Atascadero State Hospital

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medical         *
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It is Friday Feb 24 as I begin this post. I'm waking up in Las Vegas. About 6 weeks ago I began making plans to see my family for a small reunion of my siblings and their children. Las Vegas offered the most convenient venue for good air service and reasonably priced hotels--bargains if you are not a gambler.
My brother Dana flew out to Morro Bay on Wed and we got up at 2 A.M. on Thursday and drove the RV to Las Vegas. We experienced some engine power problems as we approached the California/Nevada border but managed to make it to a dealer in Las Vegas and had the fuel filter changed out. We'll see today if that was the culprit.
My family will all be here on Saturday. About 25 people will be going and coming for the next 48 to 72 hours.
My CT of the chest on Tuesday looked terrible to me. I know that medical imaging is not my forte but I'm very sure that I see a lot of progression of tumor or tumor effect in my chest. It also appears that my heart is wrapped up in this mess as well. I think that may be a partial explanation for my breathlessness--that my heart is unable to expand to the degree necessary for a good stroke volume. Normally the heart can increase blood output in two ways, by expanding and increasing the filling volume to squeeze out more blood with every beat and by increasing the number of beats per minute.
I am only able to walk about 25 paces on level ground before stopping to catch my breath. At home I am unable to climb the stairs and must rely on the elevator that the builder had installed for his own wife--what a lucky find.
So, my time appears to be very short.
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It's now about 2:30 PM. There was a lunch buffet at Thai Palace at 935 E Sahara...best Thai restaurant ever...Following that, Robert Granieri, who was my office manager when I practiced in Vegas,  and I went to look at comparable office spaces to the building we are currently renting out. Jasmine and I bought the building where I practiced in 2004 (a converted 2700' house). We have been renting it since leaving Vegas in 2007 and the leases come due in September. There are two suites in the building and neither occupant is interested in taking responsibility for the entire building.
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I'm back in the hotel room and making myself some coffee brought from home. I'm dying for the real thing. While I was boiling the water I had a flashback to Billings in January 2011--staying in a motel room and making coffee when I went to visit Shirley Gunnels who had been told that her breast cancer had involved the lungs and liver. At the time, there were three friends with cancer and lung involvement--I felt connected to them all and was really much closer in some ways that I could have guessed.
Shirley died in late summer but was unable to avoid a spinal surgery for pain 2 weeks prior to her death. She was in her high seventies or early eighties and was active enough to paint parts of the outside of house and to do a lot of cooking and running around at the senior center. There is nothing like cowgirls. We spent the afternoon at the movies. Our choices were Black Swan and True Grit. I would have gone to Black Swan but there was no way Shirley was going to a movie about ballet.

Atascadero State Hospital
The hospital was established in the 1950s and is the city's major employer. The town itself has a very interesting history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atascadero,_California

One of the requirements for working in the hospital is attendance at several weeks of training to teach each new staff member the set of expectations for conduct. A part of this training is physical--to teach the ins and outs of restraining patients safely. All disciplines are expected to participate and respond to alarms that indicate a problem on a ward. When an alarm sounds, staff from neighboring wards are expected to run to the problem and immediately boost the number of staff available to handle the situation.
Physical confrontation with patients was a last resort. Training was focused on identifying situations that were escalating and providing techniques for calming things down.
Alarms are inherently dangerous. People are running at full speed and must get through heavy steel, locked doors that separate the wards from the main corridor of the hospital. Injuries during alarms are common and more likely to be accidental than due to physical confrontation with the patient himself. Staff are more likely to be injured by patients when a punch appears out of nowhere--the patient having planned such an assault and waited for an opportune time.
The hospital has been adopted by the town and vice-versa. It is not unusual to talk to employees who are the third generation of hospital workers.
The State Psychiatric Hospitals are much more dangerous to staff when compared to psychiatric facilities within prisons. The U. S. Department of Justice became involved in the State of California's psychiatric hospitals in about 2002 and there has been turmoil for the last decade. I know that the "consultants" to the state (actually the original inspectors as well ((?talk about conflict of interest)) ), have made a very good living from California.
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I am quickly running out of time and have to prioritize what I think I can actually get written in the next few weeks--so for the time being, I am going to skip away from my work history and focus more on illness-related matters, a summing up and reflection on certain relationships, and my day-to-day kind of progress or lack thereof.