A Bad Day gets Better

I had had a very trying day. Everyone and their cousin and their dog had unmet expectations about how i should be both on and off the clock and nobody really seemed to care who i was. A patient’s brother was taking it very personal that i didnt pay attention to everyone in the grocery and immediately notice when he was standing in an aisle that it was him and that i knew him. Once off the clock, i dont pay attention to who is where…i just shop. I talk to myself, plan the chores im going to do later, plan what im making for supper, read ingredient labels, and read my grocery list. “Scan store for people i know” is not on the agenda. Little does this man realize, theres actually two different coworkers that purposefully avoid saying hi to me when they see me in the grocery after work because they know saying hi just basically means i have to repunch my time card and clock back in to the social dog and pony show that i do at work where i pretend im not an introvert who hates and distrusts people. And i appreciate the heck out of them for respecting me enough to give me what they rightly assess i want…to be left alone to shop in peace.

A new patient at work has a tendency to be inappropriate. He’s overly flirty (and married) and he acts like a 5 year old, throwing temper tantrums and asking “what are you gonna do about it” a lot. He frequently does exercise at hyper speed and then argues as if he’s in the middle of a court case when i change the reps to 40 instead of 20 because he insists upon doing them twice as fast as he is supposed to, thus cutting his amount of exercise achieved in half. He does have a habit of holding onto exercise equipment and refusing to give it back when he’s done simply because he can and its fairly disruptive. He tries his best to be disruptive and this would be the reason i resent him. Everyone else has settled into a nice routine and is cooperating and this one patient is not only being defiant and unsafe himself, he occasionally tries to trip other people because he thinks its funny. Its funny until someone falls. He told me i was making his treatments boring and it wouldnt kill me to play a little bit during his sessions. Im not the type to ‘play’. Im the type to professionally dole out exercises and ADL activities that must be completed to work towards goals outlined in the patient’s plan of care.

Then the feed store employee seemed to think that since i know what the bag of chicken feed looks like i should have been able to muster the assertiveness to tell the new guy that he was loading pig feed instead and to stop putting that on the dolly and get the chicken feed instead. Well that was the plan but im not one to go into someone’s warehouse uninvited. I was going to wait until the man came close to me with the dolly and then tell him ‘wrong bag’. Instead the men just got into a shouting match and the regular was disappointed in me that i didnt set the newbie straight, since i clearly knew what a bag of 9779 looked like and had been buying it for years.

By the time i got to the feed store i was just mentally done and wanted to go home. So when my neighbor said i should stop by to pick up my hemmed overalls on the way home and by the time i read the message, i was already in the house and settled, i did not want to leave the house. Well, after letting me know that she was not available any other day of the week to give me the overalls, i put shoes and clothes back on and got back into the car to drive over and get them, reluctantly muttering the whole way about having to get up, get re-dressed, and go back into the world of people. When i got there she handed me the hemmed overalls. They were beautiful. One leg was hemmed facing inside and the other outside but i really could care less. It was a piece of folded over fabric that probably constituted a 1/4 of a centimeter. Nobody would ever see it unless they knew to look for it. And i now had these wonderful flare leg patchwork cloth overalls of all different kinds and patterns of fabric. They were a beautiful belated birthday present. And i’d always wanted overalls ever since i became an adult and grew out of the ones i’d had as a child. I thanked her and was about to leave when she fessed up that the real reason i had needed to come to her house was because she and her husband had gone to cstco recently and they’d gotten me a bag of cashews! She pulled a jumbo bag of cashews out of her pantry and presented them to me. I lit up like a christmas tree. I hugged her so tightly. She laughed and said, “i knew uou would like that surprise!” I said, “i love cashews so much i named a dog cashew” and she said laughing, “i know.” She said, “im so happy you are so easy to please. You’re just really thrilled over the simple things in life! All i have to do is get you a bag of cashews.” Yes, cashews are securely outside of my food budget simply because of their high cost. However, every solid vegan cheese sauce starts with a cashew base. Cheez sauce on rice, on pasta, on fruit, on gluten free bread in the toaster oven, and on carrot sticks….its all delicious. Beyond that, you can toast cashews in a pan on the stove and add them to rice dishes where they taste amazing. I had an heirloom tomato left in the fridge and some chickpea pasta. I also had some chives from my neighbor’s garden that needed using up before they went bad. I put those and some basil in the cheez sauce and made vegan mac and cheese with cut up tomato on top. It was heavenly. Gluten free pasta with cashew cheese sauce is a real treat at my house because i only have it when someone has gifted me cashews. I had endured a terrible day and i failed miserably at meeting the expectations of people i dealt with throughout that day, but all of that faded away when cashew cheese sauce came into the picture and all i could see was a plate full of cheezy goodness and thoroughly savored flavor.