to make this a very different experience. I will never forget his shoes - New Balance - in brown, with that "N" printed on the side. That was what I saw first. For some reason, I didn't expect to see this body fully dressed - we are taught through television and movies to expect naked bodies covered in a sheet, or a neatly-clad made-up corpse in a casket. When I turned to leave, they were putting a white blanket over him. He was 27 years old, and just an hour before, he was full of life. It's such a change to work in an environment where death is expected, and I can't imagine the thickness of the skin of some of the people who have worked in that ER for 20 years. Regardless, there was a very somber feeling after that at work, a difference that was somewhat respectful. I didn't see the parents come in, but apparently they did, and they sat with the body of their son for a couple hours. I'm glad I didn't see them.

Change perspectives now, to a set of grandparents; the legal guardians of their 9-year old granddaughter. The brought her in at 11pm one night because she had a suspected cold sore on her lip. I tried to see the cold sore; I looked closely to see even the hint of redness, but I didn't find it. Of course, I'm not doctor. When I was a child, if I had a cold, nine times out of ten my mother sent me to school. If I had come to her with a strange tingling in my upper lip, she probably would have blamed it on a scratch and sent me to bed. By no means would she have ever whisked me off to the emergency room, especially at 11pm. My bedtime was 9:30 on the dot, and I can only remember one occasion before I was ten that I was up later than that, and that was the night my sister was born. People have changed.

But back to the weather. Those pictures I took of the new-fallen snow the other day are only in print now - the snow is gone, and in its place is mud against a grey ugly sky. Of course there is plenty of snow already heading toward our path, but it won't be the same as that first snow. Now all we have to look forward to is shovelling it, and sliding our cars on it, and falling on our asses on the way into Walmart, which I almost did the other day. But at least now I have insurance.