For reasons that aren’t relevant to the rest of the story1, we spent a good portion of Friday night/early Saturday morning in the ER at Highline or whatever teh fook CHI rebranded it to.
I’m not really sure what I want to say about this. It was horrible, of course. Being in health care environments still is quite difficult. Highline uses the same cardiac monitors and IV pumps as most of the other hospitals I’ve worked in recently so there were lots of very familiar sounding beeps and alarms. By the time Shannon was discharged I was about ready to crawl out of my skin.
Today is Wednesday and I still don’t feel like I’ve entirely put myself back together yet. This is yet more evidence that going back to work in health care is definitely not in the cards, at least for the foreseeable future.
As mentioned, my brain is full kind of scrambled. It’s difficult to string thoughts together. I may try this again in a couple of days.
Edited to add – Somehow I managed to turn on a function I didn’t even know WordPress had, subscriber only access. If anyone visited earlier and got a subscriber only notice let me offer my sincere apologies. I don’t know why anyone reads this in the first place and I certainly don’t want to make it any more difficult to access.
- Shannon was having issues with her chronic pain left over from cancer treatment. She’s back to baseline now. It’s not like any of this or secret or anything but I’m lazy and don’t feel like typing out all the background context. If you want details feel free to ask her and I’m sure she’ll fill you in. ↩︎
Yikes! I am glad she is back to baseline. I know that is not great but better than ER level. Sorry you had to deal with that. Hang in there. I miss you brother.
Yikes indeed. That sounds fucking awful, no way around it. While nothing in what you described is anything that anyone would wish upon either of you, you can at least take some solace in the fact that, when it came down to it, you were able to get and keep yourself moving in order to do what needed to be done. That’s not nothing, and it speaks to your fundamental resilience.
I would hesitate to characterize anything I have displayed over the past two years as “resilience”
You’re still breathing, aren’t you? You’re not smoking pot or drinking nonstop. You aren’t abusing your wife or your animals. You’re actively working to find the fixes to your predicament, a situation that is completely debilitating, is none of your doing and has been festering for literally decades. Cut yourself some fucking slack, dude. Flagellating yourself over what you might view as failures on your part doesn’t actually help, no matter how good or “fair” it may feel according to the goblins lurking on some level of your mental subbasement. You have a basic desire to survive; that’s more than a lot of people have. Start with what you’ve got and build from there. We’re all here to help in any way we can. Seriously, we are. It’s not a slogan, it’s a fact. Test us: reach out and see what happens.