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No Brain Space Because Kidney Poitier Is Stealing It All · You're Not Too Much

0:00
So last week, Kyle had his eye thing
0:04
that was like over two weeks. My kid got a bug bite on her face
0:07
that got infected. And it was like half of her face and she looked like
0:11
half a chipmunk. My mom came home from her trip and basically
0:15
almost immediately went to the emergency room. Cause she was sick as a dog.
0:18
And then I left the emergency room after they transferred her to another
0:22
hospital and was back less than 12 hours later
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with Nessie. That was another experience altogether.
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And then my mom's been in the hospital the whole time. Ness was out of
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work for five days for
0:37
just basically being a woman. Bullshit like that. She came back to
0:41
work yesterday. Last night her grandmother fell. She lives with her
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grandmother, broke her leg, which is the other leg from the one
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she broke a year or two ago. Oh, and my kids are in camp this
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week. My kids who do not leave my house, they leave my house. But like,
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only with us, who have never been away from us, literally ever
0:57
unsupervised. Unless it's by like Kyle's mom or
1:01
Vanessa. That's it. They're in camp this week. So not only am I like running
1:05
back and forth to the hospital, which is 30 minutes away, I also
1:09
have to have my kids to camp by 8am, which is not a problem.
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And then somebody has to pick them up at 3:30 every day. So this is
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three. Three things I have to do every
1:19
day. Three things that I have to like, keep in my brain that
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I have to find time to do every day. And if I have one thing,
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I'm useless the whole day. So poor Vanessa last
1:30
night texted me and was like, my grandmother fell. And I did the appropriate thing.
1:33
I did the right thing. And I was like, oh, no, that's not good. What
1:36
does she need? And she told me. And then after that I was like,
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but she's at the hospital. And she's like, yeah, the ambulance is coming to get
1:43
her. And I was like, cool. Your family's there? Yeah, everybody's here. You guys have
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everything you need? Yeah. Cool. Turn off. Brain is full.
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No space. We have no space. And then this morning, Kyle was like, have you
1:53
heard from Vanessa? And I was like, maybe. She probably texted me. He was
1:57
like, did you want to check? And I was like, maybe. And then he took
2:00
over from there because he was like, you're not going to process any of this
2:03
information, are you? And I was like, nope, nope, Nothing. Nope.
2:07
So both fortunately and unfortunately, I say fortunately, not that I want my
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mother to be in the hospital, but fortunately, in that this is where she needs
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to. To be right now. She's sick. I'm glad that we were able to get
2:17
her into the right place to get well.
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Obviously, nobody wants to be in the hospital, but it's definitely where she needs to
2:24
be right now. So, unfortunately, she is sick.
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Fortunately, she has access to good medical care and is in a hospital
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where they are taking great care of her. Whenever she gets sick, she gets
2:35
admitted to the transplant unit at
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the hospital where she had her transplant
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done. Not that she is currently having any trouble with
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that organ. It's actually Knockwood doing really
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well. But once you've had a transplant, they treat everything
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as secondary to the transplant. So she got
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admitted to transplant unit, and she's been there,
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I don't know, a couple days now, maybe four. Four days. You're supposed
3:05
to lose track of time and space when you're in the hospital.
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I, however, am not in the hospital and have no sense
3:13
of time and space. She's been there sometime between, like, three days and a
3:16
year, let's put it that way. It's somewhere in there. I'm not entirely sure where.
3:20
I went up to see her the other day, and she has this nasty cough.
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And so, like, I feel bad making her talk.
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And so I, like, find things to do while I'm there. I
3:32
just, like, scroll my phone or, I don't know, tidy up things around her
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room. Because it really is just very difficult for her to talk.
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She got a little frustrated with me the other day. Cause she's like, you come
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up here and you don't even talk to me. And I'm like, talk. And she
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started coughing, and I was like,
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you see what. You see that? Do you see that? Sometimes I know what I'm
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doing also. I don't want to talk to anybody anyway.
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Especially when you're on a transplant unit, they have nurses that come in all the
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time. They have all sorts of people who come in and check a bunch of
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things. They check your weight constantly because they're worried about fluid retention,
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whatever. And so the nurse comes in and
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she needed more labs done. And my mom
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has just horrifically bad veins, horrible
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veins. And she only has one arm that you can pull labs out of, because
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the other arm has, I think, has her dialysis port
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in it. And she doesn't use it anymore. But you can't pull
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labs from it anymore. Or you can't pull labs from that arm because there's no
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access. It's just like a whole thing. Every time she has to get blood drawn
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It's a whole ass thing. So this nurse comes in, though,
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and she's doing all of the things that she has to do, which is so
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many things. And she says to my mom,
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somebody told me that you were a phlebotomist. And my mom's like,
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well, yeah. And to be clear, she was a phlebotomist
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50 years ago. Approximately. Pretty close to 50 years
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ago. She has not worked as a phlebotomist, at least during my
5:03
entire life and probably for 10 years before
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that. 50 years. That's terrifying. But 50 fucking
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years. She looks at her and says, somebody told me that you were a
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phlebotomist. And my mom says, yeah. And she goes,
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I'm really bad with tricky veins. Can you show
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me? She's like, can you talk me through? Because I also know you pretty bad
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veins. And she's. It's just. I'm just not very good at it. Can
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you show me? And my mom was like, yeah, I can show you. She's like,
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do you want me to draw it on myself? And she goes, no, I want
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to do it, but just, like, talk me through it. So my mom
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goes, okay, I can do that. And so she walks over to my mom,
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doesn't give her any of the materials, but she's like, I'm just going to pretend
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like I don't know what I'm doing, and I want you to tell me exactly
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where to start and, like, how to find the vein, how to identify it before
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sticking, and then what I do after. My mom walked her through the whole thing
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took probably 15 minutes of just, like, talking. My mom was, like,
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super engaged the whole time. My mom is sharp, but very
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clearly feels sick, and so she's foggier than she normally is. I just want to
6:05
be clear about something. This woman probably takes labs 20
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times a day. She does not need help from my mother.
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She did not need help from my mother at all. She
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knows how to take labs. She knows how to draw them. She is
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fine with tricky veins. When you have trouble finding the vein,
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you call the rn, because the RN knows how to do it. The
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RN is good at it. I think my mom was, like, just sick
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enough that she didn't realize what was happening, which
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is that this woman was just trying to get her
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engaged and make sure that her brain was still working and that she was able
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to show her how to do something. And I just sat there the
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whole time, just, like, marveling. Who thinks of that? Who
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thinks of. I'm gonna have this woman teach Me
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how to do something that is so far ingrained in her
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brain wrinkles just to get her brain working, just so that she
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has some sort of stimulation so she's not staring at the TV
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for 23 hours a day between naps so that
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she's engaged and feels just a tiny bit better
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about this whole shit ass situation. After
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she was done, she, like, made eye contact with me. And she didn't really
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wink, but she, like, might as well have winked. And I was like, I see
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you. I see you. All that to say we do not
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deserve nurses. We do not deserve nurses. Who
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thinks of that? Who is like, I'm gonna
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have this woman teach me how to do something I've done
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27 times today because it will make her day the
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tiniest bit better because it will make her feel competent and
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capable. And like, there is something on the other side of
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this very long hospitalization. Who thinks of that? Who
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thinks of that? We do not deserve nurses. We need
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7,000 people who are more like nurses
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and more. Probably more like 7 million people. Not 7,000, maybe even
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7 billion. A lot of people. A lot of people who are that cool. We
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need more people who are that cool. I can't do dates. I can't do numbers.
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I can't do time. Can't do any of it right now. But I know we
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need more do that. But, yeah, we do not deserve
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nurses. Do you ever, like, forget what it's like to be around normal people
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and then say something that either makes sense to you or that you
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think is objectively funny? And forget that
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this person does not probably understand your sense of
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humor at baseline, and then it comes out of your mouth and you're like,
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oops, probably shouldn't have let that one out into the world
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without qualification. That's a blast.
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And like, you guys know I don't like the term normal
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because I don't think normal exists, but there is kind of like a
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baseline for things that are socially acceptable to say, and this is
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probably not any of them. I had a moment yesterday where
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my mom's nephrologist called me,
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and it's not her normal nephrologist. It's her hospitalist nephrologist, because she's in the
9:07
hospital right now. So he called me to talk about her kidney things, because anytime
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she's hospitalized, the first thing we have to worry about is the kidney, because she
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went and got this extra kidney a couple years ago, and it's like a big
9:17
thing that we have to worry about anyway. So it's like a whole ass thing.
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And so he called me to basically give me the update. Cuz it's just, it's
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impossible to be at the hospital enough to catch all of the doctors. She, she
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has so many doctors right now. She has a
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nephrologist, she has a pulmonologist, she has an infectious disease doctor,
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she has an endocrinologist, she has a cardiologist.
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She's like just a hospitalist, which is internal medicine. There's just so many freaking doctors
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and it's impossible to catch all of them. I said to the nurse, like when
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doctors come through, they need to call me because she's not a
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reliable historian and I want to
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make sure they're doing shit correctly. And I also need to threaten them
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personally. And by threaten them I mean if you don't figure
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out what's going on, I'm not bringing her home, which is a personal threat.
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They take it as a threat, let's put it that way. I don't actually threaten
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them. I would never actually threaten a doctor, but however, I would threaten them
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with having to take my mother home with them. And they would be like, oh
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God, no. So he calls me and he's like, hey, hey,
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just wanna let you know, her kidney studies are fine.
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Creatinine looks good. Everything seems to be working right. We're working a
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little bit on her anti rejection meds. Cause I think from being sick they
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got a little wonky. But he's like, everything looks fine. And me
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being me replied to him, oh, so kidney Poitier
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is fine. The pause, it was the pregnantest
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of pauses as he processed what I just
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said, said to him. And he goes, did you just call her
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transplanted kidney? And I said, yep, yeah, I did.
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I did that. Yeah. I'm just gonna, I'll be over, I'll be over here
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if you need. I'm just gonna. That came out of my mouth. Yeah. And to
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be fair, when she got called, then they said they had a
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kidney for her and she was rushing into the hospital, it was like mid Covid.
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So I didn't go with her and I was just like, okay, tell kidney
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Poitier that he better get his shit together. And since then, that has been the
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kidney's name. It is what we call it. She got an
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extra kidney and we named it because of course, you name it. I
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forgot that this is like a professional person who
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probably does his best to keep a straight face most of the
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time when he's working and talking about very serious
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things and I just flew out of my mouth,
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as if he knew the context. I guess he technically
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does know the context because he
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knows that she got herself a new kidney. So after he
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processed what I said and my response to it, he did start laughing, and
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I felt better. I was just like, man, the pipe between my brain
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and my mouth seems to be closed. Maybe it's
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not closed. Maybe it's open. There's a filter that's supposed to be there that has
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gotten knocked off or something because it just flew right out.
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No context. Didn't tell him that's what we call it.
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Just addressed her extra kidney
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as Kidney Poitier to a complete stranger who took
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it like a champ. So anyway, have you ever done that?
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Have you ever just, like, said something in front of somebody who had
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no context, forgetting that it was gonna sound
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unhinged, and then realized how unhinged it
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sounded? And if so, welcome to the club, and
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we've been waiting for you. So we have a small talk question
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from Opal in Georgia. Opal asks. My oldest
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friend and I have been close since we were nine years old.
12:51
26 years. And lately, when I hang up after our calls, I
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feel tired instead of full. Like I gave something, but
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nothing came back. She's not a bad person. There's no
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big falling out, no betrayal. We've just become very
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different people. And I think I've been maintaining the friendship out of
13:09
loyalty to who we used to be rather than who we
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actually are. Now I feel an enormous amount of guilt even
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admitting this, like acknowledging it means I'm ungrateful for the history
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or disloyal to a girl who was my whole world at 9 years
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old. How do you let something good fade gracefully? Or
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do you. Is there a way to say something honest without blowing it all up?
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So people evolve beyond each other. And it also doesn't
13:35
mean that not being in the same place now means you're never gonna be in
13:38
the same place again. So I think that's really important to keep in mind,
13:42
is that you're talking past each other now. You're in two different
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places, and you need different things out of a friendship, and that's okay. That's
13:49
the evolution. That's growth. That's all of it. And this person's been in your life
13:53
forever, and that doesn't mean they're not going to be in your life tomorrow, even
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if today is not the right time, or you need them in a different capacity
14:00
that you needed them before. I don't think it needs to be A
14:03
big thing. I think you can just make different choices.
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I think if you're going to cut off contact, which it doesn't sound like you're
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going to, that should be a conversation, because ghosting people is really
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hard. I had that happen to me in a friendship, and it really wrecked me
14:18
for a long time. This was somebody I was, like, inseparably close with. And just
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one day, I think realistically we had grown apart,
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and one day we just were miles apart, and I realized we hadn't
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talked in a long time. And I thought it was just accidental. And then
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it turned out to not at all be accidental. And so don't do that to
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somebody, especially somebody who is
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invested in you and your success and your life and has been a huge part
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of your life. But it's okay to just take some time and space
14:47
and pause and reassess and give yourself an opportunity to
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miss somebody. That's a hard conversation to have because they may not
14:54
understand. Telling somebody that you need space, an
14:58
indefinite or an imprecise amount of space,
15:02
is a weird conversation to have, but you can take it for yourself. If
15:05
they ask, just say, like, things are really busy right now, and I just. I
15:09
don't have a lot to give. And so the level
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that I'm engaging at is where I am right now. And it doesn't mean I
15:15
don't love you. It just means this is where my life is right now. If
15:18
you have the type of relationship where you can have that kind of conversation
15:22
with them and just say, like, it feels like we're in different places and I
15:25
need a little bit of time and space, that's fine, too.
15:29
But I don't think it has to be a production. I also think it's probably
15:32
shorter lived than you realize. And then there's also the part, like, it sounds like
15:36
your friend might be going through something that is making them focused
15:40
on one thing that maybe is not something that you feel attached to
15:44
or feel like you want to be engaged with. And that might be a conversation,
15:47
too. Hey, we're talking about this one thing all the time. I'm
15:50
concerned that it's affecting you in a way that is not the way
15:54
it typically affects you. Is there something going on? Do we. Do you need help?
15:57
Do you need something? But it's also okay to just, like,
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pause and answer less and
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protect your peace. You don't owe anybody an explanation for why you're
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taking space. You can give it to them. They will often
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misunderstand and take it very personally when it Sounds like it's not personal at all.
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It's just what it is. And so protect your
16:20
peace, take your space, give it a short timeline for
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two weeks. I'm really not going to engage too much. Maybe it can coincide with
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something that you have going on that would realistically keep you busy for two weeks.
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That's totally fine. And maybe you find out after those
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two weeks, there's not anything you miss and it was a good
16:39
break and you continue it. I don't know. But you don't owe
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anybody an explanation for why you're choosing to protect your piece, why
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you are choosing to prioritize yourself. And as long as you have done everything
16:50
to make sure that this person is okay, that they have what they need, that
16:53
you're not throwing them to the wolves in a time that they
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clearly have a need and there is a way to meet, it doesn't
17:00
mean that you have to throw yourself to the wolves to fix whatever their problem
17:03
is. But don't leave somebody suffering without
17:07
pointing out or without doing whatever you can reasonably
17:11
to try to help. But beyond that,
17:14
your peace is your own. And if something doesn't feel right, it's not right. And
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you can come back to it in a month or a year
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or 10 years and get right back where you
17:25
started or where you left off. Because that's how a lot of
17:29
friendships work. And that's just okay. That's just the reality of it. You're
17:33
allowed to evolve past people, but you also just need to need a break.
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Oh, I think one week we should have a small talk where the question is,
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like, really super long, and my answer is just no,
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that's it. I think it'd be really funny. I think that'd
17:47
be really funny. You could just be like, should I trust
17:51
RFK Jr. With my medical records? No. Next question.
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You give me so much credit for having any fucking idea what I've
17:58
said previously. Like, I listen to my episodes
18:02
not because I like listening to myself, but because otherwise
18:06
I have no idea what's on them. And people will
18:10
text me and be like, oh, my God, this resource was so
18:13
helpful. And I'm like, did we talk? Was there? I
18:17
don't. What? Your podcast. I have a
18:20
podcast. Oh, is it Wednesday? Oh, that's new and
18:24
different.