Happy Happy Birthday, JZ!!!

Jacqueline is currently managing her weekly Pediatric Heart Surgery Case Conference as all the heart surgeons who save babies get on a call together and go over the upcoming week of miracles.

It is a complicated process lining up all the cases for consideration and review and taking notes that go out to schedulers etc.

She's been doing it for many years now, but today is the last one as she's retired as of July 1st (when her COLA increases hit and raise the base level of her Pension payments one last time).

I saved the post she wrote describing her job because it was so beautifully written:

"Random notes, because I feel like I bitch a lot about work and I don't often (or ever) talk about the non-bitchery stuff. But...

The people I work for? The work they do is fascinating. Every week I have to drag myself out of bed at doom-thirty to set up the early AM weekly preop evaluation conference, and it's miserable but it's also riveting. Hearts like little boxes, like walnuts, like flapping hands and fluttering wings, sometimes with rows of Frankensteinian wires marching up and down one side or tiny bedspring coils looping through the veins or little mesh collars propping this or that valve open. Puffs of dye chugging through big sturdy passageways or spraying out into a thicket with too many tiny threadlike branches.

People whose hearts have been thrown together carelessly like the world's worst Lego set - everything connected wrong, pieces missing, sometimes the whole apparatus present and accounted for but completely backward. And, often, still striving and pumping and working despite the terrible construction: just so determined to keep living, keep being, all these wrong-way pipes and holes in the walls and solid walls where there were supposed to be holes, and yet the person containing them is often improbably up and mobile and out in the world; nothing should work, but it makes itself work as much as it possibly can.

And the plans they make are part engineering, part science, part art -- if this piece is missing, can we take that piece from somewhere else and sub it in? If this is too small, can we re-route the flow somewhere else and still get it back to where it needs to be? What are the stats on the last fifty times we had to do this? What are the probabilities if it hasn't even been done fifty times yet? What are all the options? Are there any options? Who is going to sit down and talk with the family?

There is a lot that's less than ideal about the job, but I can't imagine being an administrator and working anyplace half so interesting, and sad, and surprising."

Being involved in saving people's lives, even at a remove, has got to be a very profound work experience. Happy Birthday, JZ!

Happy Birthday, Jacqueline!!

I am working on-site at a medical practice that treats children (speech and OT), so there are kids running around, singing, dancing, playing, and so forth. And of course, they ask me questions about the computer, which is cute. I'll be here for a couple of days.

Pediatric Heart Surgery

They are miracle workers. My niece wasn't supposed to live because she had one too few chambers. They told her mother she wouldn't survive being born, wouldn't make it to being a toddler, wouldn't make it to puberty. They built her another wall, and have done another half dozen or so surgeries over the years because the fake wall doesn't grow with her. She is in her 30s now and has had a child herself.

Yeah, wow, can't imagine. And, although my broken parts are different,(My heart's fine, if a little too inclined to give a fuck when it's not its turn to give its owner equinamity(sp?) I'm very glad somebody notices the way we keep on keepin' on with parts damaged in shipping.) To borrow a bit from Adrienne Shelly in my favorite ep of Homicide, "Since something happened to me, I'm glad to know people like you are out there."

Happy birthday, Jacqueline!(Hope you get an important gift this year and get your life back.)

Happy birthday, JZ!

Happy birthday, JZ!!!!

Happy Birthday, JZ!