A mismatched day

Often when I am at work (or sometimes even not at work) my whole focus of the day is to get home, get my cup of something hot, get in bed, get comfey, and settle down with my book. A few months ago, I came home from work at midnight, snuggled up with my book, Margaret, and a cup of hot chocolate. Ecstasy. But short lived ecstasy. The phone rang – a dreaded sound at one in the morning, especially after work, as it is usually the nurse following me calling to ask why I did or did not do something. Once a nurse called me in the wee hours to inform me that I had forgotten to chart the insulin I had given a patient. I recall that this particular evening, another patient had a reaction to a medication about 30 minutes before I was due to leave, and my focus was on saving his life rather than charting the insulin. I reported the call to my manager the next day, and she was incensed, I am happy to report. “What did she expect you to do - come in and chart it?” she sensibly asked. This particular evening, my friend Nurse Mademba was calling to ask me if I had taken the narcotic key home. I was confident that I had not, I told him. I hadn’t even used it. “Check your pockets,” he said. “You have to have it.” Well, I did check and I did have it. Grrrrrr. Someone had handed it to me at the beginning of the evening, and no one had used it the whole eight hours. The down side of taking the narcotic key home is that you have to bring the narcotic key back. Right then. My heart sank. I just can’t get dressed, I thought. I told Mademba I would bring it to the ER and he could come get it. He agreed. I left the house in my PJ’s and a sweater, and when I got to the ER, I decided to just take it up to my unit. The security guard looked at me like I was a mad woman. I started to explain why I had my pajamas on (they must see a lot of pajamas there) and he said, “It’s not that. You have on two different colors of shoes.”
This morning in church, two altos were tittering and looking at my feet. I assumed that they were marveling at how I was still wearing sandals in December. Later, as we were leaving church, Rachael said, “You know you have two different sandals on, don’t you?”
In the picture - above, disparate workshoes, below, disparate sandals - one brown and one gray, and to the right, Margaret contemplating one of the many dangers of getting dressed in the dark.