Happy New Year! I know I’ve been mostly absent for the last couple months, but I’m trying to start the new year off right.
I’m not much of a self-help book kinda gal. Growing up in the ‘90s it felt like they were a fad I could never get away from, but wanted to avoid forever. So imagine my surprise when I was drawn to Jay Shetty’s Think Like a Monk.
The last part of 2024 was chaos for me. I went back to work after being home for 4 years. We moved out of our house and into the camper while house hunting. My daughter ended up in the hospital for 11 days with pneumonia. I needed to find a way to refocus and find a calm for 2025. I am hoping that the quotes I took from this book will start me off on the right foot. Maybe they will inspire you as well.
These are my favorites
When you learn to navigate and manage your breath, you can navigate any situation in life.
When you try to live your most authentic life, some of your relationships will be put in jeopardy. Losing them is a risk worth bearing; finding a way to keep them in your life is a challenge worth taking on.
Your identity is a mirror covered with dust. When you first look in the mirror, the truth of who you are and what you value is obscured. Clearing it may not be pleasant, but only when the dust is gone can you see your true reflection.
When we tune out the opinions, expectations, and obligations of the world around us, we begin to hear ourselves.
Don’t judge someone with a different disease. Don’t expect anyone to be perfect. Don’t think you are perfect.
The more we define ourselves in relation to the people around us, the more lost we are.
Remember, saying whatever we want, whenever we want, however we want, is not freedom. Real freedom is not feeling the need to say these things.
The less time you fixate on everyone else, the more time you have to focus on yourself.
The emotion you fall asleep with at night is most likely the emotion you’ll wake up with in the morning.
Treat yourself with the same love and respect you want to show to others.
If you don’t break your ego, life will break it for you.
When you’re present in gratitude, you can’t be anywhere else.
In every relationship you have an opportunity to set the level of joy you expect and the level of pain you’ll accept.
On the first day of Christmas the reindeer brought to me
Advent Calendars to make my kids crazy.
Aly is happy to be home. She still has a little bit of a cough and gets tired easily. She’s excited to make a wooden tree for Christmas.
Hannah has slime, but she doesn’t know it yet. She has to wait for Daddy to wake up before she can open day one. For the last 45 minutes, I’ve been told, “This is torture.”
What holiday traditions do you celebrate with your family? Share in the comments.
There’s something a little terrifying about researching the death of a younger woman due to a doctor’s mistake while living in the hospital with my daughter who has a very bad case of pneumonia. Aly is doing great and on the road to recovery. Her doctors have been wonderful. I just feel like I’m tempting fate with this research.
Libby’s Last Day
Libby Zion was a bright, 18 year old college student in 1984. She attended college in Vermont, but was home in New York that March. She had been experiencing flu like symptoms, a high fever and body aches, for a couple days when her parents took her to New York Hospital.
During triage at the ER, hospital staff was informed that Libby had been taking phenelzine regularly for depression. They made a note in her chart and began examining her symptoms. They decided to admit her for observation and planned to give her IV fluids in an effort to bring her fever down.
She was transferred to the 5th floor of the hospital. Her case was assigned to Luise Weinstein, a first year resident who was primarily working on the 3rd floor.
From the time of admission, Libby had been experiencing convulsions that caused her extremities to jerk uncontrollably. Dr Weinstein ordered Demerol in an effort to ease her pain and control the spasms.
Libby did not respond as expected. Instead she became more agitated. She ripped out her IV more than once. The nurses were afraid she would hurt herself. Her parents were encouraged to leave so as not to increase Libby’s distress. Then they contacted Dr Weinstein again. She ordered that Libby be put in restraints for her own safety, and be given Haldol to decrease her agitation.
After a while, this course of action seemed to work, because Libby eventually fell asleep. As she slept, her temperature began to skyrocket. At 630 am it was charted as being 107 degrees Fahrenheit. Dr Weinstein ordered interventions to decrease her temperature, but it was too late. Libby went into cardiac arrest and was unable to be resuscitated. On March 5, 1984 Libby Zion was pronounced dead.
What Went Wrong
Libby’s parents, Sidney and Elsa Zion, were shocked and devastated by the death of their daughter. They wanted to know what went wrong.
The first mistake was when Dr Weinstein ordered Demerol to treat Libby’s convulsions. The drug interaction between Demerol and the phenelzine she was taking for depression can cause serotonin syndrome. Symptoms of this include fever, high blood pressure, rapid heart rate and muscle spasms.
The second mistake was the usage of the restraints. Because Libby couldn’t move or uncover herself, she had zero chance at helping her body temperature to regulate.
No one was monitoring her fever. Part of the reason for her admission was a fever, yet the staff was not regularly checking her temperature. If they had been, they would have noticed her body temperature trending upward and could have ordered intervention before she had essentially cooked herself.
The Aftermath
Sidney Zion blamed inadequate staff and the hospital for Libby’s death. He felt that the doctors should have known about the deadly potential drug interaction between Demerol and phenelzine. He also felt doctors working 36 hour shifts were destined to make mistakes due to exhaustion.
He wrote his concerns in an op-Ed for the New York Times and he petitioned the District attorney’s office to file murder charges. In May 1986, a grand jury was convened, but failed to indict. 
Libby’s case didn’t end there though. The State Board for Professional Medical Conduct formed a committee that failed to find negligence on the part of the doctors involved in her case, since the drug reaction between phenelzine and Demerol wasn’t widely known. The Board of Regents overruled the committee and ordered the doctors to be censured for acts of gross negligence. That decision was successfully appealed in 1991.
Real change didn’t come from the previous committees. It wasn’t until 1987 that the state of New York’s Ad Hoc Advisory Committee on Emergency Services, headed by Dr Bertrand M. Bell, that the training requirements for new doctors changed. Their recommendations included:
There should always be an attending physician present in the hospital at all times.
Residents should be limited to working shifts no longer than 24 hours and now more than 80 hours total in a 7 day week.
New York State adopted these rules in 1989. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education went on to adopt them in 2003. Opinions are mixed about whether or not this is a good thing. Yes, new doctors are less exhausted and hopefully better able to make decisions. But they no longer go through the heel of a residency that older doctors believe made medicine a calling and not a 9-5 job.
I don’t have an opinion either way about whether this made medical care any better for the doctors or the patients. All I know is that I try to avoid hospitals in July when newly graduated residents begin “practicing” on us.
Aly has been healing on a 2 steps forward, 1 steps back pattern today. They were able to lower her oxygen from 6LPM to 3LPM, until she was eating dinner and her SATs dropped into the 70s.
She has been receiving her oxygen through the nasal cannula all day, but needs a full mask when she sleeps because she’s a mouth breather.
I had planned to present the incident that yesterday’s Law and Order case was based on, but I didn’t quite finish it. Hopefully tomorrow is better.
Kristie's Craziness 