One less thing to do before I die...

So the mini storage place down the street from me was advertising a public auction on their LCD sign for today. I figured what the heck, there may be some great bargains, expecting that you would see individual stuff from storage units that had unpaid bills on them. Not so much. They auction off the Entire unit! And all you can do is look in you can't enter it before you bid. And you have to have it emptied that day or you pay rent on it for the full month. I watched four units get auctioned. The highest price was around $300. One unit went for $65. I did not bid on anything!

I also found that to look in someone's cluttered storage unit with garbage bags of stuff and broken furniture and whatnot is sorta depressing if you think about it long enough. In one unit right by the door there was a duffle bag that was full of photo albums. Someone's pictures got auctioned to the highest bidder. Kinda sad, ya know...

What would people think if they saw a storage unit full of my stuff? Trash or treasure?

Pringles

I am here to share with my blogging audience (which is said very tongue in cheek because at most I get like 8 hits a day on my blog) that my big weakness in life (o-kay one of my bog weaknesses in life) is Pringles. I love them. I bought a can at school Monday to "share" with my friends at lunch and finished the whole thing off my Tuesday afternoon. (BTW, none of my so called friends helped me out by even eating ONE Pringle so I would be able to say that I DIDN"T eat the whole thing by myself.) So there's my weakness. Now here's the reason why I am telling you this today. Lest night, Hubby brought home a Gallon sized zip lock bag stuffed with Pringles. Seems the children's department at church is doing a craft that required Pringles cans. Rather than beg for Pringles cans for months on end they just went out a bought a case or two and dumped the Pringles out and handed them out to the staff. So now I have a ridiculous amount of Pringles calling me from my pantry. I know I'm not going to be strong. The question really is how dry my mouth will be from all the salt by the time I'm done....

So the guy who has this collection may actually be a bigger Pringles fan than I...

Photo of the week...

Yesterday we all loaded up in the truck for an afternoon of Geocaching and outdoor fun. (If you don't know what geocaching is click the link above, it is a lot of fun!) We headed about 45 minutes south to Brazos Bend State Park. The park's claim to fame is its alligators, 100s of them. Unfortunately we didn't see any gators but we did see this guy...

James isn't really holding it but it looks like he is. Pretty cool. His hand is on the other side of the web to provide a background. The rangers will tell you that these guys are harmless but I maintain that if one got in my hair because I walked into its web, I would be seriously injured as i fell into a lake in my mad screaming fit to get it off and then the gators would have me for lunch! So far, knock on wood, we've seen lots of spiders on our adventures out there but have managed to steer clear.

Things in my mind at 6:45 on Saturday morning...

1. When I caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom this morning my first thought was, "Huh, I look like Garth today." The other famous person I've been known to look like is Tonya Harding. Still waiting for someone to mistake me for Charlize Theron...

2. I had my last clinical day on Thursday. If I could figure out a gentle way to make every hospitalized person move their bowels predictably and painlessly, I would be a rich woman. Pooping ( or lack thereof) is a major focus of life when people are in the hospital! We can inhibit the HIV virus from replicating on a biochemical level, we can kill cancer cells with radiation, but we can't make a constipated person go without lots of nasty side effects. Never would have guessed that...

3. In celebration of my last clinical day, I have a massage scheduled for this morning! Heavenly. I never schedule massages for myself just because I'd like one. I always wait until somone gives me one as a gift or soemthing like that.

4. Aside from my massage we have nothing scheduled for today, no soccer games, no birthday parties, no errands that HAVE to be run, NOTHING! How delightful. Not sure what we are going to do with our day but it almost doesn't matter. I'm just s pleased to have a day with my family.

5. Sing it sista-friend! Karen gives us some inspired wisdom about the ridiculousness of toys that are available for little girls these days. We currently own a Polly Pockets car race track that is actually pretty cool for a girls toy until you see what the cars are racing for....To get to the MALL. Blech!It makes me wonder....30 years ago, Barbie rode around in her Vette, hung out with her friends, had great clothes and a nice town house. Eventually that got her in trouble so she got a career. Teacher barbie, astronaut barbie, doctor barbie, pooper scooper dalk walker barbie. Now barbie's got an income so she has to spend it so the focus now is consumer Barbie. Is that how we got to a point where little girls only activity in life is to buy stuff? Or perhaps we have so over sensitized people to the political incorrectness of everything that the only activity left that doesn't piss off half the consumers out there is shopping. I dunno, but I HATE it!

6. I ought to be studying. 'Nuff said.

7. I love my morning coffee. I'm not a drink coffee all day sort of person but, man, I love that first cuppa in the morning.

8. Last one, next semester one of my clinical days will be in Labor and Delivery. Yippee!!!! Here's the delimma. Which hospital should I try to go to....Slightly progressive, has a midwifery group that delivers there (major plus), where wealthy white women go to have their babies, (also where i was assigned to clinical this last semester), still accept medicaid patients, plenty of resources vs. county hospital, delivers LOTS of babies (big plus), will probably be able to assist more because of the busyness of L&D, will probably be harder emotionally because of the assembly line nature of it all. Weigh in, dear readers, with your votes....

Patho test!

On my last post I was off to take a patho test. Took it, aced it, went home and enjoyed a glass of wine with my hubby! I got a 95 on the test. I LOVE getting good grades. I'm sure everyone does but getting an A on a test is the same thrill as finding a really great bargain on something that you really needed anyway, or realizing that you've lost weight. It is a thrill that says with me for a couple days. And with the way the nursing school curriculum is about the time that thrill wears off, I've got another test to take! Ha!

I'm getting a lot of questions from my classmates about how I study. And the fact is that I don't study for hours on end, which I'm sure is just demoralizing for those that do study for hours and then barely pass. One thing is that I realized how much I have learned about medicine just from having kids who get sick with normal kid stuff and who have gotten sick with some pretty out there kid stuff (we had a rheumatic fever scare a year ago, turned out it wasn't but I learned a lot fabout rheumatic fever and valvular heart disease in the process). So my new answer is that I have kids and I watch House. I still don't think they believe me! I think the real answer is, I have kids, I watch House (and pay attention to the medical stuff looking up things on the Internet that i don't understand), I have subscribed to the Medscape weekly rundown of exciting new journal articles for a couple years (and I read a couple of them!), I read books about medical stuff just for fun, and friends and family have called me for medical advice for a long long time and I'm usually right in line with what their docs tell them. So I guess that's why I get good grades on the tests!

Oh, and, 6 year old survived her fieild trip just fine without us.

Leave it to a 6 year old to bring you back to earth

So after my cautious post about how wonderful things are going my 6 year old cried off and on for about an hour yesterday that neither of her parents were going on her Kindergarten field trip. Now really, this kid has a flair for the dramatic and I saw a significant lack of tears in all te wailing but I just had to laugh at the irony of it all! And the funniest part is that when I was a full time stay at home mom i couldn't go on field trips with the other girls because I had a baby or toddler at hoem that i needed to take care of!

Karen - Thanks so much for your comments. I soooo appreciate what you said. I was thinking today that it is true that the girls don't need me as much any more. So I guess the balance is that even though I may have been happier working when they were little, they needed me too much. My sense of fulfillment and happiness is easily sacrificed because of their need for me to be there. And because they needed me more being home with them was pretty fulfilling for me too. Now , though, they are older and our needs have balanced out some. And that is why all of this is working out so well.

Off to see what I made on my Pathophysiology test...

True confessions

Yeah, it's nothing juicy so get your mind out of the gutter.

No the tue confession today is about how much I love being in school and how much more settled i feel with more on my plate than I did when I was strictly a stay at home mom. Now part of that is just the nature of being a SAHM when the kids are babies. Somedays it is good some days it is really really hard, especially when you are doing the toddler years for several years on end as several kids move through that phase. I know that staying home was the right thing to do. I have no doubt about that. In fact it wasn't even a struggle to decide to do so. I hardly had an exciting career I was leaving behind! (I worked for a hospital system in PR writing articles for internal publication with a whopping salary of $16,000/ year.) And honestly, I have not had a lot of sympathy for women who say that they "just couldn't stay home, they'd go crazy!" or "I'm a better mom when I'm working." It was really hard for me to understand that on any level. I'd read studies that say that moms who are working feel less stress than moms who stay at home and pretty much blew them off. But let me tell you, the last 10 weeks or so have been so GREAT! I'm doing really well in school so that definitely helps the stress levels. But more than that, I've lost weight, I'm very content and settled feeling, despite the increased activity, and I can't tell you the number of people who have stopped me at church and said things like, "You look wonderful!" or even "Whatever you are doing, keep doing it, I've never seen you look better." And that's LOTS of people, ranging from thsoe who know about nursing school to those that don't.

I've invested so much into my kids over the last 11 years that it makes me feel a little guilty that I like this so much. Shouldn't I be miserable being away from them? Shouldn't I be totally stressed out and sleep deprived? Do my feelings of contentedness now mean that i would have been a better mom if I'd done this long ago? I hope not. I hope that as hard as staying home with little ones was in retrospect that it was worth it. And I hope that as much as I like this now I am not missing the signs that this is negatively affecting my kids. They seem pretty good too. They talk about wishing that i didn't have to go to nursing school oin this day or that day but the fact is that they have to go to school too!

Anyway, that's what I've been pondering lately.

All Saints Sunday

Albrecht Durer "Adoration"

Today at church was All Saints Sunday. We remember all the members of our church who have moved from the Church Militant to the Church Triumphant over the last year. In non-church speak that's all the folks who have died. At our church we sing the hymn "For All the Saints" and after each verse pause as the pastor's take turns reading from the Necrology (Non-church speak: the list of names of the people who have died.) It makes me cry and feel great thanksgiving at the same time. I grew up with hymns in church. Then moved to the more contemporary praise chorus worship. Didn't like the hymns much as a kid. Didn't understand them. As an adolescent and young adult theworld of comtemporary worship music was very very appealing. It was my languarge. Now, though, I have a new appreciation for the complexity of the lyrics of hymns. There is often so much good theology represented in beautiful language. "For All the Saints" is one of the great hymns in my mind. Somehow that hymn makes me feel like the two churches, visible and invisible are connected in one reality at least for a moment.

For All the Saints

1. For all the saints, who from their labors rest,
who thee by faith before the world confessed,
thy name, O Jesus, be forever blest.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

2. Thou wast their rock, their fortress, and their might;
thou Lord, their captain in the well-fought fight;
thou in the darkness drear, their one true light.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

3. O may thy soldiers, faithful, true, and bold,
fight as the saints who nobly fought of old,
and win with them the victor's crown of gold.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

4. O blest communion, fellowship divine!
We feebly struggle, they in glory shine;
yet all are one in thee, for all are thine.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

5. And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long,
steals on the ear the distant triumph song,
and hearts are brave again, and arms are strong.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

6. From earth's wide bounds, from ocean's farthest coast,
through gates of pearl streams in the countless host,
singing to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost:
Alleluia, Alleluia!

Drug seeking or in pain?????

So today for clinical day I had a patient who had lots of stuff wrong with him. That's nothing new. Most people who end up on a general medical floor in a hospital for any length of time have lots of issues!

When I met him this morning he was very sleepy but very polite. Answered my questions, said please and thank you, yes ma'am and no ma'am. I bumbled around with the blood pressure machine as I tried to figure out where the small size cuff was and he didn't say anything or even seem to notice.

I don't want to say too much because of confidentiality so I'm trying to choose my words carefully....

After breakfast he complained of pain in his abdomen. Rated it over a 10 on a pain scale. His nurse (the real one, hahaha) blew him off and said to me later, "He's just looking for drugs, did you see him!" Yes, there were some physical aspects of him that one might associate with a wild and crazy lifestyle. But seriously, this guy is too sick to sit up in bed, doesn't live independently and somehow is jonesing for a fix 24 hours out of ICU. And with everything worng with this guy, who cares if he is addicted to morphine! I hope someone gets me nice and addicted if I am ever in the kind of shape he is in. That's what morphine is for!!!!!!!!!!!!

I was appalled. The pt picked up on it too. He said he didn't like her (the nurse) wanted someone else to take care of him. The nurse said she would page his doc and see about getting him something stronger for the pain. 6 hours later the doc showed up for rounds and the pt finally got some morphine.

Now the fact is that the nurse didn't withhold pain meds. He didn't have orders for anything else. But we are nurses. We are supposed to be at least interested in alleviating suffering. Maybe I'm naive but it seems to me that at least being interested and taking a pt's report of pain seriously does something to alleviate it.

Please, readers, if I get to be a nurse and write a post about some drug seeking pt and act all superior because I've judged this pt based on his history or physical appearance yell at me. YOU CAN EVEN USE ALL CAPS!