In Lieu of Lorazepam: A Whiny Post

Still plugging along over here.  School, true to Nursing School From Hell form, continues to be a stressful, anxiety-producing pain in the ass right up to the bitter end.  I'm terrified.  And my jaw hurts because I am walking around all clenched all the time.  Even when I sleep.  I'm fantasizing about lorazepam. Or any heavy sedative really.  I'm not picky.  

Also, I pretty much hate everybody right now.  Classmates, family, extremely tolerant fiance who doesn't deserve an extra ration of my crap, etc. Pretty much any human being who attempts to interact with me. I still like the Kiddo (and have tons of mommy guilt).  And the dogs.  The dogs are ok.  

I have one large, obnoxious, paper left to write.  One.  You'd think I'd be encouraged, bolstered by the fact that it's the very.last.one.  But no.  Instead I have a crippling case of writer's block and have written 3/4 of a page of text in the last 5 days.  On Friday, I start my last marathon run of 12 hour shifts.  It's not going to be pretty.  So I have 2 days to write a paper.  Typing that just made me a little nauseous.  

If it helps, I absolutely know I sound whiny and obnoxious.  I do.  It's just....it's been so many years since I have felt free from pressure.  Since my first innocent stab at nursing school back in 2006.  It's been grief and pregnancy worries, then baby worries--all topped off by the crushing pressure I've felt to go back to school, then get good grades, get accepted to a nursing program, and finally...three years at the Nursing School From Hell (was I supposed to capitalize From?  I don't think so).  The truth is, I have always had a sinking feeling that something, SOMETHING will get messed up and I won't get to graduate from nursing school. I have such a hard time believing things will be ok.  Believing in anything some days. And often life cooperates with my suspicions and throws crap at me.  So...I continue to be an anxious wreck.  Its 2.5 weeks to graduation.  Announcements have been sent.  Family is coming.  I want to be done.  I am craving the pressure relief I anticipate feeling when I know it's over.  I have so much time and emotions tied up in this thing.  I just need it to turn out ok.  I wish I felt secure and like I could just glide through these last days, but the potent combination of the Nursing School From Hell and my own obstacles has made gliding impossible. So I'm whining.  And an anxious wreck.  And once again using my blog as a place to dump my emotional baggage. 

A Good Day

I've really missed my blog. For weeks now, I've been floundering along, stumbling through each day plagued by self-doubt and depression and lots of other crap.  April really sucks.  I don't have the heart to ruin my good day by describing it in detail.  It sucked.

But it's May.  Thank God.  The lilacs will be blooming here in the next few days, the snow is melting from the mountain tops and everything is gloriously, brilliantly green.  Today I had my last big nursing school test.  I think most nursing students would be familiar with Kaplan?  It was Readiness Test day today, the test that predicts a student's readiness for the national licensure exam.  It is a requirement at The Nursing School From Hell to attain a Readiness Test score that translates to having a 95% chance of success on the licensure exam--before they will let you graduate.  Basically, you walk at graduation next month but you DO NOT have a degree before they say so.  No degree means no licensure exam and no job.  I was in the last group to test, having worked 8 night shifts in the last 10 days.  Walking into the test, only 3 people before me had passed it.  I hadn't found the time/motivation to get the studying in that I needed and my practice test scores have been subpar at best.  My preceptorship has been terrible and I just survived April.  My friends that usually test right with me or just below me in scores had all failed it already.  It wasn't looking good.

Guess what?  I rocked that sucker.  I have no idea how, but I did.  A huge weight has been lifted. I think God knew I couldn't handle the extra pressure right now of having to retake that stupid test.   I am done with testing, folks.  Done.  I was driving home and it hit me that this whole nursing school business may actually have a successful outcome.  I'm still not counting my chickens before they hatch, but I have one paper and 4 shifts of my preceptorship left to finish.  Hopefully I'll be screaming from the rooftops a month from now.  

So tonight I have just been basking in the glow of my unanticipated success.  Vampire Diaries season finale (not sure how I'm going to make it without a new episode for 4 months) followed by Grey's Anatomy.  Takeout and popcorn with the Kiddo.  My house is a mess and I need to go grocery shopping, but tonight I don't care.  I am now snuggled into bed with the Kiddo snoozing beside me watching Season 2 of Grey's Anatomy and pinning crap on Pinterest.  Today was a good day.

In other news....still trying my damndest to get knocked up but trying to lay off the obsessive cycle monitoring.  My body hasn't been coping well with all the stress and my cycles have been all over the place.  If I'm not preggers by fall, I'll be in the doctor's office demanding Clomid and exaggerating my TTC attempts to grotesque proportions.  In the meantime...at least I can drink at my graduation party.  I even pinned some fun summer drinks.  I'm looking forward to a low anxiety summer.

Maybe a Nurse

I've never really seen anybody blog about this, so I'm honestly not sure if it's just me.  But the entire month of April consistently sucks for me.  I expect the grief to be there.  I expect to have a few extra episodes of crying.  I don't expect to be in a cheerful, happy place.  Yet I never seem to anticipate the full force of the sweeping depression and anxiety that swallows me up every time. 

Oh, but it's not just that, folks.  I wonder if the month is jinxed.  Shitty things always seem to happen to me in April.  It doesn't seem to be enough that I have to cope with my son's birthday, a day that was supposed to be a happy one forever in my family and has turned out so bitterly bitterly sad, as well as the anniversary of his death fifteen days later.  No, that's not enough to take.  Life just has to suck in April. 

On Tuesday, Matthew's 6th birthday, I drug myself to class.  It was an important one to attend.  I knew the day wouldn't be a great one, but I was determined not to lock myself in my room and cry all day.  I slept really badly and got maybe 2 hours total of sleep.  Matthew was born at 4am so I think I just naturally don't sleep well that night.  Nothing out of the norm.  So, school was just this really long and excruciatingly pointless lecture that didn't even occupy a tiny corner of my mind.  You'll recall that I like to refer to my school as The Nursing School From Hell?  They're the reason I don't blog more about my NICU experiences, the reason I don't post pictures of myself or my daughter here.  Because I live in fear of them kicking me out on some tiny technicality.  One of the things I look forward to most after graduation is being able to be more open and honest about what a terrible school I attended and know that they won't be able to retaliate.  Well, in true Nursing School From Hell spirits, two instructors quit that afternoon leaving the students and faculty in full on chaos. 

So...now my nursing preceptorship is a freaking disaster.  It's disorganized.  I'm unsure of my start and finish dates.  My ICU nurse is going through a divorce and being very vague and scattered.  She still seems enthusiastic about the experience--when she actually gets around to responding to my or the clinical instructors emails and calls. Several of the techs who work with her have called me and said they are "concerned" about her ability to be a decent teacher right now.  Great.   I would've been able to deal with this last month when preceptorships were still weeks away, but now there is an obvious time crunch.  And I don't have a back-up ICU preceptor.  I've had this preceptor arranged since January, and I just stopped scanning nurses for potential preceptorship possibilities after that.  And I don't get to graduate unless I meet the shift quota.  Shit.

Then there's the NICU.  I love the NICU and my clinical instructor (who, coincidentally, is one of the two instructors that quit on Tuesday) and I cooked up this intricate preceptorship plan where I spend half of my shifts in NICU making myself happy and half in ICU making myself and my school happy.  My clinical instructor really pushed for me to be able to spend all of it in NICU, but the school maintains that ICU would be more beneficial in helping me pass the licensure exam this summer.  Which I was okay with.  Until Tuesday, when I found out that I will  have to deal with a new clinical instructor as well as twice the meetings and paperwork because I have two preceptors instead of one.  

Also, my NICU nurse who's running the show is only marginally into having a student at all.  So I'm sure she's going to be really excited by the extra meetings and paperwork.  

Oh, and Jerry and I don't want to live in the Eastern Montana craphole that he is presently working in.  It's too small.  There are no big hospitals to work in.  There are no extracurricular activities for the Kiddo.  We hate it.  I don't want to move there, but I also don't want to keep doing the long-distance thing after June.  We are trying to figure out a job switch so it doesn't have to go down like this.  Stressful.

I have spent the last few days in a total state of desperation and anxiety.  Not eating well.  Not sleeping well.  Spent two evenings in a row drinking wine on my porch and crying after I put the Kiddo to bed.  Not studying because I can't focus.  Oh, and I swept through Sears like a tornado and bought a new vacuum cleaner.  And a treadmill.  Jerry was pretty excited for me about both of my purchases, especially since I did it instead of putting money into savings this week as per the Financial Clean Up Plan. Who needs a down payment for a house?  Dave Ramsey, my ass.  I just need to survive this month, this day.

All of this has led me to conclude that it is not only grief, April is also a bad month.  Bad things happen in April.  In the future, I plan to shut down all productions in April.  I'm not going to leave the house on April 10th or 25th.  I'm just not.  It's been 6 years and these days are always terrible.  I accept it.  I just want to survive it this year and graduate.  Dear God, please let me graduate.  

And...the best part?  The month is only halfway over.

Dear Matthew

Happy 6th Birthday Baby Boy.  Your Mommy and Daddy miss you more than words could ever begin to describe.  We will never forget you.  Your sister misses you.  I hope you had the best birthday party a  6 year old boy could dream of in heaven.  We love you so much.  Happy Birthday, Matthew.



Katie M Berggren via Etsy

Happy Easter!

April Strikes Again

I guess I haven't really known what to write lately.  This time of year, it's so hard for me to formulate words to match the way I feel.  It's such an odd place.  In April, everything seems to mark the time that's passed since he's been gone.  My life starts to feel like that blind spot you hit when you drive into a tunnel and the light changes.  When you can't see anything at all in front of you.  When I drive into tunnels I am afraid of that spot.  What if someone is standing there?  I would never see them until it was too late.

As I near the finish line of nursing school, I have been thinking a lot about the circumstances of my life that brought me to this place.  Why do I want to be a nurse?  What kind of nurse do I want to be?  The truth is, people are so inherently fragile.  You never know when the tiniest action can have life-long reverberations.  You never know when something you do when you aren't thinking or think you are helping can scar a person for the rest of their days.

Several days ago, I tucked one of these shots into my purse.  As a reminder of the nurse I want to be, the person I want to be.

These pictures, folks, are the first images I have of my newborn son.  For several hours, I could not see him, so some well-meaning nurse brought me these.  Blurry, chaotic polaroid shots that were meant to be comforting.  The fragmented explanations and nursing care I received in these hours and the hours preceding his birth are similar to these pictures.  I stared and stared at these pictures trying to see the details of his face and begin to process what had happened to us.  Tell me, can you see his face?  Would photos like these bring you comfort?  I'm sure that if my nearly six year old son was running around the living room with his sister today these pictures would never cross my mind and would only bring a vague and fleeting frown to my face if they did.  Maybe I would have thrown them away.  It would have been nice to throw them away.  Instead, these pictures have become a visual representation of everything that happened to us during those fifteen days in April.  Chaotic and terrifying, blurry and confusing.  In my nightmares, I am forgetting his face.  It looks just like these pictures.  Yet I can't throw them away or purge them from my memory.  There are just so few photos to look back on.

I don't want to be the kind of nurse that brings blur and chaos to patients and families.  I want to be like the nurses I had in the NICU that would stop and act like human beings, make sure we understood what was going on.  Thankfully, these days my NICU experiences are much less blurry.  I no longer have to stand by helplessly while my son has an apnea episode that turns him grey in an instant.  Now I am the one helping to right the situation.  I am the one that gets to stand by the shaking mom in the corner and make sure she understands that it's all right for right now.  For me, it can never be all right, but I am so grateful that for someone else it can be.  And I can guarantee that I will always find a moment to hold still and take a damn picture.