Johnny Dooit, come to me/I need you bad as bad can be*

Ah, the forgotten joys of bundle service.

So, yeah: my washer is broken. And the new one won't be delivered until sometime the first week of August, because that's how all the appliance stores in the area roll, except for the one that has washers *starting* at a thousand smackers. I love that store, primarily because there is an ageless woman who sits at a desk, remembers my name, asks about my sister, and remembers when my parents bought their washer from her (!!!) just before I was born (!!!!!!), but I can't afford their stuff.

So I took everything to Mike and Audelia's Super-Clean Qwiki-Wash last night and dropped it off for bundle service. Forty-nine cents a pound is nothing to sneeze at, especially when everything comes back free of stains (even the ones Max left the last time I wiped mud off of him) and neatly folded or hung.

I had forgotten how nice it was to have bundle service. Seriously? The worst parts of the laundry--the drying and folding--are done. Nothing's shrunk, nothing's stained, and the only T-shirt they hung was the LOLObama one I have, which has forty-something cat heads on it, with the last one a black cat.

It took me a moment to think--*hard*--before I realized that, cost-wise, not cancelling the washer delivery and selling the dryer was a bad idea. It was that nice to come home to a basket full of clean laundry, all folded the way I like it. I hate folding.

And meanwhile, in the back yard....

My neighbor's tree fell over.

That doesn't really express what happened. In the last two weeks, we got as much rain as we normally get in a year. The neighbor's tree is--or I should say, *was*--a seventy-foot-tall pecan tree that had mostly grown sideways in the way that pecans have.

It fell over by degrees, onto the garage that belongs to the house behind me. It just pulled out of the saturated ground and fell over slowly, not doing much damage.

Today, driven by a combination of further-saturated ground and high winds, it just sort of rolled off the garage and landed in my back yard. So now I have seventy feet of tree across an eighty-foot-wide lot (the shed is undamaged), and I have to wait until the already-overburdened tree company can find space in its schedule for a non-emergency tree removal.

It's not inconvenient--Max can and does walk under the bulk of the trunk easily--and it's not really damaging the fence, since the fence was installed by Army guys a zillion years ago and won't come down short of a direct meteor strike, but it is weird to look at.

And meanwhile, back at Sunnydale,

I got a third broken monitor fixed, got the second broken door fixed, reassigned two computers to a different printer, and took care of a patient in between. The guys from Engineering and Computer Services are my pals; they're my own personal Johnny Dooits. (And I don't even have a Love Magnet, and please no comments from the peanut gallery on that.) They show up, they fix the problem, and with a smile and a wink, they disappear.

The patient, meanwhile, was one of those ones that makes you glad to be in nursing. She had a clot in her left MCA, which is an artery that perfuses pretty much everything that's important in your head, while still letting you live.

Her friends got her to the hospital within fifteen minutes of her falling over, and could actually provide a good history for her once she got to our ED. We couldn't give her TPA, because her clot factors were all out of whack (she has a fake heart valve), but we were able to go in and yank that big ol' clot out of her head.

This morning she could barely stand. This evening she was walking with a normal gait. This morning she could say "yes" and "no" if you gave her time; this evening she was speaking in two- and three-word phrases. We got the clot out last night.

This is hugely exciting. She might have some residual difficulty with word finding, or maybe a bit of a limp, but the option prior to the MERCI procedure was a life lived trapped in her own head, without the use of the right side of her body. If she hadn't shown up at our hospital, where we're part of an ongoing study of MERCI retrievers (I always think of a shaggy dog with a French accent), she would've languished in long-term care for the rest of her life.

As it is, she's getting her speech back. She never lost her sense of humor. She's aware enough of the left side of her face to try to make it match the right when she smiles. And, most important of all, she's bilingual and didn't lose either language, which means her language centers fared okay.

I burst into tears when I asked her, "What do you want to drink with dinner? Coke or Dr. Pepper?" and she replied, "Iced tea."




*A big Head Nurse prize to the first person outside my immediate family who can identify the source of those lines and give me context. Google will not save you now, young Padawan.