It’s Saturday morning, Dec 2, 2023. I am at Miriam’s figures meet in Anthem. It is also the Anniversary of Linda’s passing (my mother in law). Hard to believe it’s been a year.
The past two weeks have been a little bit of a blur. On Monday the 20th we had our last clinical day at Chandler Regional on the med/surg and med/surg trauma units. I was glad to have that done. Clinical is good exposure, but after a few weeks it gets repetitive and we are limited to what we can do as students. Repetitive is good, though. I feel like I could do a Sub-q injection with my eyes closed now. (I won’t. I promise).
Tuesday I did my OCD/PTSD therapy and my therapist had a genius suggestion for me. I told her that sometimes I spiral too fast to incorporate any therapeutic techniques. She told me to scrunch my toes! So I had an an opportunity to try this at work on Thursday night. I work with an extremely unpleasant human being. She is grumpy all the time and acts like I’m inconveniencing her and is just generally annoyed by my entire existence. I came into work and saw she was the other aid and I immediately got anxiety. I scrunched my toes and it all went away! I think it’s that I was freaking out about the rest of the shift but scrunching toes brings you to present time. I texted Garren and I said, “This might make me a whole new person!”
Wednesday I had my second to last lecture. After lecture I had to participate in a group meeting with the department head of the nursing program. I was supposed to represent my clinical group. So I asked everyone in my group if they had any concerns to be addressed. So I relayed everything they told me to and some of my own things and she responded like everything was a “me” problem. So I feel like the meeting was pointless. I told her some people in my group didn’t like our clinical instructor used “lingo” because we didn’t know what it meant. She said, “Why didn’t you ask?” But some people don’t feel comfortable doing that because sometimes you go into class, someone says something and you think about it trying to recall if it was something you were supposed to know already, like, was this something I read about? And you think about it and by the time you realize it wasn’t something you had already learned they’ve moved on. So, anyway, she just kept saying stuff like, “Why didn’t you do something about it?” I was like, okay so my suggestions aren’t going anywhere. . . .” So, waste of time. I went home and watched Christmas movies with the kids the rest of the day.
Thursday was Thanksgiving. We went to Neal’s. It was nice. Mom and Dad were there. Ashley came out from Phoenix. It was pretty low key. We just ate dinner and played some games. Miriam stay ed the night and they went to see the new hunger games prequel. The rest of us went home. I went to work for the night. That’s when I worked with the unpleasant human being. I don’t know why people actually want to be unpleasant, but whatever. I also worked Friday and Saturday.
Monday the 27th, I started preparing for my final exam that’s coming up. I started with the psych portion. Have I mentioned yet that I hate psych with all the passion I can muster?
Work has been nice this week because they need a lot of help in the monitor room. On Saturday I called staffing to ask if I could work in the monitor room and they said they didn’t even know I could work in the monitor room! I said, “There should be a note in my profile.” She said, “Oh yah, there it is where no one looks. I’m going to put it in a more obvious place. We can always replace you as an aid because we have plenty of those around, but we don’t have plenty of monitor techs.” So ever since then they have been floating me to the monitor room! Wednesday the 29th they floated me to the monitor room but I Was expecting to work the floor. So I didn’t exactly come prepared. I wrote Garren and asked him to bring all my stuff to study because I can get about 7- 9 good hours of study time in the monitor room. He drove down to the hospital and brought me all my stuff. It was nice of him. I feel bad though because it ended up that I felt burned out a bit on studying and I ended up watching the entire mini-series of “All the Light we Cannot See” on Netflix. As a side note, in case anyone is concerned. . . . I do not completely absorbed when I watch stuff on my phone and block out everything else. i don’t use headphones and I am not oblivious to what is happening around me. I set all my alarmas and parameters on the patients at the beginning of the shift. I scan everyone’s rhythms every five minutes. I also record what their rhythm is on a piece of paper every 2 hours. So when I say I “watched a movie” I am watching my patients at the same time.
Thursday night I worked in the monitor room and I did study the entire time. I feel like I know my content, but I never know what to expect when my teachers write their own questions. I do really well on the state board of nursing exams because those are designed to be able to use test taking strategies. When my teachers write their own questions there are NO test taking strategies possible. You either know the answer or you don’t. There’s no possibility of getting it right if you don’t just know it unless you happen to guess the right one. With test taking strategies you can at least narrow down options and arrive at the correct answer eventually after some thought and application.. But there is none of that with the teachers questions. So as I’m studying I feel like it isn’t enough to know the content. You have to be like a mind reader or something.
Friday (yesterday) I slept most of the day—or tired, rather. It’s getting less and less able to sleep during the day and it’s getting really frustrating. My neighbors have lawn maintenance people come at 9am, our pool guy comes. .. it’s just that no one else in the world is on that schedule so it’s impossible to sleep! Garren and I went out last night to celebrate his raise, bonus, and becoming a shareholding partner in his firm. We had a very mediocre dinner at Outback Steakhouse. Probably won’t be going there again. Ever. Then we went home and watched 30 minutes of Babylon because we can only watch movies in 20-30 minute increments these days. Ha! Now here I am at the swim meet. So we’re full circle. I work tonight. Hopefully they float me to the monitor room!
I feel like I was a Debbie Downer in this post. Ha! That’s the only down side about keeping a journal is that I feel like I use it to say all the things I can’t say out loud to anyone else so it sounds like a lot of griping and complaining. Ha! Speaking of griping, there is a girl dancing around me right now as I sit at a picnic table and type this and she is driving me insane and I wish her mother would tell her to go do it somewhere else. Also, I’m not a morning person at is is 9am. So I’m grumpy for that reason too. Now there is a guy behind me sweeping all the rocks off the cement with his foot. Is everyone here bored to death, or what? Yes is the answer to that. . .
Josh and Garren in his car setting up. . . something. I don’t know. All that technology in his car is over my head. I think it’s over Garren’s head too. He had Joshua helping him figure it out. I thought it was cute.
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