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verushka70So I had the "official" hospital orientation this week. New Employee Orientation on Monday (7:30am-3:30pm), then New Nurse Orientation Tuesday and Wednesday (8:00am-4:00am, ostensibly, but since I'd already attended some of the classes, I got to leave early both days).
Okay, aside from being boring, my biggest problem with all three days was that the A/C was on when it was in the low 60s outside (15.5-17.5 C), and the temperature in the conference rooms we were in was in the high 50s (14-14.5 C). I was freezing my ass off -- EVERYONE was, except the two men (of course). We tried everything, we fiddled with the thermostat (we turned it up to 90, to try to get the heat to come on, but that didn't work).
The second day, one girl came in with a full size but thin fleece blanket. The third day, I brought my Farm & Fleet insulated mens XXL hoodie jacket (which comes to my mid-thighs) AND a small electric heater I borrowed from my mother's bathroom. Everyone wanted to sit near me! But before the Risk Management speaker could come in, the orientation coordinator asked me to turn it off and hide it. Apparently, you're not supposed to bring in your own heating equipment.
WhatEVER. It was fucking cold. This touched off a bad neck spasm in me (I was sitting right under a vent), despite my hoodie, because I just couldn't sit there with the hood on and be taken seriously as an R.N. So I didn't have the hood up. So I got the neck spasm. So when I got home, I took two of my mom's Vicodin. Or so I thought. But they weren't Vicodin, they were Norco. So instead of taking twice the usual dosage of Vicodin, I actually took FOUR TIMES the usual dosage of narcotic, got nauseous, and vomited a couple hours later. All because the fucking hospital's A/C could not be turned off and I had a cold draft blowing on my neck for two days. Actually, no matter where you sat, you almost couldn't avoid the drafts from the vents.
I'm so glad the ER is too busy for me to get cold standing or sitting around. But I do understand it's damn cold for the patients (which is really stupid, imho). The last day I worked (last Wed. or Thurs.) I ended up bringing the warm blankets from the blanket warmers for some of the patients who were there for hours freezing their butts off.
So begins Indian Summer in Chicago. I heard on the radio that, apparently, the Farmer's Almanac is predicting that 2008 will be the warmest year ever. How they get that from this unseasonably cold (and wet) August and early September, I don't know.
On Monday, I was supposed to meet a friend for dinner, but he was late, so I was hanging out in the Borders in Hyde Park waiting for him. They had William Gibson's new book 20% off, and I still had money from my first ER nurse paycheck in the bank... I bought it (and a true crime book of 150 years of crime photography that was on clearance for $4.99).
Oh, I love it already. I just love the way Gibson writes; I always have. Reading Neuromancer was like reading Burgess' "A Clockwork Orange" -- I felt like I needed a glossary, but it was something I was driven to understand and visualize. Since that novel, of course, his writing has become much more conventional, but I still love it. I still love his style. It's digressive, sometimes, peppered with details which may be important or banal, you don't know which -- just like life.
I remember in the documentary "No Maps For These Territories" he explained that when fans of Neuromancer ask him why nothing he wrote after that was written in that same style, he tells them that he can't write the way he wrote Neuromancer because he isn't the same person that he was when he wrote Neuromancer.
In my secret heart of hearts where I long to be "a real writer" but haven't got the confidence to actually try (yet), I understand that. I think I've lived that, at least a little bit. I've tried to go back and finish some unfinished slashfic series, and it's hard. (I guess it's like that cliche, where they say you have your whole life to write your first novel, but you only get a year or two to write your second.) Because I'm not the person I was when I started them or when I was deep in the middle of writing them. So many "life changing events" happened to me in the interim (my injuries and medical leave from work, my father's accident, deterioration, death, my lay-off, my career change/going back to school, my mother and step-father's diagnoses and battles with cancer, which are ongoing), I simply can't BE the person who started those series.
In the most recent news related to my mom & stepdad's cancers, my mom's seems to be in check. But the latest scan of my step-dad shows the metastatic lesions on his liver have grown in size (although the size was only reported in 2 dimensions, rather than three, so how deep they are, I don't know), and they have grown in his mandible (lower jaw bone), ribs, and have appeared in spots where they weren't before, such as the interior surfaces of his pelvic bones. (You'd think they would have appeared in the latter spots first, but such is the way lymph flows in the body, that they didn't).
His doctor told my mother that they had basically three choices: ketoconazole (an anti-fungal, which for some reason has anti-hormonal effects that control prostatic cancer), a different chemo drug whose name I forget right now -- and HOSPICE. She about fell off the chair when he told her that. She came home very concerned & shaken (my stepdad, of course, was characteristically silent, went to watch TV, and then said nothing about it). She asked me to read the report, so I did, and asked me if I really thought he needed to be on hospice.
I noted that I am by no means an expert or a doctor, but that if he is still walking to his other garage four blocks away to tinker on the scooter he's making with a lawnmower motor -- if he is still climbing up and down the 15 stairs to their apartment to go outside and barbecue on the new used gas grill he got that he loves -- if he is still trying to get her to go camping (which he is), then obviously his daily functioning is not affected too terribly much by pain or physical limitations. And I told her that I thought she would know when he needed to be on hospice, because he would start behaving like someone who needed to be on hospice -- needing pain relief, actually ASKING for pain relief, no longer doing things he enjoys, shrinking his sphere of activity down until it is just within the apartment or just within a couple rooms.
She seemed to grasp all that and agree, but what do I know? my only experiences with hospice were with my grandmother & my dad. My dad was wheelchair bound for two years before he died, so his sphere of activity was already quite limited. But his turning away from the world, from books, from the BBC and Deutsche-Welle news -- those had begun before he stopped using his walker. So I don't know. I guess my stepdad does spend increasing amounts of day time hours asleep in his recliner in front of the TV. More than before. But just this morning he was complaining to her that her scheduling of both of their doctor appointments in early October wasn't giving them a good solid week to go camping. So I don't know. I just don't know. It's the uncertainty that really gets you, hanging like a sword of Damocles over everything and everyone you love.
After all that, well, it just makes me want to walk to the grocery store in the Indian Summer sunshine to pick up the cat food I know my cats need. Because there's only so many days like that left in my life, you know? It's why I get so irritated with my significant trouble when all he wants to do is go "out" to movies or dinner. To me, that's not going "out" -- that's just going "in" to a different enclosed space, away from the world, the sun, the breezes, what nature there is among us in our increasingly urbanized area.
I'd rather be sitting on a park bench in a park looking up at what few stars are visible among the light pollution here, or riding our bikes. But he never seems to want to do that stuff. I don't want to do it all alone, but I'm getting to that point of thinking I'll never do it if I'm always waiting for when he wants to do it. I don't want to spend the time I have left waiting for someone to accompany me who probably never will want to because he just doesn't like it as much as I do.
And people keep asking, "So when are you guys getting married?" and I think, this is even less likely than before -- we know each other too well, now. I know all the ways he doesn't fit me and I see all the ways I don't fit him. But because we've been together so long, people think it's going to turn into something solid. Well, if it does, it will be from complacency, not mad love. We're well past the mad love. I think that ended after my father died and his father got cancer and his mother had the shoulder replacement surgery and all the other shit happened in my family.
I sometimes think about how routine and predictable and moderately satisfying our sex is, how we never do anything different in bed, how I could do it in my sleep, and how often I think of ex-lovers from a decade or two in my past with longing. But I also know that if I looked up my ex-lovers, they'd be different too, and I could not have with them now what I had with them then (if we had anything in common, other than sex) because not only am I a different person than that carefree girl of 20 was, but they will be different too -- life will have beat them up in varying ways just as it has beat me up. And even if they were single and free, and even if I were, it would not be a solution to the malaise I feel with my bf.
Maybe it's just malaise. Or ennui. Or what they call "amotivational syndrome." I finished nursing school, I got a job, I'm working again -- and I'm just tired. I want things the way I want them, but I'm too old and tired to foolishly go off and try to make things the way I want them, because now I know that sometimes it's not good to get what you want, and the problem is that you just don't want what you have.
When M----- and I fight now, I just don't even bother fighting sometimes. I just drop what I was doing and leave the room, or stop talking. Because there is no point further discussing the ways we don't fit each other -- and never will. There is no symbiotic perfect love. That's a haze of biochemistry, of sex hormones that grips you for the first 6-12 months and then inevitably fades. And I don't see the point in repeating things I've said before. Even our arguments are routine.
But when people ask me if we're getting married, I think, Does he even want to marry me? If he did, wouldn't he have done so already? Got a ring, proposed, dragged me to city hall, whatever? We've been together for over four years (okay, we were on and off for much of the first three).
More importantly, if I really wanted to be married -- to him or anyone else -- wouldn't I be already? I mean, if that was REALLY the most important thing to me, wouldn't I have found a way to accomplish that? Lesser women do, all the time.
It's like we're both affected by terminal "can't shit or get off the pot." The bottom line is, I am not sure I really want to be married. I don't know if I want to be legally and financially linked with M----- -- or anyone else, for that matter. I'm too stubborn, independent, too much of a loner in many ways no man (or friend) has ever really understood. Maybe it's the clinical depression I've suffered ever since I can remember, but I don't think so, because then I would be more unhappy when I'm alone -- and sometimes I'm not.
Sometimes I think of what a huge sigh of relief I would heave if I could get rid of M------ without it hurting him or me or disappointing everyone around us who now seems to expect us to get hitched like we're a done deal. How cool it would be to work a year in this ER and then move off to Colorado, Washington state, Alaska, other states where they need nurses. I never factor him (or children) into these thoughts -- because I guess I don't want to.
That whole "you can never leave because you're tied down" feeling -- isn't that what made my mother (and therefore us kids) endure an increasingly cruel relationship with my father for years beyond when she should have ended it? Her dependence (financially, but also emotionally, because she'd gotten married when she was 19, when she was really still just a baby herself)?
I don't have that. Sometimes it's the most fantastic feeling in the world to feel I am not dependent on anyone (although obviously I have a support network of friends and family, although the latter can be almost as much of a drag & a downer as they can a help). Other times, the way everything else is in this society, I wonder if I'm abnormal for feeling so free and enjoying it so much. As if, by virtue of possessing a vagina, I'm supposed to need someone else to validate my existence.
Who knows. I suppose if M------ were to disappear tomorrow I'd be upset. But even as I write that, I don't know for certain that that is true. Some small sneaky part of me feels it would be a thankfully easy way out of a future I'm not to certain I want to enact with him. Or anyone.
And then the idea of dying alone, like my dad, hits me... and makes me wonder if everything I just wrote isn't just a lot of bullshit. Makes me wonder if I wouldn't be even more miserable. But then, if I died in the midst of dementia like my dad -- a reasonable expectation, given that half my genetic material came from him -- I guess I would not know -- and probably would not care. I would live completely in now, like he did at the end -- no memories, no expectations. Only the moment. And that doesn't seem so bad. It just seems impossible to achieve without dementia, no matter how much yoga and meditation one tries.
Okay, aside from being boring, my biggest problem with all three days was that the A/C was on when it was in the low 60s outside (15.5-17.5 C), and the temperature in the conference rooms we were in was in the high 50s (14-14.5 C). I was freezing my ass off -- EVERYONE was, except the two men (of course). We tried everything, we fiddled with the thermostat (we turned it up to 90, to try to get the heat to come on, but that didn't work).
The second day, one girl came in with a full size but thin fleece blanket. The third day, I brought my Farm & Fleet insulated mens XXL hoodie jacket (which comes to my mid-thighs) AND a small electric heater I borrowed from my mother's bathroom. Everyone wanted to sit near me! But before the Risk Management speaker could come in, the orientation coordinator asked me to turn it off and hide it. Apparently, you're not supposed to bring in your own heating equipment.
WhatEVER. It was fucking cold. This touched off a bad neck spasm in me (I was sitting right under a vent), despite my hoodie, because I just couldn't sit there with the hood on and be taken seriously as an R.N. So I didn't have the hood up. So I got the neck spasm. So when I got home, I took two of my mom's Vicodin. Or so I thought. But they weren't Vicodin, they were Norco. So instead of taking twice the usual dosage of Vicodin, I actually took FOUR TIMES the usual dosage of narcotic, got nauseous, and vomited a couple hours later. All because the fucking hospital's A/C could not be turned off and I had a cold draft blowing on my neck for two days. Actually, no matter where you sat, you almost couldn't avoid the drafts from the vents.
I'm so glad the ER is too busy for me to get cold standing or sitting around. But I do understand it's damn cold for the patients (which is really stupid, imho). The last day I worked (last Wed. or Thurs.) I ended up bringing the warm blankets from the blanket warmers for some of the patients who were there for hours freezing their butts off.
So begins Indian Summer in Chicago. I heard on the radio that, apparently, the Farmer's Almanac is predicting that 2008 will be the warmest year ever. How they get that from this unseasonably cold (and wet) August and early September, I don't know.
On Monday, I was supposed to meet a friend for dinner, but he was late, so I was hanging out in the Borders in Hyde Park waiting for him. They had William Gibson's new book 20% off, and I still had money from my first ER nurse paycheck in the bank... I bought it (and a true crime book of 150 years of crime photography that was on clearance for $4.99).
Oh, I love it already. I just love the way Gibson writes; I always have. Reading Neuromancer was like reading Burgess' "A Clockwork Orange" -- I felt like I needed a glossary, but it was something I was driven to understand and visualize. Since that novel, of course, his writing has become much more conventional, but I still love it. I still love his style. It's digressive, sometimes, peppered with details which may be important or banal, you don't know which -- just like life.
I remember in the documentary "No Maps For These Territories" he explained that when fans of Neuromancer ask him why nothing he wrote after that was written in that same style, he tells them that he can't write the way he wrote Neuromancer because he isn't the same person that he was when he wrote Neuromancer.
In my secret heart of hearts where I long to be "a real writer" but haven't got the confidence to actually try (yet), I understand that. I think I've lived that, at least a little bit. I've tried to go back and finish some unfinished slashfic series, and it's hard. (I guess it's like that cliche, where they say you have your whole life to write your first novel, but you only get a year or two to write your second.) Because I'm not the person I was when I started them or when I was deep in the middle of writing them. So many "life changing events" happened to me in the interim (my injuries and medical leave from work, my father's accident, deterioration, death, my lay-off, my career change/going back to school, my mother and step-father's diagnoses and battles with cancer, which are ongoing), I simply can't BE the person who started those series.
In the most recent news related to my mom & stepdad's cancers, my mom's seems to be in check. But the latest scan of my step-dad shows the metastatic lesions on his liver have grown in size (although the size was only reported in 2 dimensions, rather than three, so how deep they are, I don't know), and they have grown in his mandible (lower jaw bone), ribs, and have appeared in spots where they weren't before, such as the interior surfaces of his pelvic bones. (You'd think they would have appeared in the latter spots first, but such is the way lymph flows in the body, that they didn't).
His doctor told my mother that they had basically three choices: ketoconazole (an anti-fungal, which for some reason has anti-hormonal effects that control prostatic cancer), a different chemo drug whose name I forget right now -- and HOSPICE. She about fell off the chair when he told her that. She came home very concerned & shaken (my stepdad, of course, was characteristically silent, went to watch TV, and then said nothing about it). She asked me to read the report, so I did, and asked me if I really thought he needed to be on hospice.
I noted that I am by no means an expert or a doctor, but that if he is still walking to his other garage four blocks away to tinker on the scooter he's making with a lawnmower motor -- if he is still climbing up and down the 15 stairs to their apartment to go outside and barbecue on the new used gas grill he got that he loves -- if he is still trying to get her to go camping (which he is), then obviously his daily functioning is not affected too terribly much by pain or physical limitations. And I told her that I thought she would know when he needed to be on hospice, because he would start behaving like someone who needed to be on hospice -- needing pain relief, actually ASKING for pain relief, no longer doing things he enjoys, shrinking his sphere of activity down until it is just within the apartment or just within a couple rooms.
She seemed to grasp all that and agree, but what do I know? my only experiences with hospice were with my grandmother & my dad. My dad was wheelchair bound for two years before he died, so his sphere of activity was already quite limited. But his turning away from the world, from books, from the BBC and Deutsche-Welle news -- those had begun before he stopped using his walker. So I don't know. I guess my stepdad does spend increasing amounts of day time hours asleep in his recliner in front of the TV. More than before. But just this morning he was complaining to her that her scheduling of both of their doctor appointments in early October wasn't giving them a good solid week to go camping. So I don't know. I just don't know. It's the uncertainty that really gets you, hanging like a sword of Damocles over everything and everyone you love.
After all that, well, it just makes me want to walk to the grocery store in the Indian Summer sunshine to pick up the cat food I know my cats need. Because there's only so many days like that left in my life, you know? It's why I get so irritated with my significant trouble when all he wants to do is go "out" to movies or dinner. To me, that's not going "out" -- that's just going "in" to a different enclosed space, away from the world, the sun, the breezes, what nature there is among us in our increasingly urbanized area.
I'd rather be sitting on a park bench in a park looking up at what few stars are visible among the light pollution here, or riding our bikes. But he never seems to want to do that stuff. I don't want to do it all alone, but I'm getting to that point of thinking I'll never do it if I'm always waiting for when he wants to do it. I don't want to spend the time I have left waiting for someone to accompany me who probably never will want to because he just doesn't like it as much as I do.
And people keep asking, "So when are you guys getting married?" and I think, this is even less likely than before -- we know each other too well, now. I know all the ways he doesn't fit me and I see all the ways I don't fit him. But because we've been together so long, people think it's going to turn into something solid. Well, if it does, it will be from complacency, not mad love. We're well past the mad love. I think that ended after my father died and his father got cancer and his mother had the shoulder replacement surgery and all the other shit happened in my family.
I sometimes think about how routine and predictable and moderately satisfying our sex is, how we never do anything different in bed, how I could do it in my sleep, and how often I think of ex-lovers from a decade or two in my past with longing. But I also know that if I looked up my ex-lovers, they'd be different too, and I could not have with them now what I had with them then (if we had anything in common, other than sex) because not only am I a different person than that carefree girl of 20 was, but they will be different too -- life will have beat them up in varying ways just as it has beat me up. And even if they were single and free, and even if I were, it would not be a solution to the malaise I feel with my bf.
Maybe it's just malaise. Or ennui. Or what they call "amotivational syndrome." I finished nursing school, I got a job, I'm working again -- and I'm just tired. I want things the way I want them, but I'm too old and tired to foolishly go off and try to make things the way I want them, because now I know that sometimes it's not good to get what you want, and the problem is that you just don't want what you have.
When M----- and I fight now, I just don't even bother fighting sometimes. I just drop what I was doing and leave the room, or stop talking. Because there is no point further discussing the ways we don't fit each other -- and never will. There is no symbiotic perfect love. That's a haze of biochemistry, of sex hormones that grips you for the first 6-12 months and then inevitably fades. And I don't see the point in repeating things I've said before. Even our arguments are routine.
But when people ask me if we're getting married, I think, Does he even want to marry me? If he did, wouldn't he have done so already? Got a ring, proposed, dragged me to city hall, whatever? We've been together for over four years (okay, we were on and off for much of the first three).
More importantly, if I really wanted to be married -- to him or anyone else -- wouldn't I be already? I mean, if that was REALLY the most important thing to me, wouldn't I have found a way to accomplish that? Lesser women do, all the time.
It's like we're both affected by terminal "can't shit or get off the pot." The bottom line is, I am not sure I really want to be married. I don't know if I want to be legally and financially linked with M----- -- or anyone else, for that matter. I'm too stubborn, independent, too much of a loner in many ways no man (or friend) has ever really understood. Maybe it's the clinical depression I've suffered ever since I can remember, but I don't think so, because then I would be more unhappy when I'm alone -- and sometimes I'm not.
Sometimes I think of what a huge sigh of relief I would heave if I could get rid of M------ without it hurting him or me or disappointing everyone around us who now seems to expect us to get hitched like we're a done deal. How cool it would be to work a year in this ER and then move off to Colorado, Washington state, Alaska, other states where they need nurses. I never factor him (or children) into these thoughts -- because I guess I don't want to.
That whole "you can never leave because you're tied down" feeling -- isn't that what made my mother (and therefore us kids) endure an increasingly cruel relationship with my father for years beyond when she should have ended it? Her dependence (financially, but also emotionally, because she'd gotten married when she was 19, when she was really still just a baby herself)?
I don't have that. Sometimes it's the most fantastic feeling in the world to feel I am not dependent on anyone (although obviously I have a support network of friends and family, although the latter can be almost as much of a drag & a downer as they can a help). Other times, the way everything else is in this society, I wonder if I'm abnormal for feeling so free and enjoying it so much. As if, by virtue of possessing a vagina, I'm supposed to need someone else to validate my existence.
Who knows. I suppose if M------ were to disappear tomorrow I'd be upset. But even as I write that, I don't know for certain that that is true. Some small sneaky part of me feels it would be a thankfully easy way out of a future I'm not to certain I want to enact with him. Or anyone.
And then the idea of dying alone, like my dad, hits me... and makes me wonder if everything I just wrote isn't just a lot of bullshit. Makes me wonder if I wouldn't be even more miserable. But then, if I died in the midst of dementia like my dad -- a reasonable expectation, given that half my genetic material came from him -- I guess I would not know -- and probably would not care. I would live completely in now, like he did at the end -- no memories, no expectations. Only the moment. And that doesn't seem so bad. It just seems impossible to achieve without dementia, no matter how much yoga and meditation one tries.