Nepal...in retrospect

"And it was grace to live among the fruits of summer, to love by design, and walk the startling Earth for what seemed an endless resurrection of days."
-Diane Ackerman

Nepal. The Himalayas. Annapurna. And Machapuchare...the most beautiful; the most sacred; home to the gods. That final point seems obvious in its presence. What majesty!
The first time I saw them with my own eyes, I cried.
I went without expectations. I left with clarity and peace.
I was blessed by a lama in Kathmandu.
I have never traveled so far on foot. The simple act of walking, miles and miles to Annapurna Base Camp, was an exercise in empowerment. Today I feel stronger for it.
Along the way, I was lucky to reconnect with a dear friend of 18 years but one who has been a seeming world away, our divergent paths crossing at unexpected intervals over the years. She called me randomly one night this fall and in a moment of drunken clarity I suggested she join me on my trek. And she did. She was my witness. We laughed and cried, remembered and hoped. We drank cup after cup of sweet masala chai.
I learned that I prefer to put sugar in my coffee...to soften the bitter with the sweet.
I remembered how to laugh out loud, and to relax into a smile.
I learned about Buddhism...from my sage Nepali guide as well as from books that found their way into my hands along the way...and conversations over dal baht at the dinner table.
Finally, I met an angel. Or, in the event that he was actually human, perhaps a soulmate? Perhaps. Chance and luck brought us together multiple times along the trail and in the cities. We shared so much. Those few short days and long conversations will occupy a special corner in my heart forever.
I believe that it's possible to fall in love in a day. Be that with mountains or men.
But eventually, you have to walk away.




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When I was a little girl I wanted to fly around in helicopters when I grew up…

…okay, well not exactly. 

Actually not at all.  It was more like “When I was a little nurse I wanted to fly around in helicopters when I grew up.”

That one is true. 

“Context?” you ask?  

I was sitting in a lecture in nursing school, a class about professionalism or some shit, and they passed out these fliers for different types of nurses.  One of them was “Flight Nurse.”  Hmmmm…fly around in helicopters and scrape people off the pavement after motor vehicle accidents on remote mountain passes?  Sounds fun!  Especially being the “extreme” little lady that I was at the time, all retired “pro snowboarder” and all (are you wondering how many time I am going to use quotation marks in this post yet?  I sure am….)

That is literally how it started. 

My first nursing job after I graduated simply followed in the footsteps of my senior practicum.  Based on a strictly pragmatic decision (namely that I spent my second to last quarter of nursing school abroad and didn’t want to move home, take a senior practicum and have to move again to Tacoma to work at a hospital system that had given my a scholarship for school with the understanding that they owned me for the first 18 months of my nursing career) I wound up in the only available nursing school senior practicum in Tacoma: Neonatal intensive care….NICU…and that, like I said, turned into my first job.

I don’t particularly like babies.  I had never actually even changed a diaper when I started (seriously!).  But I soon realized that babies, especially the premature ones, periodically have to go for rides in helicopters to get to hospitals that can deal with their unfortunate illness or tiny-ness.  SO, maybe this would be a good road to start out down on my way to flight nursing. 

It was. 

And then babies turned into sick kids and sick kids turned into sick kids with heart defects, which is how I ended up traveling around the world and also at Stanford. 

My 6^th nursing birthday is this June (I know, I’m growing up so fast!).  And recently, I felt like I might be ready to take a stab at the whole “ultimate professional goal” thing.  Airlift Northwest, a very reputable flight company affiliated with the University of Washington Medical System was recently hiring peds nurses.  Like me! 

So I applied.

And I interviewed.

And….

(Drum roll please)

I did not get the job. 

And I honestly couldn’t be more relieved about it. 

Moving back to Seattle for my dream job couldn’t be more complicated than it would be right now between finances, relationships, and home leases.  Not to mention the fact that I would like to not to burn bridges at Stanford and have only been there just shy of a year.  And don’t forget that I actually do like it here in California, living in the mountains off the central coast, thirty minutes from surfing, two hours from the city and five hours from climbing in Yosemite and Lake Tahoe. 

In short, I have never been so happy to fail at something that I have always wanted.  But then again I guess I don’t really consider this a failure.  It seems like the kind of thing that I can only become more and more qualified for and that the circumstances of the rest of my life can only become more accommodating of than they are a this moment.   

SO, yay! 

J

“You can’t bring the machine gun in there.”

 Those where the words that started my latest adventure in international travel…because going to Iraq again just wasn’t enough…so we had to make going home more interesting. 

We left our guesthouse, Pasha, Christine, and I at 0500 this morning in two vehicles.  One car with us and our driver and the second one a large, police/military truck with a machine gun on top that contained our security detail and all of our luggage.  We got stopped at the first checkpoint for the airport and there was clearly a problem.  There was a lot of back and forth, a lot of yelling, and then an American contractor type guy came out to straighten everything out for us and I distinctly heard him say “You can’t bring the machine gun in there.” 

The police truck that carried our security detail had been without any large, automatic weapons for our entire trip, but for some reason guys decided to outfit it with a large machine gun the day before we left.  And apparently they just didn’t anticipate that it would be an issue at the airport. 

So we go on ahead and are assured that our luggage will follow.  We have to go through multiple checkpoints before arriving at the terminal and eventually make it to the check-in counter.  But, alas, can’t check our bags yet so we can’t really check in for our flights yet.  We wait.  And wait.  And wait.  Oh, and by the way, our driver here in Iraq…a lovely man really…speaks as much English as I speak Arabic.  This has been a challenge to say the least.  Now, we don’t know what the story is with our bags or even what is going on. 

Eventually, bags arrive.  Not sure if they just drove home and dropped off the problematic machine gun and came back or if they went and found a cab to carry our bags into the airport compound.  But at this point we have less than an hour to get checked in and get on our plane.  And we are at the end of a sea of people. 

We make it on the plane.  I am told that my bags are checked all the way through to San Francisco via New York…which is hard to believe since what they have handed me is a hand written ticket that says IST, JFK, SFO and little else. 

Plane takes off late.  Plane lands late.  Delay in deboarding.  And then when I go to the information counter to get my new boarding pass, I’m S.O.L. because Najaf couldn’t check me in for my flight and the check in was closed by that point. 

Screwed. 

But not to worry, Christine is a veteran airline traveler, even more so than myself and has way more experience haggling with airlines.  So, with her help and some extra frustration, I was able to book a new flight to San Fran via Paris for the following morning, which means, I get another day in Istanbul for site seeing and I get to do it with my friend Christine and her friend in Istanbul!  However, it has been a very long day and I am beyond tired.  Two hours of sleep before we left for the Najaf airport and maybe two hours on the plane, followed by two hours in the hotel after our day of seeing the beautiful historic sites in one of the most beautiful cities I have ever seen.  I am, like I said, beyond tired. 

But now, I’m checked in and on my way to Paris, then one more plane to catch and

I think I got called a prostitute today…

…we checked on the children in the ICU this morning and got things planned out for the day for the local team.  We are trying to be pretty hands-off at this point and let the locals do the bulk of the work because we will be leaving in a few days and they need to be able to take care of the children without us. 

So, after we got everyone tucked in and had a little lunch, we went on a little outing. 

We went to this major shrine here in Najaf…the kind of place that pilgrims come from all over the world to see.   I can’t remember what it was called. 

It was beautiful.  Like the most beautiful piece of architecture that I have ever seen.  We had to remove our shoes to go inside…and Christine and I also had to don abaya, the local customary covering for woman in public.  It covers one’s head and entire body, apart from the face, and is pervasive here in Najaf as well as throughout Iraq.  Lucky for us they had a few spares at the entrance of the shrine so we could be dressed appropriately to enter. 

And like I said, the shrine was amazing.  Solid gold walls, colorful tile mosaics, beautiful carpets, and mirrored ceilings.  Spectacular. 

When it came time to return our rental abaya, Christine and I each removed the black cloth from our bodies in the middle of the street and handed them back to the local officials.  As we were doing so, an old woman passed by us and started yelling at us and waving her hands.  Our guides and body guards all started laughing hysterically!  We asked our interpreter what she had said and he sheepishly replied that she thought we were “very pretty ladies.” 

Yeah.  Right. 

Our interpreter ran up ahead of us and told her who we were and what we were doing here in Iraq.  She seemed mildly placated…

…but I am left to wonder, what it was she actually said about us. 

Not found….not present…

When I arrived last week I heard these words a few times from my team and it sounded like an inside joke….someone would say “Not present,” in some random context and everyone would laugh.  I didn’t get it, but whatever.

I was at the hospital yesterday and I was going through the medications for a patient with one of the local nurses and what was ordered was oral Lasix and we didn’t have any.  The local nurse said to me “Not present…not found,” and suddenly I understood.  And I laughed. 

And then today, when the internet wasn’t working again (or still...?) the page that popped up said “Server not found” and I had to laugh again. 

It turns out that the random power outages are not quite so random….

…they are quite predictable actually. 

This is how it worked when we first got here: the power went out around 10:00AM in most of the house and stayed off all day.  In the whole house.  Then it came on partially in the evening, not sure what time.  I had light in my bathroom but not the bedroom.  There were no lights in the bathroom down the hallway or downstairs.  Then at around 9:00 or 10:00PM all the lights would go out for a minute and then the generator kicked on and we had light in the entire house again, all night long.  Then the generator went off again around 10:00 AM and the whole thing started again. 

At least, that is how it worked when the rest of the team was here.  Now, with only the tree of us, they turn the generator off all the time.  I just had to ask for the second morning in a row if they would turn it on so we could see in our bathroom, charge our electronics and use the internet.  The other issue is that they turn the generator off on us at night.  The three of us are all total night owls and it seems like when our security detail gets tired of listening to us talk at night, the generator goes off.  We grumble about it for about an hour and then, resigned to our fates, go off to bed. 

And then there were three….

….or maybe, the title should be, “Left behind in Iraq, Part II.”

When I first went to Nasiriyah last year, my friend Pasha and I stayed behind for a few extra days to get the remaining children out of the ICU before continuing on to Sulaymania (P.S., I really don’t have any idea how to correctly spell the name of either of these locations, so sorry for the inconsistency). 

This trip however, I arrived under the pretense that there would be children left in the ICU after the rest of the team left and that they would need to be attended to.  Therefore, I arrived halfway through the trip with the intention of staying for an extra week.  Now it is Saturday, most of the team flew out this morning but myself, Pasha and Christine from Washington D.C. are here until Thursday morning. 

We have a full ICU.  Luckily, Najaf’s cardiac ICU can only accommodate four patients…and we are operating at full capacity.  One child is very sick…like I don’t want to talk about it sick…like Pasha and I had a f%@ked up night last night sick.  But the other three have the potential to recover fully and do quite well. 

So that is reassuring. 

After our crummy night, Pasha and I went back to our guesthouse for breakfast.  It was a beautiful sunny day and we opted to sit out in the “garden” for our dining pleasure.  We ate hard-boiled eggs with bread and cheese (a menu that is identical to breakfast every morning), drank bootlegged vodka and smoked cigars….actually, Pasha smoked a cigar and I smoked a “neonatal cigar,” otherwise known as a Montecristo. 

We laughed a lot. 

And tried to forget how stressful our night at work together had been.