kapachino

Category: personal

  • A Rare Change In Routine

    I’ve discovered that I like showering at night.

    One evening I was feeling particularly bad about myself. It was one of those times when I decided to skip exercising and eat an entire Milky Way Midnight instead. I looked in the mirror and just felt…ugh. Even though it was already getting late, instead of plopping into bed like that I decided to adhere to a saying I learned from a cancer organization: “Look good, feel better.” I started by taking a shower. Next I did an exfoliation of my face, shaved my legs and arms, and lathered myself up with body cream. I blow-dried my hair. I put on a cute nightgown instead of my usual PJ pants and tank top. I scrubbed and moisturized my hands, which get dried out from washing and sanitizing a hundred times a day. Finally, I put on some lip gloss.

    After all that, I was tired. But I looked in the mirror, and I felt better. I slipped into bed and drifted off into a happy dream. When David came to join me a little while later, he nestled up to me and whispered in my half-sleep, “I love it when you shower at night. You smell good all over!”

    I’ve been following the same routine ever since.

  • Mondays

    Working on the Monday after I’ve worked a weekend is always the worst. The only good thing about working weekends is that they are usually a lot more laid back. The bosses aren’t there, patient testing is cut down to a minimum, and there aren’t a million doctors, residents, and other random people swarming the unit. Plus, the people I work with over the weekend are my favorite coworkers.

    But Monday…ugh. It’s my fourth day in a row to work, and we have admissions all over the place. I’m still training a new nurse, which takes a lot of patience. Not to mention we’ve had some really tough patients lately. That sentence doesn’t even begin to describe what I mean. There are times when I think about what a depressing place my unit can be. At the end of the day I am beyond exhausted. It’s a constant struggle for me to continue pouring myself into these needy patients day by day. It drains me, yet it is so gratifying.

    But the other day I was in the middle of helping a patient when out of nowhere she looked at me, smiled, and said, “You sure do love your job, don’t you?” I can’t think of a better compliment. Because I really do – I love my job. And I’m so glad it shows.

  • recovering

    For those of you who don’t know, my husband found out in the middle of last year that he has a condition in both of his hips that causes the bone to die due to lack of blood flow. The disease is very advanced in his right hip especially. It’s an extremely painful condition because it causes a deep, aching bone pain, similar to cancer of the bone. If left alone, eventually his hips will collapse.

    Since he’s so young, and hip replacements don’t last forever, we’ve tried a different procedure to help prolong the need for them. What they do is drill holes in his hips to clear out some of the dead bone and relieve the pressure. He had the surgery done on his left hip first, since there was more of a chance of it working. Yesterday he had it done on his right one.

    The doctor’s very words were that the procedure is a “Hail Mary” for his right hip, and if this doesn’t work he will have to get it replaced. Obviously we want to avoid that.

    Anyway, he came through the surgery alright, and I was able to get a really cute picture of him with his surgical gear on lying in the stretcher, but sorry ladies, that one’s for me to enjoy!

    Unfortunately, this recovery so far has been a lot harder on him because this hip was so much worse to begin with. He really should be staying in a hospital for a few days, but they just gave him a bunch of pain medicine after surgery and then sent him home within 45 minutes. Well, that medicine wore off in about 3 hours and what he has to take now isn’t covering it. I took today off work to be with him, and I’m doing all I can to make him comfortable. It’s so hard to see him like this.

    So right now, this is what is consuming our lives. That, and cleaning my house, which I needed to do for my own sanity. It’s not easy for either of us to be going through this. Him in miserable pain, unable to be of much help around the house and practically immobile, and me helpless to make his pain go away, with all the duties of the house and dogs and work on my back.

    There are times when I start to feel myself get irritable – not at David, but just at the situation. But all I do for him is worth it when he compliments me. He’s the best patient I’ve ever had, and taking care of him is definitely the most fulfilling.

  • I Guess They Trust Me

    Well I’ve been trying for days to post pictures from our new house and our wedding. After trying on three different computers and three different browsers and still getting faced with a blank page, I called my brother, my web-design guru. Turns out something has gone wrong with my software, so he will be fixing it soon hopefully!

    So I decided that just because I can’t put up pictures doesn’t mean I can’t write about SOMETHING. So here is something. I have been a nurse for about eight months now, and my director has asked me to precept (train) a new employee. Some have told me that I must be doing a great job to warrant this trust, but I personally think it’s more the case that we are running out of experienced nurses that can precept – we have had a lot of people leave for other jobs lately, for various reasons.

    My director had told me the nurse’s name that I would be training, that she was younger than I, and that she had graduated around the same time as I did and had been working at another job up until this point. Today she let me know that the nurse would be coming by the unit tomorrow and I’d get to meet her.

    Well, she showed up today, and as soon as I saw her, I recognized her! It’s an acquaintance I went to school with, recently married with a new last name, who is extremely friendly and who I always thought would be a really great nurse. This relieved a lot of my anxiety, because I am unsure of my ability to make a good first impression. Also, she is really easy to talk to. We’ve already had a phone conversation, which is crazy for me because I’m a chronic phone avoider.

    So the moral of the story is that I’m actually kind of excited about this now instead of nervous. I’m still not that experienced, but I know that the rest of our staff will help me whenever I need it.

  • Does This Mean I Need Another Vacation?

    Last night when I went to sleep at 8 p.m. David lay down in bed with me and took a nap. It was a nap because he could never ACTUALLY go to bed that early. Anyway, he decided to get up a couple of hours later, once I was already asleep. Apparently his movement stirred me halfway out of my dream, because I started talking to him. He thought I was completely awake.

    I wasn’t just babbling random words though, or so he tells me. I started clearly demanding that he give me all his prescriptions and medical records so that we could get him admitted to the hospital. Since I’m a nurse and he had been sleeping, he seriously thought that something was wrong with him. I was so insistent that he started to get really worried. 

    At this point I vaguely remember that I was trying extremely hard to convey something to him that seemed so obvious to me, and I didn’t know why he didn’t get it. Eventually he asked me if I was partly dreaming and I responded, “I thought you knew I was!” 

    When David reminded me this morning about what happened, I had no recollection of the events. He finished the story by telling me that I should try dreaming more about him than the hospital. My coworkers think this means that I need a vacation, and I tend to agree.