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October 29, 2004

Just call me a friggin' genius!

I figured out my halloween costume, but you're just going to have to wait until Sunday to know what it is....

I will give you a few hints though:

1. It's a scenario.
2. It can be found all over television.
3. It has nothing to do with politics.
4. Or sports.
5. It will require leaves, paint, marker, tape, glue, yarn, and other such things...

Any guesses?

Posted by missfitsandstarts at 08:25 PM | Comments (3)

October 27, 2004

Blah Blah Blog

Ok, so there are people in California getting on my case for not paying attention to the Red Sox. I can't help it if I just don't care about baseball. Does nobody stop to think about how boring this sport is? You wait. They throw. You wait. They Miss. You wait more. They throw again. You wait. They miss. You wait. They Go to commercial... and then what? MORE WAITING.

Now, gimme the Pats and a good beer and I'll watch some sports.

I'm waiting to take a quiz in a class that I don't have the book for.

Just call me slackass...

Posted by missfitsandstarts at 08:31 AM | Comments (3)

October 18, 2004

Quiet.

I'm sitting in an empty classroom right now trying to get a little bit of peace and quiet before my Sociocultural Issues in Health and Illness Class starts. This class has been quite unengaging so far, even though I made the decision to stay in it because it looked like I would be learning and experiencing a lot. Remind me that when I make decisions like this from now on, I need to think about what I will be feeling like 5 weeks into the term. It usually ain't pretty. I usually just want to go home and take a nap.

Things have been so uneventful thus far, in all of my classes. The emotional experiences (watching a cesarean section or holding the hand of the wife of someone who is transitioning into death) are wild, but most of the days just seem to blur together in monotony. There is no routine, no steady schedule that I have to stick to, and it feels almost flat.

Or maybe it's just me who is flat.

I'm reading a good book right now, though, called Out by Natsuo Kirino. It's a contemporary Japanese mystery and damn it's good. But even less of a mystery than it is a commentary on what happens to people when life beats them down.

It's starting to get not so quiet in here....

Posted by missfitsandstarts at 12:56 PM | Comments (2)

October 13, 2004

What do you mean I have to touch the babies?

That was my first thought (and many subsequent panics) when I found out I was going to be on a Labor & Delivery unit.

I mean, I love the little people. I can hold them, feed them, diaper them and make sure I don't let go of their head when I am moving them, but I'll be damned if I know what to do with one as it flies out of it's moms uterus and its all slimy and droppable and screaming and needs to be washed without being drowned by the six people suctioning it and touching it and making sure its breathing and "phew". I would want to scream and crawl my way back inside too.

All of this was running through my pea sized brain (a pea with lots of nooks and crannies) until I actually got there.

The essence of birth is so special and beautiful. It's also complicated (terrifically complicated, both scientifically and with the familiy dynamics) and normal and tragic and wonderful all at the same time. I will get to the adults and the magnitude of pregnancy and parenthood and all that stuff at some other point.

But the babies, especially the babies, I love the babies.

The babies, I have decided, contain all the information we will ever need in this world, all of this spiritual and cosmic knowledge (wrapped up in this small, smooth, napping little package), that they can't communicate with us because we are older. And as the babies grow older, they lose that intimate unspoken knowledge and have to relearn different things. Life things. And that's where we are when we are growing up until we transition in to learning about things that are not about us being alive.

Babies are a big secret, and I would like to think that within that secret is something so huge and special that we aren't allowed to know it or remember it as adults. We can just have the brief honor of feeling it from the babies.

I don't know, I'm feeling horribly existential lately. I think I need to go see I Heart Huckabees to at least be able to laugh about it.

But the babies, even though I don't want children of my own, the babies help remind me that we all come into this world tiny and fuzzy, needing naps and such, and no matter what happens, I kind of want to live my whole life like that. Fuzzy. With naps. And an expression of "I know something you don't knowwwwwwww," always plastered to my face.

Posted by missfitsandstarts at 11:59 AM | Comments (2)

October 10, 2004

It finally comes out of my head...

I want to talk a bit about my first experience working and observing hospice. I chose this rotation for my community health course because I knew it was going to be intense, I knew I was going to learn a lot, not just clinically, but about myself, about how people are with each other, about life and death and everything in between. And I was right. I already am. Even after two weeks.

On my second day, I had the opportunity to observe one of the RN case managers and went with her to visit her set of hospice patients. We spent the day in the together, and I met four wonderful people and their families. I was immediately struck by how different all of their situations are, and how each individual and their family reacts and cares for the experience in unique ways. One woman had just been taken home a week ago after a round of radiation to ease some of the pain of the spinal metastases that resulted from her lung cancer and was being cared for by her husband and adult daughter, another was 86 year old woman with end-stage congestive heart failure, living alone and generally going about business as usual cooking and cleaning and living a life of consuming organic foods and supplementing her medications with herbal therapies. Yet another patient was a couple, the 58 year old husband, a recovered drug addict was spending his last days at home with bladder cancer, being cared for by his wife.

I spent most of this first day trying to take it all in, to think about each of these individuals and the complexity of emotions and experiences they must be facing during each day that they are home, either in the process of dying, or caring for and watching a loved one transition into death. I watched how spouses would run their hands through the hair on the head of their dying parter, how some would gently hold hands, how some would putt around as though everything was business as usual, and how others would work on cleaning and folding laundry and taking care of logistics. Spending an hour in each of their houses felt like such a short time, but also seemed like a real glimpse into not only individual experiences with death and dying… but of their lives.

I learned a lot from the nurse on this day. How to talk to patients. What it means to have a relationship with their family, to listen to them, to ask questions to assess not only the status of the patient, but with how they are all coping with the situation. I learned that, at least with this nurse, the process of death must be spoken about with the family frankly, so that they can understand what's happening, have some of their fears eased (what happens when my wife is breathing like that? Why isn’t he eating anymore? I don’t understand why I don’t have as much energy as usual.) and hopefully prepare them little by little for what is to come... supporting them in this time.

I was also struck by the privelidge of being in someone’s home, and the importance of being home for the patient and family, during a time when so many things out of their control. Home care allows for some empowerment for the patient. Some sense of security, and when the nurses, the caseworkers, the chaplains and the volunteers are all in and out during the week visiting, it is on the family's turf. They can sleep in their own covers, look out the windows at their gardens, and we are just their to help them in their space, versus the clinical, technical and seemingly all powerful setting of the hospital. And here I am, sitting in the chair that these families ate dinner at, looking at their paintings and pictures, and experiencing what it is to be in their home.

This makes it all more real, more powerful. It also makes it a little more difficult for the clinician (or me) to set boundaries. The sterility and technicality of a hospital is an automatic boundary, and the clinician is less vulnerable to their own sense of what they bring to a situation, and what it brings to them. Here, it is different.

This experience is going to be intense. There is so much to understand. So many nuances, so many emotions, so many stories and experiences. But I am here to learn, lend a hand when I can, and do my best to be real and present and work with these families even in my limited capacity.

Sometimes it really is just about opening your eyes and heart as wide as you can, or touching someone’s shoulder, or talking to a member of the family that seems like they are in distress, sort of disappearing in all the attention that is paid to the patient.

That is what I can do. Learn. Understand. Feel it. And work with the little things.

Posted by missfitsandstarts at 11:28 PM | Comments (1)

October 07, 2004

Self help for the new generation...

The other day when I was in the throes of this anxiety business, Loody bought me a present that I had been pining for ever since my brother Steven came to visit.

It's a new video game called Burnout 3: Takedown. The title says it all, and the whole point of the game is to drive a car as fast as you can into a pile of traffic. Explosions, jump ramps, cars being mashed to bits... what more could you ask for to relieve stress?

I can't help it if I like to blow shit up. On the TV, of course.

Posted by missfitsandstarts at 10:27 AM | Comments (0)

And my body said...

Poo poo to you, I'm going to do whatever the hell I want to even if you have better things to do.

I have been having an anxiety attack since Monday morning. And who knows, really, it may have started on Sunday night, or even before that. It was building up. I should have known.

When this happens, I don't sleep well, I get butterflies in my stomach that last for hours and get to the point where I feel like I'm going to throw up caterpillars, I cold sweat, I palpitate, I feel like someone has wrapped my chest in duct tape. It's fun, really. Oh right, and the crying... I can't forget the crying...

On top of all of this, I usually am rendered fairly non-functional, so I have been hanging around the house for the past few days because I'm afraid if I go to class or clinic I will have a meltdown.

It's the kind of thing that makes me feel crazy and then makes me feel incompetent. I know it will pass, but its timing sucks.

Thank god for Mr. Xanax, and even more for my wonderful little PCP (primary care doc) who let me cry in his office on Monday.

I promise I will write about nursing again someday, but today I just had to bitch. And moan.

Warm fuzzies to all.

Posted by missfitsandstarts at 07:59 AM | Comments (1)

October 01, 2004

Still cranky....

Well, not cranky, just stuck in my head. And when I'm stuck in my head, I don't write (or speak) well, but then when I'm not stuck in my head I forget what it feels like and then can't write about it because I can't recapture it. I give whole new meaning to the term "introvert".

Yeeeeesh.

Finished my first two days of hospice care and it is quite possibly one of the most intense and amazing experiences I have had in my life. And this is just the beginning.

Gotta figure out how to get out of my head. And what the hell is wrong with my blog?

Posted by missfitsandstarts at 10:14 PM | Comments (2)