Wisdom and Humor: Two complimentary flavors

I am blessed to have people in my life who share their humor and wisdom. My friend Dan is one such person. I recently stumbled upon these two gems of his succinct, sound advice:

If ever you feel ill, sweaty though you may be, refrain from removing too many articles of clothing because, were you to pass out, the people that find you will not have the initial response to be of assistance, but rather they first will wonder why you are not wearing clothes.

If ever you read or listen to something and you hear trumpets in the background, stop, step back, and reevaluate. Take most things with a grain of salt.

If SB5 Wins, We All Lose

Generally speaking, I am politically uninclined. I refrain from political discussion to keep my blood pressure in check. There is however a current issue I have no choice but to address, not for my own well being, but for the sake of my patients. I am a nurse at a local hospital and therefore a member of the nursing union therein. This union is vital for supporting the safe staffing of the hospital as well as providing equal pay and fair treatment of nurses. In the last year, we have been facing crippling staffing shortages. The only thing that has allowed for the hospital to continue to run with a safe number of nurses is the section in our contract allowing for mandation which, for better or worse, allows us to never work a shift with less nurses than required for safe patient care. Without this stipulation in our union contract, our patients would suffer from overtaxed nurses who barely have time to address the bare minimum care due to being spread so thin. There would be a massive increase in burnt out nurses thus perpetuating the strain on patient care.

I do not preach the integrity of unions as a whole and I am not seeking to save equal pay and benefits. I am seeking a repeal of Senate Bill 5 to ensure my patients, and your family members who come through my hospital receive the care they need and deserve by supporting a nursing union which guarantees safe nurse staffing.
 
Ohio Senate Bill 5 Summary

UPDATE: I got published :) Columbus Dispatch 9/30/11

This doesn't taste right

I’m sitting on a plane amongst 50 strangers and the thought that just popped into my head was “Jane is going to die.” I understand how that would seem morbid and hopefully not the most normal of thoughts to pass through ones head, but I suppose after the last few weeks I have had, it is rather apropos. I shall explain.

I am a nurse, a cancer one. The general response received when this information is made known is something along the lines of “Oh, wow. It takes a very special person to be able to deal with all that.” The that being referred to is “death.” I suppose the euphemism serves to blunt the depressive nature of the topic. I tend to take this comment graciously but quickly blow it off since it has never been any big deal to me. I love my job and care deeply for my patients, don’t get me wrong, but for me, cancer nursing wasn’t so much as a calling as it was simply where I got a job. Still, there seems to be a general consensus of which I am not a part, that cancer nursing is somehow a more emotionally painful profession than other areas. I can only assume this is because cancer is, indiscriminately, a mass murdering fuckhead, and in many cases you don’t know it is trying to kill you until it’s nearly too late to attempt a fight. Be that as it may, the majority of my time at work is spent laughing and drug pushing; rarely do I get noticeably upset.

Ok, so back to Jane, (Jane is not her real name, so you know. It is her alias that I made up to protect her identity from all the many people who will fail to honor the HIPPA gods). Jane, as I mentioned so poignantly before, is dying. This may elicit a variety of emotion but today, for me, it brought frustration and anger, not that Jane was dealt such a sad hand in her 29 year life, but that the doctor’s were too cowardly to tell her point blank that she is headed to deaths door and that Jane and her mother were too stupid to figure it out on their own. Jane and her mother are under the impression that the tumor she has in her shoulder which metastasized from her stage IV ovarian cancer, is going to get all better after the hell that is radiation therapy. In reality, Jane is dying. I feel it important to repeat this statement so as to emphasize just how cold I have become. While Jane is in excruciating pain with a bone tumor, a possible brain tumor, and is living with a belly which lacks all her woman parts because of the ovarian cancer which started the party, I am entertaining thoughts that she is being whiny and stupid to let her family, especially her three boys think that she is going to be all better soon. It is not until I have de-stressed from this last shift by showering, playing with my dog, packing and boarding a plane to Philadelphia that I process how horrible I have become. Jane is going to die. Jane is going to leave behind 3 young sons, a mother who loves her and countless friends. Jane is going to die and I have become so numb to this reality that I am probably in worse denial than she is. Ok maybe that is an unfair statement, but I certainly am living with a mindset that death isn’t real and the repercussions don’t exist. I can argue that this is a necessary defense mechanism for me to cope with my job but if the result is being annoyed by a dying woman’s pain, then how helpful is it in making me a good compassionate nurse?

Jane is dying and crying, I am living and bitching. Time to reevaluate.

A Dash of Karma and a Pinch of Prayer

This afternoon as I was leaving the gas station, the angle created by my jeep and the truck in front of me, caused a woman desiring to enter the gas station parking lot to be momentarily delayed. I can only assume she was in despirate need of gas, a fountain drink, or a pack of smokes, because in the 10 extra seconds she was required to wait before the truck and I could advance thus clearing a path for her little Honda, she unleashed a vile rath of what, as a lady, I am disinclined to repeat along with several gestures of undeniable meaning. I found myself speechless. Very rarely does this occur but I was stunned and the only response I could muster was a shrug. As I exited the parking lot and contemplated how I should have responded, my first thought was to have returned the gestures, or i could have rolled down my window to attempt to reason with this irrational woman. After vetoing my own first ideas, I decided to simply, pray. I prayed that someone be nice to her today and that whatever there is in her life which is causing her to present herself in such an offensive way, may be soon resolved. It may not have done her any good, but it kept me from doing something to make her feel any worse about humanity and it gave me peace with the situation, so it certainly didn't hurt.

Square Peg, Round Jar

I've had two major relationships in my life and in breaking them down to brass tacks, I made the same mistakes in both, I was just better at justifying things the second go around. Both times, I looked for the wrong signs indicating success and was so certain both times that my family just didn't understand how good these guys were for me. I was blind to my unhappiness in the first relationship and it wasn't until after the break up that my family revealed their misgivings. In the second, I thought if my family could see that with this guy I was happy, they would agree that we were perfect for one another. When that failed and my mother, father, sisters, and brother still disapproved of the match, I convinced myself they didn't understand our love and they lacked faith in my ability to have a healthy relationship because of my past experience. Let me say that again so as to emphasize the craziness -- I convinced myself that the 5 people who have known me all my life, who know me better than anyone in the world, were ill equipped to judge my compatability with someone I had met only a year prior. I knew they were wrong and I set out to prove to them just how wrong they were, and in the process, I discovered in 1 year and 2 months what they knew from the start. My first reaction, once the river of tears momentarily paused, "Dammit! My mom was fucking right!" One of the scariest feelings in the world is when it is made abundantly clear that someone knows you better than yourself. It is a very vulnerable position in which to find oneself. The remedy, to call your mom letting her know she was right and finding out that the only thing she cares about is that you are hurting.

Be cherished! That is the inscription on the claddagh ring my parents got for me for my birthday several years ago. Not "be tolerated" not "find someone who will put up with you" not "find some one indifferent to you." It says, Be Cherished! as in find someone who feels like the luckiest bastard in the world to have found you, someone who feels they can't live with out you, who puts you first, who dreams of spending the rest of his life getting to know you, someone for whom you feel the same way. The problem with my relationships and what my family could see that I couldn't, I found guys who at that point in their lives, felt I was the lucky one that they would love me. As far as syntax goes, it is a small distinction, but in practice, it is everything. Both times, this thinking resulted in my reverting to the mentality of a 5 year old in the presence of my significant other, I became an insecure, dependent, attention seeking, little girl who I hated and didn't recognize, but avoiding her was strangely difficult. It was also counter productive because rarely do those behaviors inspire anyone other than the mother of a 5 year old to offer attention. On the opposite side, those days when I was frustrated enough with this lack of attention that I seemed distant, I received the attention I sought so feverishly any other day. I resented these occasions as they were a reminder that the relationships were a power struggle and the one who cared the least held the temporary lead. In case you have never experienced this phenomenon, it really sucks to be the one who doesn't care least. I believe that real love, the love on which lasting relationships are build is not one that requires this sort of game playing.

I tend to ramble and sometimes even lose my way in my own thought processes. So to redirect and draw this page to a close, There is one thing I have not yet really accepted but need to remind myself everyday: if the man I am with makes me become someone I neither recognize nor like, however painful it maybe to admit, he is not the one. What's the worst thing that could happen anyway, I live the rest of my life unmarried with a house full of dogs (allergic to cats)? At least I already have a nice set of fine china :)

It's What you said not How you said it

As I have grown up, my dad has tried to instill in me this concept: when you ask a question, try to phrase it in a way that doesn't impose your opinions onto the other person. For example, "You don't actually like this show, do you?" or "we don't have to stop at your sister's house, do we?" or "you don't want that last piece of cake, right?" ...ok well I suppose in some cases it is ok to transfer your wishes onto another, but in my experience, these instances are the minority. Today as I entered the room to perform a procedure on a patient, I made a comment, which I intended as a joke, "oh man, now I have to sit in here and watch this show with you!" The show was Glen Beck on Fox News Network, a politically charged program for which my distaste has nothing to do with my political affiliation, merely my aversion to biased political television (it causes undue anxiety). However, I did not adequately analyze my audience in making this comment and it was received as a declaration of being - for lack of a better phrase - on the wrong side of the fence. I naively entered into a situation which resulted in my being the target of a 15 minute diatribe about my ignorance to the ways of the currently corrupt government, the need to rid the nation of illegal immigrants, the benefits of Fair Tax, my unpatriotic ways of not informing myself of the truths of our government and the economy, my antimilitary sentiments and my need to understand that the Glen Beck show delivers nothing but hard facts.
...Here I thought I was trying to build rapport by razzing my patient a little, when apparently, I was confessing myself to be a staunch pro-alien, anti-american, military hating ignoramous. Who knew?! Thank you disciple of GB for gleening all that from what I thought was an immature yet innocent gesture of bonding. To this I say, father, I shall remember in the future to tread carefully when uttering a statement which transfers with it any opinion, personal view, or value.

Planting a seed

I'll begin here by saying I am not so ambitious a girl as to pretend even for a moment that the thematic posting titles and references will remain a constant in this blogging endeavor; however, I will give in to the cheesiness when inspired. I also feel too much pressure, in writing this inaugural post, to make it witty, captivating, and in all other ways inspiring. Therefore, it shall suffice for me to say this blog is written for me and me alone. Should anyone else find it, I hope it proves mildly entertaining but it will not be written for any purpose other than as a forum for me to process the goings on of my life. It is simply a new age book with infinite blank pages where I can find, develop, and master my own flavor of Mustard. The Mustard I can, should, and will one day become.