Month: November 2021

Oh look!

Now that I’ve neglected this to the point that no one is reading anymore, it’s safe to post again.

The truth is there hasn’t been anything happening on the cancer treatment front, I’ve more or less settled into a routine with work, and my mental health is better overall than it’s been in quite a while. Of course that has meant I haven’t needed to whine about anything here. And I pretty much still don’t but there are definitely things on the horizon.

Looming largest in my mind right now is another covid surge. I’m sure any number of the none people reading this have heard me lamenting that I couldn’t do another year of covid and it’s looking like another year of covid is a good possibility. Having spent no small amount of time ruminating on this, right now, from a mental standpoint I think I actually could do another year of covid. I would certainly be happier to not have to but, strange as it may seem, having a couple months mostly away from the bedside may have allowed me to recharge my batteries a little bit. Well maybe not another year of covid, maybe six months. I don’t know. Anyway, the point is I could definitely do one day at a time which is more than I would have been willing to say a few weeks ago.

As an aside – there really isn’t enough information on the omicron variant to make any definitive statements about what the next year is going to look like. What is noteworthy is that in South Africa, where omicron was first identified, the delta variant was pretty much the exclusive strain being passed around and omicron is out-competing it and is on it’s way to becoming the new dominant strain. It is a deeply concerning variant and an excellent reason to get your vaccine booster ASAP if you haven’t already.

Anyway, this revelation that stopping to rest for a while can replenish one’s stores of mental and physical energy is the latest in a series of startling discoveries I have made recently now that my brain has had time to reboot.

The first of these came to me maybe two weeks ago. I believe I have lamented here before that I didn’t really know what to do with the advice to “make time for yourself”. The foundation of my difficulties was that I had more things to do than time to do them and it was impossible for me to make time for anything else. Short of actually making time (see any number of science-fiction stories to learn why that isn’t a good idea) I genuinely couldn’t comprehend how I was supposed to “make time for yourself”.

My revelation came while putting together a to-do list for the week. As was usual, I knew there wasn’t going to be time to get to everything so I was triaging and prioritizing what I really had to get done and what I could let slide and it occurred to me that I could just put myself on the to-do list and treat it the way I would any other project. And that the time-for-myself project didn’t always have to be the one that got dropped when it came down to prioritizing for time. If I had been on the road to Damascus I would have fallen to the ground. This was a revolutionary technique that I could use to try and…

…right… make time for yourself… like everyone has been telling you to…

Ahem.

Right. So I’ve been making time for myself and the world hasn’t ended yet.

Clever Title

Back to school. This is (hopefully) my penultimate term in my masters program and what happens after that is not at all certain. I had hoped to have the basement done before I had to start school again but in spite of that I think I’m at a point where I’ll be able to manage.

Work has been interesting. There is an actual sick (in the previously discussed “sick or not-sick” sense) patient on the unit right now, one of the kind that I have spent the last 5-ish years specializing to take care of. The unit at my current place of employment has some very smart, very capable nurses and doctors but very few of them have a lot of experience caring for specifically this kind of patient. This is the kind of patient I would very much like to see more of on the unit and, I think, that is a goal that is shared by the Powers-That-Be at the hospital.

So there’s this sick patient and one of the assistant managers texted me to ask if I could come in to work tonight to help out. A couple more bits of relevant information; I worked last night, it was a pretty exhausting shift, and I didn’t get much sleep today for several different reasons. I’m really tired, is the point to all that. Even so, if this had been not that many years ago, I would have said yes without even pausing to think. I had told managers and physicians that I would live at the hospital 24/7 if that’s what was required to take care of the patient and I nearly did on more than one occasion.

I’m going to go on a little side-track here but we’ll get back to the main storyline in a moment. I have frequently thought that when I tell someone about the long hours and short sleep that I put myself through to take care of these complicated patients, they infer that this is due to some depth of character and dedication to the nursing profession that drives me to do these things. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The fact is, being a bedside nurse is kind of a shit job. All too often it is literally a shit job. Yes, it pays well, but really the only thing that makes all the, literal and figurative, shit worth it is if you’re doing something interesting. I pushed myself taking care of these patients because I wanted people to keep sending those kinds of patients to our unit. I wanted the admitting services to know that they could dump the sickest patient imaginable on us and we’d take it happily. Being a nurse is the only thing I know how to do that someone will actually pay me for so, if I need to keep working as a nurse, I need a good supply of crazy sick patients so I don’t get fed up with all the nonsense. This could potentially be a much longer tirade but I don’t want to lose focus.

The end of the story for today’s incident is that I did not go in to work. I really wanted to for all the above discussed reasons, but I also knew that it would really not be good for me and self-care won out.

Also, tomorrow we have our first D&D game in almost two months and I am not missing it.