Author Archives: rachrn34

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We Are Camp Nine Surgery on the Boardwalk

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After dinner I was walking along and came across a group of people surrounding a girl on a bench who was hysterically crying. I took one look at her foot and saw this sticking out of the bottom of it close to her toes. It was about the size of the top stick in the picture.

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Someone told me it couldn’t be pulled out because there was a barb or something preventing it. It was pretty far under the skin so I had to go into burn unit nurse mode (maybe that’s why I dreamed about the burn unit last night) and take a pair of tweezers and pick the skin apart to reveal the stick. I had gotten about halfway through this endeavor when it was clear we needed a scalpel or a needle or a razor blade. So up comes the official Big Stuf camp nurse with a gadget called splinter out.

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It actually reminded me of the really old blood sugar lancet’s from my really early nursing days. So I stabilized the stick while she finished opening it up so we could pull the stick out. The girl did really well. Her group had a wash cloth so the camp nurse washed it and dried it and put a temporary band-aid on. I told her to take a shower and then come to my room and I would fix her up. Apparently the kids with her convinced her that peroxide on it would feel like acid and it would hurt forever. I told her the peroxide wouldn’t hurt but her foot would probably really bother her to put weight on it. So while she is freaking out about the peroxide I sneak and pour it on and it was over and done with before she even knew it. Then a little Neosporin a 2×2 and some gauze wrap and she was good as new. Someone asked why I didn’t use alcohol. I said now that would have burned like battery acid and she would have come out of her skin. Then they asked if I could look at another kids toe. He was so worked up trying to find injured girls sister he jammed and stubbed his toe and peeled the skin off. He already had cleaned and put Neosporin on in, so I did a burn unit toe wrap! It’s been 15 years since I have done any sort of debridement or burn wrapping but it came right back like it was just yesterday!

Mole moral~Once a burn nurse, always a burn nurse!

 

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We Are Camp Nine Day 2

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I am not going to lie, I am tired! Like really tired! Like I could curl up on the sandy fake wood floor of this room and go to sleep. And maybe not wake up for ten hours. Not to worry, the kids are in small group while I type this. And when they get out, I have a couple already scheduled to stop by and may get a few more surprise visitors. Every time someone knocks on the door I am like who is it now but I am thrilled these kids come to me and trust me. I did see a foot today that has me a little concerned, most likely because I was reading about the bacteria in the gulf of Mexico that can cause necrotizing fasciitis. (aka flesh-eating strep). Google can be a good thing and it can be a bad thing. I always call myself the worse case scenario nurse so whatever the symptom is, I jump to the very worst thing it could be. This is so it doesn’t happen. And this folks is called magical thinking, which my counselor nazi told me does not exist. Anyway, I just went off on a huge tangent so I will try to get back to camp.

At the very first bathroom stop on the way down, I made a really stupid statement. I am not even going to repeat it because I must protect the privacy of others and my own stupid self. Well that comment must have went like straight to God’s ears because ever since then it’s been I will show you Rachel Carty Moehlmann. And he has! It’s so easy to sit and judge others by a few actions you have seen without ever getting to know the person or know their story. However, once the story comes out and God reminds you of how you fell into the same trap not long ago, its embarrassing, annoying and you really hate the God is right and you are wrong! Ok I think I just spoke morse code or something but lets just say I have a huge nice note to write this week at camp. If I tried to speak to this person, I would turn red, get tongue-tied and sound like an idiot. I have a gift for writing (thanks counselor nazi for convincing me) so I might as well use it.

Morning session was we are better together. And because I am so tired I could sleep on the floor, I am going to copy and paste Dianne Prewitt’s post from this morning.

Studies have shown that the #1 ingredient for growth in any area of life isn’t practice or learning or discipline or self-control or any of that – the #1 secret ingredient for growth is SOMEONE ELSE! King Solomon put it this way: “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.”

I saw that on Facebook and thought it was awesome. I could have said the same thing in about a thousand extra words. The speaker challenged us to think of two people who could be our iron. And these people you have to be totally authentic with and not like the fake self that we often project.

Tonight’s session~we are human. Dianne is in small group so she hasn’t posted anything so I can’t borrow it. I had a really hard time concentrating as my mind was all over the place. But basically bad things are going to happen. God came down in human form so he knows what you experience as he experienced it. He will stand with you and he will win for you. Well he already won for us with defeating death and the enemy.

That is camp day 2. If this makes no sense please refer back to the first four sentences of this blog. I plan to get up early tomorrow as it is a 2 mile walk day. Hopefully, I can squeeze a nap in at some point! Today I was dead to the world when someone knocked on the door, and I remember thinking who is knocking at 2:30 in the morning. It was actually 2:30 in the afternoon and I had a 30 minute sleep like the dead which helped but not enough to fix all this rambling.

Mole moral~I can barely think straight on a normal day, add camp, no sleep and God pounding on me and I am a lost cause!

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We are camp nine

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The theme for Big Stuf this year is WE ARE.

Tonight the talk was we are ready. Ready for what exactly. Well the big answer was are you ready for life and if so how do you know you are ready. The first thing you need to know is your name! Huh? Everybody knows their own name right. Well the truly great people had more than their name. For example, Alexander the Great, William the Conquer, and Ivan the Terrible. So how would you fill in the blank. Mine would look something like this:

Rachel the ___________

high fall risk

One whose parents divorced and her life is ruined (I proved that prediction wrong! I’ve had a fairly great life!)

crazy in a fun way

compassionate

always thinking of others

I could list more but think about how you would fill it in for yourself.

Now here is how the speaker filled in the blank. Rachel is God’s masterpiece. Did anyone come up with that? Seven years of camp later and I’m still so far off. I will never get it right except there really is no right or wrong. I just need to remember this written by Paul (if I was paying attention) for we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us new in Christ Jesus so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago. That’s heavy and hard for me to comprehend. Me a masterpiece? Well maybe a clumsy, crazy, compassionate masterpiece on any given day. So when I believe what God says about me (the masterpiece business), then I’ll be ready for what God has ready for me.

So intense to comprehend this. If we all lived and treated each other like we are indeed God’s masterpieces the world would be a beautiful place. However, I can’t ever see this happening on this side of Heaven so I will wait patiently till I either die or Christ returns.

Mole moral~ Rachel the masterpiece of God!

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Big Stuf Olypmics 2015

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SIMG_8705Yesterday was the Big Stuf Olympics and in true form it was blazing hot. It seems like every year its the hottest day of the summer. That is probably a bit of an exaggeration but just sitting in the shade had me sweating a lot! The Olympics always means camp is fast approaching and it is used as an ice breaker for the kids to get to know each other. This years theme was The Hunger Games. They even had 12 districts. 7,8,9,10,11,12 grade girls and 7,8,9,10,11,12 grade boys. It was very clever and all thought up by the Obterns. They are college aged kids who spend the entire summer working as slaves for the church. Well not really but they do a lot of service work and are the counselors at camp. This year I am riding the pink bus with the tenth grade girls. I told them they all had to win so we would be first on the bus. In true fashion they rocked it and came in first. There first event was to run to the cornucopia in the middle and grab stuff to dress up one member of the team for a fashion parade. The kids were very creative with what they had to work with. I think a lot of the stuff came from the Kid Stuf prop box. Next up was the egg toss and Allyson had hers break all over her hand. Next was a three-legged race and they had to spin around a bat five times and then come back. Now that was hysterical. Some of the kids hopped there and back. Some fell and ended up crawling. The adults were dying. The next event was busting water balloons on one persons head. That was good for cooling off. The final event was running to the table grabbing a paper bag that had unknown food in it and the team had to eat all of it. They had three bags to do. Allyson’s group got donuts, jalapeno’s and saltine crackers. Sierra’s group got Oreo’s, baby food and peanut butter. They said the baby food was disgusting because it was warm from being outside. One group got cottage cheese and the other a gallon of milk. This is why I watch and forget about participating. They ended the day with hitting each other with paint balls in pantyhose. Sierra and Allyson were a painted up mess!

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Church was really good before the Olympics. We sang a new song He Is Jesus As soon as it was over I knew I would be adding it to my running playlist. Later Tom came out and said it’s the theme song of camp this year. I should have known. So I’ve already listened to it three times. I cannot wait until camp. Church was very much like a day at camp so when Herc asked if I was ready to for camp I said yes super fast. This year I will not be out half the day cake hunting and will go to bed at a decent hour. All the buses are full which means if I want to nap, it will be on the floor jammed between the seats!

Mole moral~I may be old but the best part of camp after the sessions will always be the bus ride!

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My frog friends

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imageSometime around the beginning of May I noticed loud frog noises coming from the backyard. Brian said when we opened the pool, they would be gone. He said the chlorine would chase them off. After the pool opened I didn’t hear anything for maybe two days and then the frog was back and with a buddy. We could hear them carrying on with the windows shut. Last week he told Kayla one of the frogs jumped into the pool so she refused to go swimming that night. Over the weekend I finally caught the suckers in action on the pool ledge. I just had to get their pictures. They were quiet until I went back into the house. Every evening after dark they park themselves on the same part of the pool ledge and carry on like two old women gossiping. I have named the Frog and Toad even though they are both either one or the other.

frog-and-toad-are-friendsGrowing up one of my favorite I can read all by myself books was called Frog and Toad are Friends. I bought a new copy when Emily could read and then discovered there were three more books in the series so I have them all. The Frog and Toad are Friends book is still the best by far! When I was younger one of my moms friends called me Frog and my sister Toad. It’s stuck with me all these years. I will admit a few years back I got stuffed Frog and Toad off of Ebay and they sit on my dresser. It just shows I am a kid at heart.

 

 

Mole moral~If something annoys you, try to make friends with it. If that’s not possible shoot it dead. HAHAHAHA

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The Library

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Today I went to the library to renew my library card. They had sent me three emails so I thought why not? There were a couple of books I had read in high school that were fairly racy for that time but I could no longer remember the names of them. Oh what would the young people do without Google. All I had to do was type a synopsis and BAM the names were right there. The one was available on Kindle so I bought it and read it last night. The other is not on Kindle and I really wanted to avoid ordering a hard copy but the library doesn’t have it either. It’s about a girl who runs away to become a model and ends up a hooker. I have never really grown up and still enjoy the young adult section so I walked over there to see if they had any books by Robert Cormier that I had not read. Score I picked up Tenderness and I can’t wait to read it. He wrote The Chocolate War and a bunch of other stuff. Most of his work is really bizarre. It reminds me of Wayward Pines, my newest obsession. I read the first book and it’s just bizarre. It also ended right where the TV series is at.

I also have checked a lot of books out via the library’s online site. Kind of like Kindle but they have their own app. It was obvious I hadn’t been inside the library for a long time when the librarian yelled to me that I could check myself out at the self check-out. It made me wonder if computers are going to take over everyone’s jobs. I mean seriously. Although maybe this gives the librarian more time to find research stuff for people. I have no idea. Let’s just say it’s been way too long since I have written a paper and I am perfectly happy keeping it that way.

Mole moral~Times are changing, even at the library. Does anyone remember the card catalogue? I have memories of opening the drawers and looking for books. They were categorized by title, author and subject and I am ending this because I am showing my age again!

 

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The brain of a runner

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I return to work in six days! Heck yes I am counting, I cannot wait. I am fortunate to work part-time which I think helps immensely. I truly enjoy my job and the people I work with and the patients I take care. I cannot wait to see them all again. I purchased a fitbit last September to get a feel of how much I was walking at work and how much bothered my foot. On days I work the entire 8 and I am busy I easily hit 10,000 and my little armband buzzes. At home if I don’t do much of anything we won’t discuss that number. So I feel my foot needs to be able to tolerate 10,000 steps three days a week and I can rest on the others. So today I decided to go for a walk. I only did one and a half miles. Just 1 1/2 miles. Only runners and crazy people talk like this! Before all these injuries that distance wasn’t even worth going out for. That shows you how warped my brain became. Wait it still is. So anyway due to the non stop rain I did a half a mile earlier and had to come back for rain and barely got the mile in before it was raining again. However I refuse to let it rain on my parade. Hahahah. I did notice it is much easier on my foot to go up the hill than down the hill. Now my horrible cardio will tell you that downhill was much easier. I have lost a lot in the past two months. Pastor Tom is right, what you work on, you get better at, what you don’t work on, you get worse at! I am worse but am hoping that this comeback will be the final comeback. I really would like to do my ten-mile run down to the shell station on Imperial Main Street sometime in the future.

Mole moral~ Walking leads to running (to get done faster) which then leads to crazy runner brain. You have been warned!

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Wayward Pines

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A while back my dad suggested I watch this show. I set the DVR up to record it, but hadn’t started watching it. When I saw my cousin Eddie last week, he told me it was awesome and all of his friends loved it. So yesterday I took a look at the DVR and saw I had 4 of the 6 episodes recorded. I then checked on demand and sure enough all the episodes were available. Because I overdid it on Tuesday with greater than 12,000 steps, I decided to cross stitch and watch this show. About thirty minutes into it, I was ready to kill Eddie. I was already freaked out. When I was young, The Twlight Zone came on channel nine at 10:30 at night. I didn’t always stay awake but I will never forget the episode that freaked me out for life. It was called “Stopover in a Quiet Town.” Not too long ago I watched it on YouTube and it was just as freaky scary in present day as when I was a kid. A husband and wife get drunk and wake up in a strange place. That’s all I’m going to say about it. I think this new show may have the same premise! After watching the first three episodes, my friend Laura stopped by with her new puppy so that was the end of that for the day. I did some googling and this show is based on a trilogy. It’s only ten episodes long. It also reminds me of American Horror Story as that show makes no sense till the last couple of episodes and then everything is tied together. So we shall see!

Mole moral~do not take tv suggestions from my dad or my cousin Eddie! 😂

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Happy Birthday Emily

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imageToday is May 23, 2015 and Emily’s twenty-third birthday. What makes it even more special is she was born on a Saturday afternoon and today is Saturday. I’m just trying to orientate any of the un-orientated people who might be reading today. It’s hard to believe that it has been 23 years ago since I sent Brian to the bar with his friends and went to my mom’s house on a Friday night to watch my Uncle Larry try to beat this one level he and my mom were stuck on in Mario World for Super Nintendo. (That was at least 3 or 4 Nintendo gaming systems ago.) My mom came with us to the hospital I do believe and she would call Uncle Larry from time to time to see if he had beaten the level yet. If I remember correctly he still hadn’t beaten it when Emily was born. When I arrived at the hospital I was convinced I was at least 3cm dilated. Not even close, I was a whopping 1cm. By the time 5 am rolled around and I was finally a 3 the anesthesiologist asked me if I wanted an epidural. My response “yes, I don’t care if you paralyze me and I never walk again, do something about these contractions.” She was horrified I said that but I was dead serious! So my doctor came by around 7 before Saturday office hours and broke my water. Things progressed along nicely and around 10:30 my nurse said I should have the baby before lunch. The next thing I knew I was crazy as a loon and told everyone I was playing Mario in my head and making up levels as I go. Uncle Larry finally arrived and I said “hi honey” or something to that effect. I never talk like that. I asked the nurse what she put in my IV when I come out of that and she said I was just delusional from being up all night. I to this day do not believe this. I will always be convinced my doctor didn’t want his office hours screwed up and needed to delay my birth. (All my life I was convinced something went wrong with my appendectomy since I was in the hospital for a week and I found out from Dr. Meiners that my appendix most likely burst and I was never told based on the amount of adhesions Dr. V. found and the length of time I was in the hospital and my giant scar.) Uncle Larry and mom went to the cafeteria to get something to eat. Uncle Larry came back up to see if anything was happening. He stood outside the door and heard Emily be born. Brian and I had fought for nine months about boy or girl and we did not find out. She was born and we just stared at her until the nurse finally asked if it were a boy or a girl. Finally uncle larry yelled through the door, “do we have an Emily or a Larry.) I said Emily and he went back down to the cafeteria to tell mom. They all came in and saw her. Now the Moehlmann’s were at the Lake of the Ozarks at their lake house. So they drove back and also arrived shortly after Emily was born. They visited with her for a couple of hours and then went back to the lake as it was Memorial Day weekend (just like it is this weekend). I was discharged on Memorial Day and was crying as the tech wheeled me out. Brian asked her what was wrong with me and she said “honey, this is totally normal.” I think I was overtaken with the spirit of every post partum hormonal woman ever when I looked at him and said “I told you so!” And so we brought Emily home and the adventure began.

Happy Birthday Emily Mole!

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Ten days post op

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IMG_8048The past ten days have been a living nightmare. As usual I thought I would wake up from surgery and just be my normal self. As if that would ever happen. If I had pain, I didn’t really notice it! I was way too busy being nauseated, dizzy and a raging headache. I even called the doctor office on Thursday and asked for Zofram. Which by the way did NOTHING. So yesterday in one last-ditch effort before I off myself I decided to go to the store and get the over the counter medicine for motion sickness. I always have horrible issues with post op nausea and vomiting. I expected to feel better within an hour. Like that didn’t happen either. So I went to be at ten last night and slept 11 hours and feel 100 times better. I wish I would have thought of this like last week. I swear I will need to be at death’s door before I consider surgery again. There are many days I think I should have just stayed fat and on the couch as this all started from running. If I wouldn’t have run, I wouldn’t have wanted my bladder fixed. Then I wouldn’t have had a hysterectomy and the stupid pathology report on my uterus. My adhesions wouldn’t have moved putting me in the worst pain ever. I wouldn’t have had repeated left-sided inflamed muscle pain. Then I would have never had the giant wart removed off my foot. I wouldn’t have bought into the minimalist running movement and caused plantar fasciitis in both feet requiring surgery a year apart. However, without all the running my resting heart rate wouldn’t be 48, making me a “finely tuned athlete”. My husband calls himself that because his heart rate is the same. However, he is on a beta blocker so it should be. BAHAHAHA

Mole moral~ Is it time to go back to work yet? It’s hard to keep a crackhead down!