45 Boxes of Books

Grace: Hey, uh, Rocky…

Rocky: You have a question, Grace my best friend Grace?

Grace: yeah. um. Why does everyone else wear clothes and you. Don’t.

Rocky: oh. That’s because they’re mostly from 🎵🎵🎵 and people are weird about clothes there.

Grace: what

Rocky: in 🎵🎵🎵 they think it’s wrong to have your carapace uncovered in public. Which is stupid. It’s a CARAPACE who cares if your carapace is out. We all have one. My country understands this. I can’t help it if the space program was primarily organized by the 🎵🎵🎵 government because they’re the ones with power and resources so everyone who works at the space elevator thinks they need to wear clothes even when they don’t actually have to.

Grace: Rocky are you a nudist

Rocky: don’t know word. I’m 🎶🎵🎶 and also the Savior of Erid so the 🎵🎵🎵 guys can’t tell me I have to wear a shirt anymore. SUCK IT

...

Imagine this: You are Mark 'The Martian' Watney, the first human being to ever be alone on a planet, technically the coloniser of Mars, space pirate. After your incredible/harrowing space adventure, you've returned to Earth, taken a job training future astronauts. You are still one of the most famous people to have ever lived, so dating can be a bit tricky.

But one day you meet an amazing woman, a scientist, and the two of you fall in love. As part of the 'getting to know each other' stage of dating, she tells you about one of her ex-boyfriends. They met in grad school and dated for a few years, but it didn't work out and they had kind of a messy break up, after which he apparently crashed out hard, ending his career in science by writing a paper that gave a giant middle-finger to his entire field. She thinks he's a teacher now, but they're no longer in touch. Other than it being an interesting anecdote, you don't think much of this.

Then, the Petrova crisis. The Sun dimming. Humanity facing extinction. You aren't directly involved in the global response, but you and your girlfriend are both scientists, and this is basically all anyone is talking about, so you are following the development of the situation with keen interest.

When the Hail Mary mission is announced, your first thought is to volunteer (surely you would have to be one of the best-suited people for a long-haul high-stakes space mission like this?) but your second thought is that you really don't want to face dying in space again. You talk it over with your girlfriend. You have an argument that turns into a fight, that ends when you both get tested for the coma-resistance gene and both receive negative results. She finds you sobbing in the middle of the night from a complicated mix of relief and regret and holds you until you calm down. A week later, you propose.

The names of the crew and backup crew are announced. You know at least some of them, by reputation if not personally (astronauts being a pretty small community). You reach out, and offer a mix of congratulations, condolences and advice. You are one of the only people on Earth who truly understand what it is they are facing. You wish them luck.

Two of them die in an explosion. The news is devastating, not just to you, but for everyone on Earth. Despair gives way to hope with another announcement: Dr Ryland Grace has volunteered to join the mission.

‘Holy shit,’ says your fiancé. ‘That’s my ex.’

‘I thought he was a teacher?’ you say.

‘So did I,’ she says.

In your mind, you re-categorise your fiancé’s ex from ‘crashout-failed-scientist-turned-teacher’ to ‘space-hero’, and joke that she must have a type. She laughs, but her eyes are wet. You hold her hand and watch the rest of the broadcast in silence.

You try to reach out again, but are told that Dr Grace is not available. You are quietly relieved, since that conversation would almost certainly have gotten awkward. You invite your old crew and their families over to your place to watch the launch of the Hail Mary. Not all of them can make it, but you share a few drinks with those that do. When the ship successfully leaves Earth’s atmosphere, you give a toast to Yao Li-Jie, Olesya Ilyukhina and Ryland Grace, followed by a minute’s silence.

Life on Earth gets colder and harder than it has been in living memory, but you know how to survive on an inhospitable planet (even when it seems hopeless, you just keep solving the problems in front of you). You make it through starvation, conflict and a thousand other tragedies. Many nations band together and share resources. Scientists pour years into finding new ways to keep the environment as stable as possible, to maximise food production and prevent natural disasters. You get married.

At long last, the solution arrives (along with a whole host of new discoveries that will fuel scientific research for decades, such as the fact that ALIENS ARE REAL). The space program has languished, but not died, and when a mission to Venus is planned, you are called in to train the crew. As part of your work preparing for that mission, you are given access to the video logs that Grace sent back to Earth along with the planet-saving taumoeba.

So you, Mark 'The Martian' Watney, the first human being ever to be left to die in space, gets to witness the second human being ever to be left to die in space mention you by name to an alien, not for any reason to do with your aforementioned incredible/harrowing space adventure, but because this crashout-failed-scientist-turned-teacher-turned-space-hero is still so upset that you got together with his ex (your wife) that he needs to vent about it to the alien (his friend).

Pendant

1880s

Gold with enamel decoration, semiprecious stones, pearls

unknown maker

By the professional standards of nursing, when she gives the medication without checking the label, she fails at doing a universal safety check that can have catastrophic consequences. Let’s ignore the fact that the meds were maliciously switched (we’ll get to that, it’s a real fuckin wrench in everything). The fact is that she should have verified that she had the right medication rather than go by routine. Med error is so so easy in part because passing meds can become so routine. Especially in home health. You lose the fear of fucking up, you don’t check something bc you’ve done it a hundred times before, oops something goes wrong.

Additionally, she fails to assess her patient. Harlan is not showing any signs of morphine overdose. (I also want to be clear as I’m saying all this: if I thought I had given someone 100x their morphine dose and then lost the narcan, my asshole would have fallen out so hard you would have heard a clunk when it hit the floor. I like to think I wouldn’t let the dramatic old man rope me into an elaborate coverup, but like. He was very convincing. Anyway—)

Most importantly, she does not admit her error. Every single person in healthcare will make a mistake. If you are lucky, it doesn’t cause any harm. If you aren’t lucky, you think about what you did for the rest of your life. Sometimes you’re lucky and you still think of what you did for the rest of your life. What’s important is not keeping mistakes secret. It doesn’t help the patient harmed by the mistake to pretend there isn’t a problem or that you don’t know what the problem is. And on a larger scale, it doesn’t let the system know what happened, how the mistake happened, and what we can do to stop it. Marta doesn’t tell anyone what happened, largely in part bc Harlan is fucking wild and so hyped to die dramatically, but still for the point of nursing argument: she conceals her mistake.

And that causes about every problem in the film. Because if she’d been like “Harlan, this is insane, I am calling an ambulance” the med switch up would have been caught because he would have been fine. So much of the situation was out of Marta’s control—literally, malicious interference with the medication and hiding the reversal agent, like what’s she supposed to do about that—but after the error happened, she engaged in a cover up.

And the moment in which Marta is a by the books Good Nurse is when she performs CPR and calls 911 to save someone she believes is blackmailing her and is the only person who knows Harlan’s death is her fault. She is providing care to someone in need regardless of her personal situation. She is owning up to what she did to prevent further harm. In a world in which Harlan was dying from a med error, she provides the family closure regarding his traumatic suicide. Being a Good Nurse means owning up to your mistakes, even if it is too late to save the patient, because we can’t find ways to address problems we don’t know exist.

But like to get back to the murder of it all, her failure to check the medication DID prevent a catastrophic med error. Like yeah she fuckin t gave the right med! She did know it by touch! And on one hand, that’s kinda bullshit, but on the other hand, I know what dilaudid feels like when I draw it up. I know what Ativan looks like in a syringe. And to be clear I would not give anything on a purely vibes based premise, but with experience you do get a nursing sense that’s difficult to articulate. It’s knowing someone has a fever from the doorway of their room, or that someone has a GI bleed from the faint smell of their poop, or that someone is in the early stages of sepsis from a glance at their respirations, or that someone’s getting delirious from just a passing comment they make. Intuition is not a consistent safety system, and also it is an invaluable asset. Sometimes you just know something isn’t right. That cannot be the entire basis of your practice. But it helps!

Marta knew the med was right because she’d drawn it up a hundred times before. That’s horrible safety practices, but also she was right. If she’d done the med check correctly by verifying the label on the vial, then she would have killed Harlan. So in this sense, ignoring protocol and going by pure intuition resulted in the correct decision in the context of unknown but extraordinary circumstances (Chris Evans). So like. Not sure exactly what the takeaway there is. I think mainly just murder is wrong.

And also just generally speaking—stepping back from the murder of it all once again—Harlan clearly liked her. Marta and Harlan had good therapeutic rapport, by which I mean they enjoyed each other’s company which was probably Harlan’s chief need. Like medications, treatments, those are all good, but so is talking to patients like they’re people and making them feel comfortable. I mean, she did that so good she got millions of dollars and a mansion. Girl knocked it out of the park.

So is she a Good Nurse? I’d say overall yeah. While at times throughout the movie, she is more concerned with being a Good Daughter or a Person Who Isn’t In Jail, the overall impression is a compassionate person who is normally competent at her job, tries to save others despite her personal situation, and takes responsibility for her mistakes. I think that’s why she rings true as a character who is a nurse, even if you could quibble with the exact medical details.

$369,000 / 3 br / 1 ba

Built In 1910

Helena, MT

[househunting on substack]