Dinners, TB, college continues.

I’m quite tired. I asked Jeremy tonight why I’m so tired. All week, I’ve felt like I’m sleeping enough and then Jeremy said – we are not sleeping enough. We are not asleep until 11 and we are getting up at 5:30. That is not enough sleep.

We hosted four dinners for ten each weekday night. Thank goodness it was the same ten! Alice’s husband was out of town for the week and normally, I wouldn’t host four consecutive dinners for the same group of people, but we had extenuating circumstances. It was fun and I was happy we were able to pull this off. On Thursday night, both Jeremy and I were out of the house (Jeremy at a downtown meeting and me at BTSN) and the group dinner still happened over takeout Chinese food.

I spent a lot of the week doing lots of paperwork for my hospital job. I had to renew my CPR certification one morning. And then I had to go to my annual health checkup at work in which they’ll fit you for an N95 mask (airborne precautions), do your blood test for sugar, lipids, take a BP (all fantastic. I’m like a 20 year old inside.) and then run the TB testing (I am negative I DO NOT HAVE TB). The CDC just recommended that annual screening for health care workers can be dropped because the rate that healthcare workers get TB is extremely low. But it didn’t stop me from fretting for a whole 48 hours that I had TB because I had redness/puffiness around the injection site which I obsessed over (I’ve never ever had a hint of reaction at any other TB test I’ve ever done) and scoured the internet for hours for pictures to compare my arm to. We had a TB patient on our unit for SIX months. We all rotated taking care of him. I asked if that counted as an exposure and the checkup people said it did not because the patient was in the special air handling room and we all wore our N95 masks and he was taking his antibiotic cocktail (mostly). I know all the ED nurses get random people off the street coughing on them all the time some with active TB, so I shouldn’t be that scared because the CDC recommendation must have included the thousands of ED health care workers. But I was. And then I spent time regretting ever becoming a nurse and thinking to myself every good deed gets punished. One the first night after the test, I woke up at midnight and checked my arm for induration and was sure it was positive and then resisted waking Jeremy up. I managed to fall asleep until 5am and then I woke him up and told him I was worried but that I managed to not wake him up at midnight and he said – thank you. thank you for not waking me up at midnight to say that you have TB. Upon telling Vickey my concerns, first she said – wait, when was the last time I saw you? Do you think I need to get tested for TB? And then second she said – if you die from consumption, at least you will be signing a beautiful song in wonderful lighting like in Moulin Rouge (Nicole Kidman) or Les Miserable (Fantine).

Thursday night was BTSN for Vince. Jeremy was at a meeting downtown. This is his favorite teacher who teaches him math. (I forgot her name). Everyone spent their ten minutes talking about their test scores. We score awesome on all the AP testing. We are prepping for the AP test. They are totally going to be prepared. They will be prepared for college. No one talked about how beautiful science and math can be. I didn’t even need for them to say how beautiful science is, maybe I just wanted a list of what they were going to learn in science/math? Not that intro calculus or chemistry changes that much in 30 years. But still. Come on people, I love a good test score, but I also love chemistry. It’s fall of senior year for Vince. I will miss going to back to school night next year. I hope I’m doing right by him. I have my doubts.

Here’s the list: Carnegie Mellon, Haverford, UMd – College Park, U Wisconsin (Madison), U of Oregon (Eugene), U of Washington (Seattle), UC (Irvine, Davis, Santa Cruz), Cal Poly SLO, Pitt, Drexel, U Toronto, U British Columbia, Rutgers. He wants to apply to the engineering schools and he’s an engaged and motivated student. I’m sure all his teachers enjoy having him in their classes, he participates a lot and isn’t afraid to say his ideas and he loves group work (mostly. He still gets frustrated by the one person who doesn’t pull their own weight and never answers the group texts). He likes to think about concepts and understand them, but he is indifferent to acing the tests which, I will admit, is infuriating to me. So a common (but weird) scenario is that he’s tutoring other kids to better grades than he is getting himself. WTF? How is that even possible? He’s gotten a lot of Bs in math/science classes (which are hard classes, but not the hardest at our magnet school which he turned down the offer to take) and then his test scores are a bit on the low end, slightly lower than expected for the level of classes he’s taking and then on top of that, one has to subtract 100 to 150 points for being Asian (if he says he’s Asian, if he says he’s not Asian, it just hurts my feelings to which Jeremy and Vince are both surprised at my hurt feelings) so that’s a bummer. I’m not sure how being out state plays in whether it’s an advantage or not. We’ll see! I think this is a reasonable list. I didn’t do any of the things I’m supposed to do. I didn’t pay for SAT prep (goes without saying that I didn’t pay $15,000 to do SAT cheating). I didn’t get his slight dyslexia (so much trouble spelling. like the word “turkey”) formally diagnosed so that he’d get extra time on all his tests. I’m not going to pay for a college coach. I didn’t get him diagnosed with ADHD and put him on Adderall which now I’ve come to realize is a common thing. I didn’t hound him on all his homework. He says he’s not cheating – not participating in the legions of group chats in which the kids text each other about what’s on the exams. So I’ll take the Bs and the lower SAT scores and figure it out from there.

I biked there because parking was going to be terrible at the school and then I met up with Jeremy who ended up back at the Rockville station at the same time BTSN ended. We snuck off and had an ice cream date.