Thoughts on Dirt

Hello, dear long-lost blog readers! Sorry about the delay in writing. I had every intention of blogging yesterday morning after work, but alas. I fell asleep on the couch while checking e-mails and paying bills. The first night back from vacation is always the hardest.

I've noticed that one of the things that sometimes bothers me when coming home from work is when someone has been across the carpet with muddy shoes. For example, the other day we had to have the cable guy come and assess our problem with our bad picture and inability to watch TV for large patches of time. I wonder why with most of these sorts of folk that taking shoes off (especially after strolling through mud) is a common courtesy when entering into someone's home. Alas, my carpet will never really ever be clean, even with a Bissel steam/vacuum cleaner. But, don't lose heart, oh fellow carers of carpet! I hear the Spot Bot works pretty well for spot treatments. I might have to invest in one eventually.

On another note, I was fortunate enough to have missed a horrible mishap at work the other night. A larger baby got stuck after the head was delivered. This is a condition known as a shoulder distocia, which in layman's terms means that the baby's body/shoulders get stuck in the mom's pelvic bones on the way out. The baby essentially strangled to death in the delivery. This unfortunate incident happened to one of our very best nurses and one of our very best and most knowledgable physicians.

As I was pondering this, I kept thinking about how scary it is that something like this could cause me to really doubt my abilities as a nurse had I been the one in that situation. I'm sure there will be some sort of lawsuit settlement, and the blame will be tossed around among the staff and doctors, but ultimately, I kept thinking about how there is a small glimmer of comfort in this for us as believers. The nurse and doctor together were not able to get that baby out in time, no matter how hard they tried. It was a situation that was completely and utterly in God's hands. I'm sure the lawyers would say that the doctor should have "foreseen" how big this baby was going to be, and thus the patient should have automatically been scheduled for a c-section instead of attempting a vaginal delivery. That being said, the bottom line is that we forget that God is in control and we are not. While it's a scary and sad thing, he does things in his own time and in his own way for his own glory.

And after pondering all of that, suddenly the leftover footprints on the floor don't look so bad.