Over the River

The weekend can't get here quickly enough. The weather is promising more snow tonight after the ordeal we went through the other night. Tuesday afternoon started innocently enough with a text message to do a start of care at 6 PM-only forty five miles away from my home. Knowing the snow would start around 8 PM, I was not thrilled to be way out in the boonies when it hit and tried to no avail to change my appointment time. I drove to my office on dry pavement to get supplies; when I got back in my car, there was a coating of snow-all in 10 minutes. Oh-oh. The white stuff was 3 hours early and struck at rush hour.

I headed toward my destination at a snail's pace. Twenty five miles west and only half way there, it would take 2 hours or more to get to where I was going. I'd have been quite late so I checked with the supervisor, rescheduled my appointment for Wednesday and turned around to go home. Two minutes later, the phone rang to notify me I had to go pronounce a patient's death. This one was forty five miles northeast of where I was. I knew exactly where this patient's home was-I'd been there the previous week. Let me tell you, if I thought my first destination was the boonies, then this was the outback. It was up into the thumb of the mitten and on a good day, takes close to 2 hours to get there. Not knowing the exact way to get there from my current location, I'd listened to hardheaded Tim, who like a typical man, took me down every single back road he could find. For God's sake, he took me down a dead end road directly behind my patient's home. He wanted me to nose my car down a TRAIL. He thought it was a road. We argued for 2 minutes and being the bright one in the car, I got out and knocked on a stranger's door to ask directions. That's the difference between me and the man I drive with, I'm not afraid to ask another human for directions. Sheesh! If Tim isn't careful, he is going to have a gender switching operation.

With new instructions, I reached my destination in an impressive 3 hours. Adding insult to injury, of course this death was in a county where the medical examiner mandates we summon a police officer to the scene. The family and I waited another hour for the sheriff to arrive to ascertain there was no monkey business. Once he was finished asking silly questions, we had to wait another hour and a half for the funeral home to get there. After all was said and done, I was still 45 miles from home and had to reverse the whole process to get there (minus the part where I listened to Tim). The urge to spend the night in the now vacant house was overwhelming.

This snow issue is not going to be good. The forecast for tonight is not promising and those liars at the weather station, who like to say they know exactly when a storm hits, were wrong Tuesday. I'm planning for the snow to start at 9PM-they say midnight. It will snow all night into Friday and the white stuff will continue well into the day. Six to ten inches, in places a foot of fluff, will fall. Isn't that the kind of weather that should find me indoors making soup, lighting a fire, wrapping gifts and sitting near the Christmas tree?

Maybe I should ask Santa for a team of sled dogs...