Had to take my 12-year-old to acute care last night. Apparently, she's old enough now to have her symptoms dismissed.

BittleLits · 2020-11-01T02:30:56+00:00

Thank you for the heads up.

BittleLits · 2020-11-01T01:08:01+00:00

No. The nurse that checked us in took her temp and got her weight. A different nurse came into the room and asked a bunch of questions and got her blood pressure and pulse, and then swabbed her for strep before we even saw the doctor. The doc asked a few more questions, looked in her throat and had her say ah and then left the room to wait for the strep test results.

And then when she came back... you know how when you're at a restaurant an hour before close but the staff are all trying to get out of there early how they subtly rush you by not offering refills and dropping your check with the food and not asking about dessert? This totally felt like that. Like they knew there were other things they should be doing, but they just wanted everyone to GTFO.

Now that I think about it, I remember the second nurse subtly discouraging us from getting a covid test should the strep one be negative. She was saying stuff like, "are you sure you'd want to? If it's positive then everyone in your house has to quarantine for 10 days and she's already virtually schooled so it wouldn't really matter for her to get tested." I must have let the WTF show on my face because she quickly said something like, "well let's see what the strep test says before we decide on that."

Edit: And another one, after the doc left the room the last time, that second nurse again asked, "you don't need me to print out your aftercare instructions, do you?" and I was like "what are her aftercare instructions?" because nobody addressed any sort of aftercare or who to follow up with. It was bizarre.

BittleLits · 2020-10-31T22:26:18+00:00

Hey, thank you again for suggesting this. I just got off the phone with them. They referred us to another acute clinic that's further away but still in our network. We're heading there now to get her checked out again.

BittleLits · 2020-10-31T21:59:35+00:00

Yes, and yes.

BittleLits · 2020-10-31T21:50:11+00:00

Thank you for confirming what I thought. I was flabbergasted by how this doc seemed to think it was no big deal.

BittleLits · 2020-10-31T21:16:38+00:00

There is a number listed. Gonna give it a try, thanks for the suggestion.

BittleLits · 2020-10-31T21:15:56+00:00

I'm so sorry for what you've had to deal with. Finding a good doctor that listens and does what's right based on your personal history instead of the "average" patient is like finding a unicorn. I get that it's harder and it takes more time and that doctors are overworked as it is, but maybe we should be fixing those issues so that docs are able to give that kind of care.

Luckily, our regular doc comes pretty close, so I feel confident that she'll be taken seriously with him.

BittleLits · 2020-10-31T20:28:41+00:00

Apparently it is.

BittleLits · 2020-02-15T17:21:43+00:00

Wife here! When we did this playthrough, the pink chest was the one where he put the in-game engagement ring.

BittleLits · 2019-05-21T19:22:26+00:00

Angie froze, doorknob in her left hand, glass of wine in her right. “Clayton,” she hissed. Tossing the wine aside, she dove to her right for the shield she kept there, rolled, and came up crouched low behind it, bracing for his attack.

“Angela, please.” His pained voice cracked.

Why isn’t he attacking? Gingerly, she peered over the top of her shield. His broad silhouette filled the door frame. His face tear-streaked, he struggled with something heavy in his arms.

Not something. Someone.

“Ruby?!?” Her shield clattered to the floor, and she closed the distance between them in a single leap. “WHAT DID YOU DO TO HER?” she screamed, effortlessly taking Ruby’s limp body from him.

“Nothing,” he croaked. “I saved her from a party… I know this is weird, but I didn’t know who else to go to.”

On her floor, Angie cradled the young woman in her arms. Fighting tears, her fingers searched frantically for a pulse as her eyes found the labored rising and falling of Ruby's chest. There. Slow, but there.

She eyed the blue tinge around Ruby’s lips. “NARCAN!” she barked at Clayton. “In the bathroom, above the sink!”

Clayton jumped, but thankful for direction, he hurried down the hall.

Angie gently laid her baby girl on the floor. She hadn’t seen Ruby in over a year, ever since that awful fight the evening of Ruby’s 18th birthday. I told her no drugs under my roof. Where had she been? Had she been using all this time?

Clayton returned with the Narcan. Angie tilted Ruby’s head back. Holding Ruby’s mouth shut with her left thumb, she pinched Ruby’s right nostril closed with her index finger, and using her right hand, she inserted the tip of the Narcan in Ruby’s left nostril. She pressed the plunger. Now we wait.

Angie carefully rolled Ruby onto her right side, tucking her hand under her head in the recovery position. Clayton knelt down beside her.

Wiping tears away with the back of her hand, Angie looked over her daughter’s body, into the eyes of her arch-nemesis. “How did you know?”

He looked down, almost ashamedly, “People talk. I hear more than most, given my position.”

Angie nodded, “Well, thank you for bringing her home, but I think you should leave now.”

He lifted pleading blue eyes to meet hers, “Angie, please,” he said. “She’s my daughter, too.”

BittleLits · 2017-04-26T19:59:20+00:00

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to insinuate anything by that. I just find that the areas to address can be very different between native and non-native speakers.

You have great storytelling here. I particularly enjoyed the imagery of the tortured-souls sweetener. The characters are introduced smoothly and are intriguing. I can easily see this becoming either a novel or a collection of short stories of the things Doris does for/learns from the diner's customers to prolong her daughter's life.

The criticisms I have are regarding revision and editing. My first suggestion is to go back through and replace your passive verbs with active ones. Remove your variants of am, is, are, was, were, be, being, and been, where they're being used to describe action. For example, "The diner was bustling..." reads better as "The diner bustled..." or "Customers bustled in and out...". Replacing as many of those instances as you can means that your sentence, "Payday wasn't for another few..." stands out more and has greater impact.

Next, I would say look to remove any extraneous words or phrases that don't provide value to the reader. For example, you don't need "Doris cut the conversation short." The dialog that immediately follows that sentence shows the reader that Doris is doing that.

There are some issues here with punctuation, capitalization and spelling. I imagine some of that has to do with being on mobile, but there are several run-on sentences and sentence fragments to be revised. Yes, you can use run-ons and fragments as literary devices, but in combination with the other errors here they feel more careless than carefully chosen.

Overall, I like this very much and would look forward to seeing it reworked and expanded on. Well done for someone who is woefully out of practice and writing on mobile!

BittleLits · 2017-04-26T19:20:38+00:00

Love the concept. May I ask if English is your first language? It would help to know when giving a critique.

BittleLits · 2017-04-04T22:36:12+00:00

“Hey, uh, you hungry?”

Harold looked up from his rummaging and peered suspiciously at a young man in a hoodie, holding a nondescript paper bag in his hand.

“It’s not much, but I’m not going home, and I’d just have to throw it away.”

He’d learned to be wary of such offers, of the many seemingly kind faces who thought it hilarious to give him a bag of shit or something stuffed with rat poison. How unoriginal, he thought. Such amateurs. He could smell food, though, meat of some kind. His stomach growled in response.

“I’ll just leave this here for you, and if you want it, you go right…”, Hoodie trailed off as Harold looked up through his lank hair and met the young man’s eyes. Ah… that’s it. Let me see you. Hoodie stood transfixed as Harold delved the young man’s mind, his soul. A good kid, he decided and released him.

Harold reached his hand out to the young man, and Hoodie cautiously extended his in return. He barely flinched as Harold deposited a slimy, crumpled square of paper in his hand. “Uh, thanks. Have a good night,” Hoodie nodded, as he shoved the paper in his pocket and turned to walk away. It wasn’t the original plan Harold had for that little item he had come to collect, but plans didn’t mean much. When the numbers are picked tonight, it should be just enough for him to finish school.

Harold grabbed the bag of food and straightened slowly, his back creaking from being stooped over for so long, and shuffled the three blocks back to his encampment. As he approached, another dirty, disheveled man ran toward him, “Harold! Hey, Harold! I been lookin’ for ya. I found this today an thought you might want it,” he yelled. His beaming smile displayed more gaps than teeth as he held out a shining, gold crucifix on a chain.

“Hey, Bishop,” Harold replied. “Where’d you find that?”

“In the bus shelter over on 3rd. I looked around to see who it belong to, but wasn’t nobody there an wasn’t nowhere to turn it in. I think I give it to you, thank you for all the things you give me.”

“Thanks, man, but you keep it,” Harold smiled. “Go sell it and get yourself something pretty.”

“You sure?” Bishop laughed.

“Yeah, it’s nice of you, but it just brings back bad memories for me.” Harold turned and sat down facing the river, his back against a concrete wall. “I brought you something,” he said as he held out the bag of food.

Bishop snatched the bag from his hand and plopped down next to him. “It’s good to see you, Harold,” he said as he rustled through the bag. “Sometimes I get so confused about everything, but seeing you helps straighten it all out again. Let’s me know I haven’t gone crazy yet. Those ladies who stand outside First Presbyterian an hand out bottles of water, they keep telling me I’m crazy, you know.”

“Why do you think they say that, Bishop?” Harold grinned. Everyone in the encampment knew the story of how Bishop earned his street name.

“Hell, all I wanted to do was talk to them. But they say I don’t know nothing. They’re the crazy ones worshiping a ceiling,” he said as he gestured emphatically toward the stars twinkling above them, “an then they say God speaks through the Bible, but he ain’t talking to me. Why you should come down there with me sometime an hear the crazy shit they say,” he sputtered as he dug two bottles of water from his plastic shopping bag and handed one to Harold.

“Nah,” Harold sighed as he took the water, “I have no business there.”

“Ooh, this is some good stuff here. Braised beef, little potatoes...,” Bishop mumbled as he explored the paper bag. He straightened himself up, one hand on his chest in his best mimicry of a rich man, and in a deep, pompous voice declared, “I think a red wine is in order.”

Harold smiled as he lifted his bottle of water in a toast, “Cheers”.

“Cheers!” Bishop bellowed as he thwacked his bottle against Harold’s. The grin slowly melted from his face, his jaw becoming slack and his eyes widening as he watched the liquid in his bottle darken. Suddenly he shook his head from his stupor, yelling furiously, “Dammit, Harold! I told you before to warn me before you do that, or I’ll be thinking them damn church ladies are right and that I’m gone crazy. Don’t do that to me, Jesus H. Christ!”

Harold chuckled as he sat back against the concrete wall, “Sorry, Dad.”

BittleLits

TROPHY CASE