A Box At The Shelter (Wordless Wednesday) and Words for Wednesday

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Linking up with Wordless Wednesday, BeThere2Day, and Sandee at Comedy Plus.     

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Words for Wednesday was begun by Delores and has become a moveable feast of word or picture or music prompts to encourage us to write stories, poems, or whatever strikes our fancy.    

This month, the prompts are being provided by WiseWebWoman, and will be posted by Elephant's Child.  

   

This week's prompts are:

• Rusk 
• Spindrift 
• Ballistic
• Troubadour
• Killick

and/or

• Mantra
• Tuckamore 
• Whirlpool
• Calliope
• Catamaran

Charlotte (MotherOwl) has selected fawn brown as the colour of the month.

As always, have fun.

Elephant's Child, the wonderful current hostess of Words for Wednesday, asked me a question yesterday.

I'd mentioned Little Girl's comment she had been chased by an elderly person in a wheelchair, and EC wanted to know the rest of the story.

I've only been given the scantest of details, because of patient confidentiality, but to both use the words and work this into the tale, i have to go back a bit and tell some of Little Girl's prior adventures and some misadventures lately.

When LG was in high school, she got out of classes one day by taking a test.  Yes, it sounds odd, most students would rather be in class, or even hear a CALLIOPE wailing away and trying to play the current pop music, than take a test.

Anyway, it was an Army recruiter giving it, and LG scored so high she was asked to apply to become a medic, and they'd pay for her college.

Long story very short, she went to basic right after graduating, then to "medic school."

Side note, they feed them better than RUSK (a kind of toast, and if you look at pictures, some of it looks Fawn Brown and absolutely unappetizing) and water now, although the MREs she described on her assignments sound absolutely awful.

She then went to work for the military for a while, at the local station where she was in the reserves.  Eventually, she started school for nursing.

There were many times when she was called in for duty as well, especially hurricane duty and pandemic duty.

While on pandemic duty, she noticed the medical school students brought in to help with running the emergency testing sites to assist the military didn't know how to put on and take off their PPE (personal protective equipment) properly.  She pitched a fit and developed a class and made every one of them take it, telling them if they were going to be doctors they needed to know this stuff anyway.

Is it a wonder she made Sergeant?

It was while on hurricane duty the event EC asked about happened.  She was assigned with medics to help care for the elderly evacuated from nursing homes who had ended up in a warehouse with no care thanks to a crooked guy who ran those homes.

Almost every single one of the elderly people she was caring for was a delight.  She loved them and they loved her.

There was one, however, who was grumpy and cantankerous and diabetic and angry he was on a special diet, and he decided to go after her when she wouldn't give him cookies.  

A good while later there came a weekend when she was sick, unhappy, and having an anxiety attack, her first.  She went to a hospital and signed herself in because she didn't know what was happening.

There's a rule doctors aren't supposed to break, and that is, you don't give a major psychiatric diagnosis to a person in crisis.

The doc there decided she was bipolar and put her on meds, not something he should have done at that moment of crisis.

She started having trouble concentrating and wasn't doing as well in school, most unlike her.  After a while, she dropped the meds and got something to take just if she had an anxiety attack, and her grades went back up and she was doing great.

The problem was the damage was done.  Like a KILLICK thrown into the middle of a CATAMARAN to sink it, with that diagnosis on the books, the Army decided they could not keep her and the board of nursing decided she couldn't be a nurse, just 2 months short of earning her degree.

She appealed, got special testing and got 4 psychiatrists to certify the diagnosis was wrong, and she had a negative drug test by hair follicle (and as long as her hair is, it meant she couldn't have used anything for several years).

It didn't matter.  The nursing board wanted her to go through a 2-year drug rehab and therapy program to get back in.  Someone in the Army office where she'd worked forged her signature on a discharge paper to get shed of her.

This is where she could have gone BALLISTIC and let it push her off the deep end.  She could have been a TROUBADOUR and spent years singing the blues.  She could have become like SPINDRIFT from a WHIRLPOOL and simply wandered through the next years, bitter and angry or sad and depressed.

Instead she took up a MANTRA, I will get through this, too.  She would become a TUCKAMORE, a tree sculpted by this ill wind into something beautiful.

She still had her EMT license (she was a fully trained Army medic, after all).  EMTs and paramedics, well, that's the wild west of modern medicine.  Every nursing board in the country now has her name on a list and would put crazy requirements on her before letting her in, as would medical schools or physician assistant programs.

But those willing to do the emergency work?  They do not care what your diagnosis (within reason).  If you're willing to do the work, they're willing to have you.

She got accepted at another college which took as many of her credit hours as they could and she only has until next summer before she will have an Associates Degree in medical laboratory science.  Once she has that, one of the medical lab companies will hire her and help her pay for her full Bachelor's Degree.

Currently she's working with an ambulance service as an EMT.

Little Girl has no intention of letting her setbacks define her.  The Army taught her to be a fighter and all her medical training will not go to waste, she'll find ways to use it.

Even if it means occasionally being chased by an angry older person in a wheelchair who wants cookies.

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Today is:

Anniversary of Benazir Bhutto's Death -- Sindh, Pakistan

Calli (House) Day -- Aztec Calendar (a good day for all things hearth and home and family. a bad day to participate in public life; date approximate, but soon after the solstice)

Constitution Day -- Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea)

Festival of Nehebkau -- Ancient Egyptian Calendar (Beginning of Eternity, celebrating the snake god and his role of binding the sun to the earth at the beginning of time; date approximate)

Kwanzaa, Day 2, Kujichagulia (Self-Determination)

Make Cut Out Snowflakes Day -- internet generated, with Christmas over, you need to do winter decorations

Modern Medicine Day -- birth anniversary of Louis Pasteur

National Fruitcake Day -- unless, of course, you are like me and have spent your last several days with fruitcake relatives, at which point you get a day off from fruitcakes! ;D 

Second Day of the Stanley Races -- Falkland Islands

St. Fabiola's Day (Patron of difficult marriages, divorced people, victims of abuse, victims of adultery, widows)

St. John the Divine's Day (Patron of art dealers, authors, bookbinders, booksellers, burn victims, compositors, editors, engravers, friendships, lithographers, painters, papermakers, printers, publishers, tanners, theologians, typesetters, writers; Asia Minor; Boise, Idaho, Borgo Santo Sepolcro, Italy; Cleveland, OH; Eger, Hungary; Milwaukee, WI; Morra, Netherlands; Saint-Jean – Longueuil, Québec; Sansepoicro, Italy; Sundern, Germany; Taos, NM; Umbria, Italy; Wroclaw, Poland; against burns, poisoning)

St. Stephen's Day -- Eastern Orthodox, a public holiday in Romania

Third Day of Christmas

Visit the Zoo Day -- don't know who put this one in the middle of winter, but there it is

Watch the Children Day -- internet generated, a day to take a page from the book of the young and remember how to play like a child

Birthdays Today:

Heather O'Rourke, 1975

Masi Oka, 1974

Bill Goldberg, 1966

Tovah Feldshuh, 1952

Gerard Depardieu, 1948

Cokie Roberts, 1943

John Amos, 1939

Oscar Levant, 1906

Marlene Dietrich, 1901

Sydney Greenstreet, 1879

Louis Pasteur, 1822

George Cayley, 1773

Johannes Kepler, 1571

Debuting/Premiering Today:

"Knots Landing"(TV), 1979

"Howdy Doody"(TV), 1947 (first successful children's television show)

"Radio Roxyettes"(Now the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes), 1932

Today in History:

The Hagia Sofia of Constantinople is completed, 537

The Spanish Crown issues the Laws of Burgos, governing the conduct of settlers with regards to native Indians in the New World, 1512

The first public railroad using steam locomotive completed in England, 1825

Charles Darwin embarks on his journey aboard the HMS Beagle, 1831

Worst English avalanche kills 8 of 15 buried in Lewes Sussex, 1836

Ether is first used in childbirth in US, in Jefferson, Ga., 1845

The world's first cat show is held at the Crystal Palace, London, 1871

Carrie Nation's first public smashing of a bar, at the Carey Hotel, Wichita, Kansas, 1900

Unsuccessful attempt on prince-regent Hirohito of Japan, 1923

Stalin's faction wins All-Union Congress in USSR, Trotsky is expelled, 1927

Radio City Music Hall opened in New York City, 1932

The Shah of Persia declares Persia is now Iran, 1934

The World Bank was created with the signing of an agreement by 28 nations, 1945

Apollo 8 splashes down in the Pacific Ocean, ending the first orbital manned mission to the Moon, 1968

The People's Republic of China is granted permanent normal trade relations with the United States, 2001

Radiation from an explosion on the magnetar SGR 1806-20 reaches Earth. It is the brightest extrasolar event known to have been witnessed on the planet, 2004

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto is assassinated, 2007

Toyota Motor Corporation agrees to pay $1 billion to settle over a dozen lawsuits related to sudden acceleration, 2012

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visits Pearl Harbor, offering “sincere and everlasting condolences to the souls of those who lost their lives” and adding, “[Japan] must never repeat the horrors of war again," 2016