This is what happens when your brain runs out of RAM.

Hi, I'm Lauren Howard (you can call me L2) and this is my podcast Different, Not Broken - which is about exactly that.

My mom is in the hospital. Again.

My kids are at camp for the first time ever.

My co-worker Vanessa's grandmother fell.

Kyle's eye is still a thing.

And I have exactly zero bandwidth left for anything — including, apparently, remembering that not everyone knows my mom's transplanted kidney's nickname.

The nephrologist found out the hard way. He's fine. Kidney Poitier is fine. I am questionable.

In this episode, I tell you about the nurse who pretended she needed help from my mom — a former phlebotomist — just to get her brain working and make her feel useful in that hospital bed.

I ugly-cried a little on the inside.

Then I talk about the moment my filter completely abandoned me mid-conversation with a medical professional.

And then Alison brings us a Small Talk question from Opal in Georgia, who's been close with her best friend for 26 years and is starting to feel like she gives more than she gets.

Brain full. Filter gone. Heart kind of full, too. Let's get into it.

New episodes every Wednesday. Find them all at differentnobrokenpodcast.com.

So last week, Kyle had his eye thing

that was like over two weeks. My kid got a bug bite on her face

that got infected. And it was like half of her face and she looked like

half a chipmunk. My mom came home from her trip and basically

almost immediately went to the emergency room. Cause she was sick as a dog.

And then I left the emergency room after they transferred her to another

hospital and was back less than 12 hours later

with Nessie. That was another experience altogether.

And then my mom's been in the hospital the whole time. Ness was out of

work for five days for

just basically being a woman. Bullshit like that. She came back to

work yesterday. Last night her grandmother fell. She lives with her

grandmother, broke her leg, which is the other leg from the one

she broke a year or two ago. Oh, and my kids are in camp this

week. My kids who do not leave my house, they leave my house. But like,

only with us, who have never been away from us, literally ever

unsupervised. Unless it's by like Kyle's mom or

Vanessa. That's it. They're in camp this week. So not only am I like running

back and forth to the hospital, which is 30 minutes away, I also

have to have my kids to camp by 8am, which is not a problem.

And then somebody has to pick them up at 3:30 every day. So this is

three. Three things I have to do every

day. Three things that I have to like, keep in my brain that

I have to find time to do every day. And if I have one thing,

I'm useless the whole day. So poor Vanessa last

night texted me and was like, my grandmother fell. And I did the appropriate thing.

I did the right thing. And I was like, oh, no, that's not good. What

does she need? And she told me. And then after that I was like,

but she's at the hospital. And she's like, yeah, the ambulance is coming to get

her. And I was like, cool. Your family's there? Yeah, everybody's here. You guys have

everything you need? Yeah. Cool. Turn off. Brain is full.

No space. We have no space. And then this morning, Kyle was like, have you

heard from Vanessa? And I was like, maybe. She probably texted me. He was

like, did you want to check? And I was like, maybe. And then he took

over from there because he was like, you're not going to process any of this

information, are you? And I was like, nope, nope, Nothing. Nope.

So both fortunately and unfortunately, I say fortunately, not that I want my

mother to be in the hospital, but fortunately, in that this is where she needs

to. To be right now. She's sick. I'm glad that we were able to get

her into the right place to get well.

Obviously, nobody wants to be in the hospital, but it's definitely where she needs to

be right now. So, unfortunately, she is sick.

Fortunately, she has access to good medical care and is in a hospital

where they are taking great care of her. Whenever she gets sick, she gets

admitted to the transplant unit at

the hospital where she had her transplant

done. Not that she is currently having any trouble with

that organ. It's actually Knockwood doing really

well. But once you've had a transplant, they treat everything

as secondary to the transplant. So she got

admitted to transplant unit, and she's been there,

I don't know, a couple days now, maybe four. Four days. You're supposed

to lose track of time and space when you're in the hospital.

I, however, am not in the hospital and have no sense

of time and space. She's been there sometime between, like, three days and a

year, let's put it that way. It's somewhere in there. I'm not entirely sure where.

I went up to see her the other day, and she has this nasty cough.

And so, like, I feel bad making her talk.

And so I, like, find things to do while I'm there. I

just, like, scroll my phone or, I don't know, tidy up things around her

room. Because it really is just very difficult for her to talk.

She got a little frustrated with me the other day. Cause she's like, you come

up here and you don't even talk to me. And I'm like, talk. And she

started coughing, and I was like,

you see what. You see that? Do you see that? Sometimes I know what I'm

doing also. I don't want to talk to anybody anyway.

Especially when you're on a transplant unit, they have nurses that come in all the

time. They have all sorts of people who come in and check a bunch of

things. They check your weight constantly because they're worried about fluid retention,

whatever. And so the nurse comes in and

she needed more labs done. And my mom

has just horrifically bad veins, horrible

veins. And she only has one arm that you can pull labs out of, because

the other arm has, I think, has her dialysis port

in it. And she doesn't use it anymore. But you can't pull

labs from it anymore. Or you can't pull labs from that arm because there's no

access. It's just like a whole thing. Every time she has to get blood drawn

It's a whole ass thing. So this nurse comes in, though,

and she's doing all of the things that she has to do, which is so

many things. And she says to my mom,

somebody told me that you were a phlebotomist. And my mom's like,

well, yeah. And to be clear, she was a phlebotomist

50 years ago. Approximately. Pretty close to 50 years

ago. She has not worked as a phlebotomist, at least during my

entire life and probably for 10 years before

that. 50 years. That's terrifying. But 50 fucking

years. She looks at her and says, somebody told me that you were a

phlebotomist. And my mom says, yeah. And she goes,

I'm really bad with tricky veins. Can you show

me? She's like, can you talk me through? Because I also know you pretty bad

veins. And she's. It's just. I'm just not very good at it. Can

you show me? And my mom was like, yeah, I can show you. She's like,

do you want me to draw it on myself? And she goes, no, I want

to do it, but just, like, talk me through it. So my mom

goes, okay, I can do that. And so she walks over to my mom,

doesn't give her any of the materials, but she's like, I'm just going to pretend

like I don't know what I'm doing, and I want you to tell me exactly

where to start and, like, how to find the vein, how to identify it before

sticking, and then what I do after. My mom walked her through the whole thing

took probably 15 minutes of just, like, talking. My mom was, like,

super engaged the whole time. My mom is sharp, but very

clearly feels sick, and so she's foggier than she normally is. I just want to

be clear about something. This woman probably takes labs 20

times a day. She does not need help from my mother.

She did not need help from my mother at all. She

knows how to take labs. She knows how to draw them. She is

fine with tricky veins. When you have trouble finding the vein,

you call the rn, because the RN knows how to do it. The

RN is good at it. I think my mom was, like, just sick

enough that she didn't realize what was happening, which

is that this woman was just trying to get her

engaged and make sure that her brain was still working and that she was able

to show her how to do something. And I just sat there the

whole time, just, like, marveling. Who thinks of that? Who

thinks of. I'm gonna have this woman teach Me

how to do something that is so far ingrained in her

brain wrinkles just to get her brain working, just so that she

has some sort of stimulation so she's not staring at the TV

for 23 hours a day between naps so that

she's engaged and feels just a tiny bit better

about this whole shit ass situation. After

she was done, she, like, made eye contact with me. And she didn't really

wink, but she, like, might as well have winked. And I was like, I see

you. I see you. All that to say we do not

deserve nurses. We do not deserve nurses. Who

thinks of that? Who is like, I'm gonna

have this woman teach me how to do something I've done

27 times today because it will make her day the

tiniest bit better because it will make her feel competent and

capable. And like, there is something on the other side of

this very long hospitalization. Who thinks of that? Who

thinks of that? We do not deserve nurses. We need

7,000 people who are more like nurses

and more. Probably more like 7 million people. Not 7,000, maybe even

7 billion. A lot of people. A lot of people who are that cool. We

need more people who are that cool. I can't do dates. I can't do numbers.

I can't do time. Can't do any of it right now. But I know we

need more do that. But, yeah, we do not deserve

nurses. Do you ever, like, forget what it's like to be around normal people

and then say something that either makes sense to you or that you

think is objectively funny? And forget that

this person does not probably understand your sense of

humor at baseline, and then it comes out of your mouth and you're like,

oops, probably shouldn't have let that one out into the world

without qualification. That's a blast.

And like, you guys know I don't like the term normal

because I don't think normal exists, but there is kind of like a

baseline for things that are socially acceptable to say, and this is

probably not any of them. I had a moment yesterday where

my mom's nephrologist called me,

and it's not her normal nephrologist. It's her hospitalist nephrologist, because she's in the

hospital right now. So he called me to talk about her kidney things, because anytime

she's hospitalized, the first thing we have to worry about is the kidney, because she

went and got this extra kidney a couple years ago, and it's like a big

thing that we have to worry about anyway. So it's like a whole ass thing.

And so he called me to basically give me the update. Cuz it's just, it's

impossible to be at the hospital enough to catch all of the doctors. She, she

has so many doctors right now. She has a

nephrologist, she has a pulmonologist, she has an infectious disease doctor,

she has an endocrinologist, she has a cardiologist.

She's like just a hospitalist, which is internal medicine. There's just so many freaking doctors

and it's impossible to catch all of them. I said to the nurse, like when

doctors come through, they need to call me because she's not a

reliable historian and I want to

make sure they're doing shit correctly. And I also need to threaten them

personally. And by threaten them I mean if you don't figure

out what's going on, I'm not bringing her home, which is a personal threat.

They take it as a threat, let's put it that way. I don't actually threaten

them. I would never actually threaten a doctor, but however, I would threaten them

with having to take my mother home with them. And they would be like, oh

God, no. So he calls me and he's like, hey, hey,

just wanna let you know, her kidney studies are fine.

Creatinine looks good. Everything seems to be working right. We're working a

little bit on her anti rejection meds. Cause I think from being sick they

got a little wonky. But he's like, everything looks fine. And me

being me replied to him, oh, so kidney Poitier

is fine. The pause, it was the pregnantest

of pauses as he processed what I just

said, said to him. And he goes, did you just call her

transplanted kidney? And I said, yep, yeah, I did.

I did that. Yeah. I'm just gonna, I'll be over, I'll be over here

if you need. I'm just gonna. That came out of my mouth. Yeah. And to

be fair, when she got called, then they said they had a

kidney for her and she was rushing into the hospital, it was like mid Covid.

So I didn't go with her and I was just like, okay, tell kidney

Poitier that he better get his shit together. And since then, that has been the

kidney's name. It is what we call it. She got an

extra kidney and we named it because of course, you name it. I

forgot that this is like a professional person who

probably does his best to keep a straight face most of the

time when he's working and talking about very serious

things and I just flew out of my mouth,

as if he knew the context. I guess he technically

does know the context because he

knows that she got herself a new kidney. So after he

processed what I said and my response to it, he did start laughing, and

I felt better. I was just like, man, the pipe between my brain

and my mouth seems to be closed. Maybe it's

not closed. Maybe it's open. There's a filter that's supposed to be there that has

gotten knocked off or something because it just flew right out.

No context. Didn't tell him that's what we call it.

Just addressed her extra kidney

as Kidney Poitier to a complete stranger who took

it like a champ. So anyway, have you ever done that?

Have you ever just, like, said something in front of somebody who had

no context, forgetting that it was gonna sound

unhinged, and then realized how unhinged it

sounded? And if so, welcome to the club, and

we've been waiting for you. So we have a small talk question

from Opal in Georgia. Opal asks. My oldest

friend and I have been close since we were nine years old.

26 years. And lately, when I hang up after our calls, I

feel tired instead of full. Like I gave something, but

nothing came back. She's not a bad person. There's no

big falling out, no betrayal. We've just become very

different people. And I think I've been maintaining the friendship out of

loyalty to who we used to be rather than who we

actually are. Now I feel an enormous amount of guilt even

admitting this, like acknowledging it means I'm ungrateful for the history

or disloyal to a girl who was my whole world at 9 years

old. How do you let something good fade gracefully? Or

do you. Is there a way to say something honest without blowing it all up?

So people evolve beyond each other. And it also doesn't

mean that not being in the same place now means you're never gonna be in

the same place again. So I think that's really important to keep in mind,

is that you're talking past each other now. You're in two different

places, and you need different things out of a friendship, and that's okay. That's

the evolution. That's growth. That's all of it. And this person's been in your life

forever, and that doesn't mean they're not going to be in your life tomorrow, even

if today is not the right time, or you need them in a different capacity

that you needed them before. I don't think it needs to be A

big thing. I think you can just make different choices.

I think if you're going to cut off contact, which it doesn't sound like you're

going to, that should be a conversation, because ghosting people is really

hard. I had that happen to me in a friendship, and it really wrecked me

for a long time. This was somebody I was, like, inseparably close with. And just

one day, I think realistically we had grown apart,

and one day we just were miles apart, and I realized we hadn't

talked in a long time. And I thought it was just accidental. And then

it turned out to not at all be accidental. And so don't do that to

somebody, especially somebody who is

invested in you and your success and your life and has been a huge part

of your life. But it's okay to just take some time and space

and pause and reassess and give yourself an opportunity to

miss somebody. That's a hard conversation to have because they may not

understand. Telling somebody that you need space, an

indefinite or an imprecise amount of space,

is a weird conversation to have, but you can take it for yourself. If

they ask, just say, like, things are really busy right now, and I just. I

don't have a lot to give. And so the level

that I'm engaging at is where I am right now. And it doesn't mean I

don't love you. It just means this is where my life is right now. If

you have the type of relationship where you can have that kind of conversation

with them and just say, like, it feels like we're in different places and I

need a little bit of time and space, that's fine, too.

But I don't think it has to be a production. I also think it's probably

shorter lived than you realize. And then there's also the part, like, it sounds like

your friend might be going through something that is making them focused

on one thing that maybe is not something that you feel attached to

or feel like you want to be engaged with. And that might be a conversation,

too. Hey, we're talking about this one thing all the time. I'm

concerned that it's affecting you in a way that is not the way

it typically affects you. Is there something going on? Do we. Do you need help?

Do you need something? But it's also okay to just, like,

pause and answer less and

protect your peace. You don't owe anybody an explanation for why you're

taking space. You can give it to them. They will often

misunderstand and take it very personally when it Sounds like it's not personal at all.

It's just what it is. And so protect your

peace, take your space, give it a short timeline for

two weeks. I'm really not going to engage too much. Maybe it can coincide with

something that you have going on that would realistically keep you busy for two weeks.

That's totally fine. And maybe you find out after those

two weeks, there's not anything you miss and it was a good

break and you continue it. I don't know. But you don't owe

anybody an explanation for why you're choosing to protect your piece, why

you are choosing to prioritize yourself. And as long as you have done everything

to make sure that this person is okay, that they have what they need, that

you're not throwing them to the wolves in a time that they

clearly have a need and there is a way to meet, it doesn't

mean that you have to throw yourself to the wolves to fix whatever their problem

is. But don't leave somebody suffering without

pointing out or without doing whatever you can reasonably

to try to help. But beyond that,

your peace is your own. And if something doesn't feel right, it's not right. And

you can come back to it in a month or a year

or 10 years and get right back where you

started or where you left off. Because that's how a lot of

friendships work. And that's just okay. That's just the reality of it. You're

allowed to evolve past people, but you also just need to need a break.

Oh, I think one week we should have a small talk where the question is,

like, really super long, and my answer is just no,

that's it. I think it'd be really funny. I think that'd

be really funny. You could just be like, should I trust

RFK Jr. With my medical records? No. Next question.

You give me so much credit for having any fucking idea what I've

said previously. Like, I listen to my episodes

not because I like listening to myself, but because otherwise

I have no idea what's on them. And people will

text me and be like, oh, my God, this resource was so

helpful. And I'm like, did we talk? Was there? I

don't. What? Your podcast. I have a

podcast. Oh, is it Wednesday? Oh, that's new and

different.