Backlog

I just published two posts that have been sitting in my little editing que waiting to go out for EVER. I didn't edit them at all, so if they don't make sense....that's why. I just felt bad for them, sitting there, never getting to live up to their full bloggy glory, so I let them free.

I don't, however, know how to change the order they appear in my actual blog....so they're down past the one about the big scary world.

Hello World, You Terrify Me

I wrote a "History 225: The History of British Columbia" final exam today and, with the completion of a 3 page essay on Japanese Canadians, internment camps and "The Iron Chink" officially finished my four year long Bachelor of Science in Nursing. It seems fitting to me that a program with so very many useless courses should end on such a note.

It all seems a little anticlimactic to me. I've been in school, just out of school or about to head back to school for as long as I can remember. I actually have almost no memories from before I was old enough to be educated, although I do remember trying to get my little sister to eat dirt when I was pretty darn young. It's taken me 5 and a half brutal years to get through this program. I've almost quit so many times that I'm pretty sure my friends got tired of hearing it. I've written so many papers on so many things, from the ethics of force feeding meds (for the record: not ethical unless the person is legitimately crazy) to the leadership styles of Hitler (charismatic) and Obama (transformative) that I think I could actually write papers in my sleep now. I am so used to spending all my time finding ways to not do school work that, now that all my time is my own, I'm a little freaked out.

That freakout, however, is minor in comparison to the one that is coming, very, very soon in my future. Because, as anyone who has seen my bank balance will tell you, I gots to get me a job. Like yesterday. Luckily, I just finished nursing. I could, probably, get a job starting yesterday, even if I didn't apply for another week. Finding work is not my issue. My issue is that once I start working I will be on my own, actually responsible for people's lives. Up to this point I've either been a care aide (fewer ways to immediately kill people) or a student (lots of people watching your every move). Now, according to a program that made me take 4 courses titled "Self and Others" I am a fully grown nurse, raised from my infancy of making hospital corners on beds and interviewing healthy families to a young adult, perhaps with much to learn, but able to function on my own assessing unstable patients and administering blood products.

I don't feel like a young adult. I feel like a gawky teenager. I'm all legs and my decision making capabilities aren't all there yet. I long for independence but, in every tough situation find myself screaming "I need an adult here!" I'm the 13 year-old who's braces have been removed too soon. Sure they were awkward and uncomfortable, but I'm not totally convinced my teeth will stay straight without them. Is that too many mixed metaphors? It makes sense to me.

I'm starting to panic guys. Other careers you get out of school, you take an entry level job and if you fuck up, even massively, it means something like your boss' airline tickets not being booked or a shipment of files going to Tanzania instead of Toronto. You work your way up the scale and, unless Daddy owns the company, earn the right to have any responsibility at all. In nursing they educate us, tell us at the end of the program that we really don't know enough and "all the best learning comes from the real world" and then hand us a patient load of 8 acutely ill post-op hips. I've started to have nightmares where I over medicate all my clients, someone codes (their heart stops, for the non-nurses) and then I sit down to cry only to find out that I've sat myself on a bed of used syringes. This is my life.

I know that it's probably all going to work out. I (sorta) know what I'm doing, and I'm applying to a hospital with a great, supportive mentorship program for new grads. I love the work I did during my preceptorship and I'm applying to work there too, as a casual RN. I only have to work long enough to make the money for an airline ticket and some spending cash and then I can pretend to be irresponsible again. But still, this is too close to the real world for me. I almost miss the bagel store.

Conquering the Mountain

Awhile ago B, her friend A and I did the Grouse Grind. For those of you who don't live in Vancouver the Grouse Grind is like the outdoor stairmaster from hell. It's somewhere between 3 and 5 kilometers depending on whether the person you ask is a tour guide (3) or someone who just finished the hike (5), and it's STRAIGHT UP. Really. No joke. It takes a fit person an hour or so to get to the top.



As you hike up this massive hill, cursing yourself for:

a) deciding this is a good idea

b) getting drunk anytime in the previous 2 weeks and

c) eating anything, ever,

you start to notice something. People are passing you. And not just a few crazy fit people. I'm talking lots of people. Some of them look about 80 but have the calf muscles of Nepalese sherpas. Others RUN past you up the hill, barely breaking a sweat while you begin to seriously contemplate going on all fours just to pull yourself up the next set of stairs. Just as you are beginning to harbour feelings of homicide towards those that can run up this thing you will look up and see the same person that ran past you 15 minutes ago running BACK DOWN THE HILL.



This happened to us as we climbed up the hill. And as the guy who had passed me back at the quarter ("We're not seriously only a quarter of the way up, right?") mark ran back past me at the 1/2 way ("I hate stairs. And nature. And you.") mark I turned to my friends and said "Dont' people like that just make you want to trip them?"



The thing is I kinda miscalculated how far voices travel in cool, damp westcoast air. Also, I may have possibly been breathing too hard to control the tone or volume of my voice. I'm pretty sure that he heard me because as he ran past he looked at me with a shocked expression on his face and gave me a whole lotta space on the stairs.



What DOES make me a bad person is the joy that I got from the looks on the faces of the two old folks that shared our gondola down the mountain afterwards. 40 people, 38 of whom just did the Grind in one gondola car? Those old fogeys didn't stand a chance.

Mille TheNurse Has Taken A Facebook Quiz and her result is: Confused

I am tired of Facebook quizzes, I really am. It used to be that I would sign on to my Facebook page and be greeted by pictures and updates from my friends, actual information that I might actually care about. Now everytime I open up the ol' FB my entire wall is covered with endless quizzes taken on topics I don't care about by people I sometimes just barely know.

Now, I'm all for taking stupid quizzes to amuse yourself/procrastinate/zone out boring classes, but do you REALLY have to put them all on display? I know our culture is getting more and more self absorbed and most people have an inate fear of being forgotten but I'm not 100% sure that this is that way to go.

Just for illustration purposes I went back 24 hours through my wall posts. In that time this is what people have found out about themselves:

-5 people are prego- 1 of whom is a boy. Not totally sure about the science behind that one.

-2 girls should name their first child Vanessa, 1 should name hers Sara (apparantly she will be a tomboy)

-Someone's Filipino name is Esperanza (don't worry, I still like you, even though you did a quiz)

-3 people are passionate kisses, one is a lip biter.

-Someone has schitzophrenia. That one might actually be true.

-1 guy is the element light and the periodic element Neon, Hitler, the pink Power Ranger, Codename V, chocolate ice cream, a rainy day, an oatmeal cookie, England, a member of the Psi Delta Fraternity, a beer bong, Conan O'Brian, blue, heavy metal music and an elephant.

I just don't get it. Add to all the quizzes the endless "Favorite 5 lists" and "Fan of" postings....does anyone have a private life at all anymore? I just learned through a friend the other day that if someone in a relationship changes their relationship status to single, FB changes the other person's status too. That means its possible that all the people on your friends list will know you've been broken up with before you do. How effed is that?

I want to know what drives people to answer and post those quizzes.

(You will all please ignore the fact that I just ranted about oversharing on a blog, the homeland of self-indulgent public displays of emotion.)

Dear 2009: 2008 Still Wins (But You're Doing Better)

Dear 2009,

So, my last letter was a little harsh. To be fair to me, being with you up to that point had been 2 months of icy chill. You didn't warm up anytime soon after that either. You taunted me with a bit of warmth and sunny demeanour and then snatched it away. I have to say, '09, that until recently I've still been pretty upset with you.

You may think I'm being unfair but really, you made liking you difficult. Do you realize I haven't sat in a class 5 days a week since my ill fated relationship with '07? After that ended I ran away to Asia and '08. It's actually kind of impressive that I stuck around you as long as I did. Especially when I think of the people I had to hang out with. '09, your friends suck. How did you manage to find so many stupid people and put them all in one class? While I will admit that there were one or two winners in there the majority of them would have benefited from a good 10cc of air IV. The friends that I brought with me from previous years were really the only things that kept me going.

But things are finally starting to look up for us I think. There is maybe, just maybe, a chance that we can pull this relationship out of the nosedive that was the first 5 months of the year.

You've really come through with this move thing, first off. Who knew that there was a nursing job that I would like THIS much anywhere in the world? While it might not be everyones cup of tea talking down people that do so much crystal meth their brains are so fryed that you have to trick them into taking their pills in the manner you would a five year old (come on, they taste good!) I really love it. I guess you knew me a little better than I thought.

And living on the coast is working out pretty well too. You've really started to come out of your shell '09. Partying in downtown Vancouver, getting so drunk that we get lost on the way to the beach, chugging gin and grapefruit pop out of a 2 litre bottle while sitting on a log and watching the sunrise? That's something I never saw us doing together. I mean, sure, you still have a long way to go to catch up with '08, but you're really starting to hold your own now. You're starting to let me stretch my legs a bit and it's making all the difference.

So, '09, I think it's time I cut you some slack. Sure you were boring in the beginning, but at least I got to spend a lot of time with Treesh and Meg and Robin before I had to take off. And maybe all we did was go to the gym and pretend to pay attention in school, but at least I got fit out of the deal. Maybe you just knew what I needed at the time. I still don't understand why you ever thought Tian was a good idea though.

Keep things headed in the direction they're going now and I might stop wishing that you were last year. Someday.

Millie

Confidential Smonfidential

Over the past two weeks many funny things have happened to me. They've caused me to bust a gut laughing and, as I like you guys, I'd like to share them with you.

But I can't.

Nursing is the kind of world where things happen that people don't want their friends and family to find out about. For (a totally made up) example cute old grannies go loopy post surgery and spend two days in a "gerichair"- basically a big highchair that only Houdini could wiggle out of. Respectable, stable, adult people defecate in their clothing, projectile vomit from one end of a room to the other and go so cucko for cocoa pops on morphine that they have in depth conversations with their bedsheets. People yell, scream, curse, bawl like babies, throw tantrums like teenagers and basically act in a way that would, in any normal situation, have other people doing the "don't look at the crazy person" eye shuffle. Alot of the time it's annoying, as crazy people take up way more time than the totally sane ones. But sometimes it's so freaking funny, I just want to share.

But I can't.

One of the major ethical things in nursing is confidentiality. It's not as simple as it seems at first. I mean, there's the obvious stuff. If Joe Brown comes into the hospital with a raging case of genital warts and I let it slip to Mrs. Brown that she may want to be getting some testing done herself, that's a big no-no. Pretty basic. But it gets a lot more intense than that. If I am at a coffee shop talking to someone I work with and I happen to mention that I know one of my clients has got the crazys big time and the sister of another patient overhears and recognizes me as a nurse from that facility and now knows that someone on her brothers ward is a psychopants and freaks out and takes her brother off the ward......yeah, that's a breach of confidentiality too.

It's not really fair. I know that it's important to protect people's privacy and stuff but really, what am I supposed to gossip about? When I was travelling I had no such boundaries. What I saw, I could blog. Even when I was in school I mocked the heck out of people on here. But now I'm on my own. I'm the only student in the whole facility and since I like my preceptor and don't yet feel confident enough to make fun of the rest of the staff the only thing left to gossip about is the goofy clients we have.

But I can't.

If I can't talk about things like (hypthetically) watching someone making an apple bong to smoke their medicinal marijuana and then, when stoned and forgetful, eating the apple and asking why it tastes so weird, what am I going to blog about? Is this the end of Millie?

Ewwwww

Today someone's toe fell off in my hand.

IN. MY. HAND.

I love my job

Disclaimer: I actually do love this job. And, disgustingly, doing dressing of the sort where there is the potential for toes to fall off. But it was still gross.

Nursing: Killing Perfectly Healthy People Since God-Knows-When

I took one of two pharmacology exams I have to pass in order to be a nurse today. It was open book (yay!) and written by my least favorite instructor. Below are two actual questions from the two exams. Don't worry, I know not everyone that reads this is a nurse, so I'll explain.

1. What IV solution would the nurse most question giving to a woman on potassium-sparing diuretics?

a) Normal Saline
b) D5W
c) NS with 40 meq K
d) water

Ok, here's the breakdown. Normal saline is just what it sounds like. Normal. A-OK. D5W just has some extra sugars in it. As long as she's not diabetic it's also par for the course. I would be seriously cautious giving normal saline with added potassium (K) as the meds she's on makes your body hold onto potassium like an OCD hermit holds onto tupperware. Apparently that was the right answer. Which at first makes sense. Giving extra potassium makes your body do fun things like have major seizures. Not cool. The only thing that makes this 100% wrong is that you also have the option to choose d) water. Giving extra potassium= possible bad things. Giving WATER through an IV line makes this happen:

That's right. Injecting water into the blood stream makes your red blood cells swell up and BURST. Your blood sees the water and guzzles it, frat party style. And then dies.

So, of course, when the world's smartest teacher (from here on in referred to as TWST) announced that the answer was C I put up my hand and asked why it wasn't D. Her reply?

" We wouldn't use tap water"

Oh good. We may make their red blood cells explode, but at least we won't give them sepsis. I feel better.

That was on the first exam. The next gem is from today's.

2. A mother asks an RN who gave her child a vaccination "How do I make her feel better?". The nurse should answer
a) "Don't be so weak, she'll be fine."
b) "Put a cold pack on the injection site"
c) "Give her baby aspirin"
d) "Put a warm compress on the injection site."

Ok, this one isn't QUITE as stupid. But still. I'm thinking that in response to "How do I make her feel better the nurse should, perhaps, answer "What is the matter". Because C (the official correct response) may make a slightly swollen injection site feel better, but it's not going to do a whole heck of a lot for anaphylactic shock......sorta a majorly scary adverse reaction to being vaccinated. When I asked TWST what I was expected to make of this question I was told

"It's right there in the question. She's got a swollen injection site."

I copied the question word for word. Does anyone else see any mention of a swollen injection site in there? I didn't think so.

You know what makes me extra lucky? I, and I alone, have TWST for a practicum instructor. Think of all the individual attention. I can't wait.

Dreams, Goals and Other Imaginary Beasts

I went to my friend A.M.'s wedding this weekend. Her, me and B all lived together in 3rd year. We did things like taping signs to B's back while shopping in Jysk, making casseroles out of whatever we happened to have in the house, and hosting parties that you had to dress up as a fake superhero, complete with a unique superpower, to attend. I was The Plague, B was Passive Aggressive Girl and AM was Master Debater. Also in attendance were such greats as Corporate America (a supervillan), Crazy Tennis Playing Guy and The Highlighter. AM's car used to break down about once a month and I remember using the fact that her battery constantly died as an excuse to talk to the guy I liked who lived across the parking lot.

B and I wrote a toast to give at the wedding and while doing that spent about an hour sitting around and reminiscing about that year and the rest of our times in nursing school. It all seems so long ago, but really first year was only 2004. Its weird that some things have stuck so much and others have faded out. I only remember parties at "The Party Quad" these days when I am consciously thinking about them. But I still call T Treeesh, and spell it out with 3 E's every time. B and I still involuntarily quote Jimmy Falon whenever we walk past the leather store in the Kamloops mall ("Eeehhhllleather).

What are this reminiscing boiled down to was one thought: just how much we all have changed. How weird is it that someone who taught me all I know about applying smokey eyeshadow and picked me up from work wearing a dress shoes, Pj pants and a towel on her head just got married? It's definitely strange that the girl who's fish tried to die every time you looked at it just bought a house, with spare rooms that I can stay in if I ever pass through town. Sometimes I just don't know what to do with the fact that the world is growing up around me. Every time I turn around another of my friends is getting married. Everyone I know seems to own a house, a dog and a new car. I can list off 5 people that I went to school with that either are pregnant, are trying to get pregnant or have had a kid in the last year.

Sometimes all this change gets a little overwhelming and starts to get me questioning my choices in life up to right now. It seems like everyone else is going the regular "mature adult" route, while I seem to be hacking my own path through the underbrush. Yet I never doubt that what I'm doing is right for me when I'm bouncing along a dusty road in Cambodia in the back of a pick up truck, holding two Cambodian babies and sharing coconut rice out of a bamboo tube with a toothless old lady. Even when I'm upside-down in a river in Nepal and semi-convinced that I'm about to drown I know that each near-death experience is going to be something I will never regret. The only thing that makes me question myself is sitting in a room decorated with tulle and fake ivy, twinkle lights and a cake on a pedestal, surrounded by people that are so happy that someone else in their lives has reached this adult milestone.

I guess it turns out that aspirations are kind of like perfume. If you spend enough time surrounded by someone else's dreams (especially when they are on display as conspicuously as a wedding, kinda like dumping a bottle of perfume over your head) you start to wear it, and for awhile it almost seems right for you. Then you get back out into the open air and realise: I smell like a rose garden. When in my life have I ever wanted to smell like crushed gardenias? The scent of vanilla pods and lilies may seem grownup and classy, but what if I really like smelling like raspberry body mist?

Time to Get a Job

I just finished the "What to Expect in the Big Wide World" class. Here's what I've been told I can look forward to in the first year out of school:

-for the first 4 months after I graduate I will be so concerned with doing things right and making people like me that I won't be able to sleep, I will lose all my friends and any semblance of normal social life and all the experienced nurses will view me as an indecisive suck-up.

-eventually this self-doubt will get tiring and I will begin to pretend I get it, at which point the experienced nurses will start calling me cocky.

-I will have 2 serious crises of confidence: one at 4 months out and one at 8. Each of these will be above and beyond an overall feeling that I will never be a good nurse, that I made the wrong career choice and that everyone is judging me (which they will be).

-I will kill someone, either by a med error, oversight or overwork driven neglect. Apparantely everyone does.

-Everything I have learned up to this point is useless, as the real world is not a textbook.

I'm stoked.

Welcome to Kamloops: Now With 500% More Racism

Public transit is always an interesting thing. You never know who you are going to run into or what manner of drug induced rambling you will get to hear. Usually, I don't mind the bus. It's sometimes a little sad, often a little funny and generally kind of ho-hum. Today that changed.

Today as the bus was about to pull away from the curb at a major transit exchange, one last lady flagged it down. She ran aboard, flashed her pass and began to make her way to the back of the bus. All normal, except that, when she passed an older black man, she paused every so slightly, screwed up her face and spat out "F*cking N*****." Seriously.

I've never seen so many people have to actually pry their jaws off the floor. She said it so loudly I heard it through my headphones. Everyone, including the man it was directed at, reacted with stunned silence. When was the last time you heard that word not in the context of:
a) a rap song
b) a movie portraying racism in the southern states or
c) a movie where producers are trying to show they are "down with the lingo" of inner-cities?
I don't think I ever have. I mean, this is Canada. Sure there is racism here, but people generally go to great lengths to hide it. This hit me the same as reading about the peace protesters clashing with the white supremacists in Calgary....there are really people that think like that?

The worst part is, that's not the part of the story that made my blood boil. Q was obviously mentally unwell (stained parka in May, almost dreadlocked hair, twitchy erratic movements, random tearful outbursts). The worst part is that nothing happened.

The lady said it so loudly that for the driver to not hear he would have had to actually have his fingers in his ears and be going "LALALALALA" at the top of his lungs. But he didn't do anything. When he failed to act on his own a woman sitting behind me, let's call her A, went up, told him what had happened and asked that the woman be removed from the bus. He said that, as he hadn't heard it himself, he couldn't do anything. When the woman told him that the whole front of the bus had heard it at least five of us piped up and agreed. Still, nothing. Even Q, between telling the woman talking to the driver to get some class and shouting something about her pimp, admitted that she had said it. Nothing.

How can this be? The buses all have placards posted with the rules of transit on them. One of them is that people have the right to ride free of harassment. I don't really think that it's open for interpretation, but this driver made it that way. If nothing happens to him then the transit authority is basically telling everyone that all WHITE people have the right to ride free from harassment. I don't understand.

While I was still on the bus Q got off, threw a quick apology to A and the man she had originally insulted. He just sat there, through her hurried "I'm sorry", through people around asking if he was alright, staring at his hands. How do you react to that? This isn't Hickville, Texas. No one is on their guard to have racial slurs hurled at them here.

So that's the majority of the story. I have called the transit authority to complain. So have 6 or 7 others that were on the bus. When the answer to my complaint was "Ya, ya, I've already put a note in the managers box, ok?" I also called the newspaper and told them the whole thing. It's apparantely going to be in the next days paper. I might even be photographed for it. But I'm still feeling confused and thrown off guard. My naivety and belief in human goodness both got a bit of a shake and I think they might need some time to recuperate.

As a finishing note I'd like to throw in a quote I just found on another blog:

"Racism isn't born, folks, it's taught. I have a two-year-old son. You know what he hates? Naps! End of list."- Dennis Leary

Exactly How Wrong is it to Strangle People?

Are we talking burn in hell for all eternity wrongness? Fighting lawyers, politicians and crooked salesman for a tablespoon of cold water? Or merely a stint in purgatory? Or do you thing the wrongness is relative and gauged on a sliding scale, kind of like insulin? The more legitimate your reason, the less the wrongness. Example: going back in time to strangle Hitler before the Holocaust= A-OK. Strangling someone because they sat in your seat at the theatre= eternal damnation.

I need to know the answer to this question. Because I've recently started a month long session of the 5 day a week, 8 hour a day type of schooling. Which means I spend 40 hours a week with my class. This ain't no J-School class. There are no balanced, informed political debates. In our "Politics for Nursing" class someone asked what a premier is. Not WHO the premier is, that's kind of understandable, names are easy to forget. WHAT the premier is. Yesterday our class on liver failure began with the world's dumbest girl talking for 10 minutes about how she'd gone to a question forum with the candidates for our riding and no one should vote for the liberals because he was rude with the other candidates. Not that the liberals plan on cutting health care (sort of a nursing concern) or that the NDP is the only party that really has anything to say about retaining nurses. Just cause he's a big meany pants.

I was almost able to handle it when it was 2 days a week. I went to school, sat in awe at the things people said, came home, blogged about it and then went about my life for 5 glorious days, until I had to do it all over again. Now I don't get that kind of reprieve. And people seem to be taking this opportunity to really show what they've got. There's one girl that talks an average of once every minute and a half. I counted. Not asking questions or participating in a discussion. Just putting up her hand, interrupting the instructors and stating her opinion on everything from conflict resolution methods to abruptio placenta.

There is also the instructor. Or, to be fair, one of the three instructors. Two of them are great and have been my favorites since the first time they taught me. But one of them.....I don't have words. So, instead of a description, I will just post the tally we've been keeping in class:

Personal Stories Told That In No Way Connect to Class : 42
Declarations of Personal Greatness: 27
Excuses For Not Doing Her Job: 17
Mocking Students: 34
Sounds Effects Reminiscent of Epileptic Seizures: 12
Technological Failures: 8

That's in 4 hours, we didn't start keeping a tally until halfway through the last day. That's an average of one inane personal story every 6 minutes. It's fun. I know all about her car, her dog, her husband and the time she went to Disneyland. What I don't know anything about is the stuff that's going to be on my insanely scary 9 hour long exam that determines whether or not I can actually BE a nurse. So that's good.

They make me insane. On reflection, I'm pretty sure I could pull a "not legally responsible" or "way too Eff-ing crazy, your Honor" if I strangled one of them. I'm just still not sure about the morality part of it.

Staying Sane 101: How to Work Nomadism into an Otherwise Functional Adult Life.

I haven't blogged in a while. Somehow having the most free time since the beginning of the year translated into simply not having enough time to blog.

See, I've had 2 weeks off school. I'm only just, this week, starting up another round of staring listlessly towards the front-ish part of the classroom while attempting to keep my brain alive by folding origami paper balls. You can tell I'm thrilled. Anyhow, I've known for awhile that I was going to have those 2 weeks. Ever since I figured it out I've been joyously planning ways to fill them with things that make my heart happy. Here's what I did:

1. Made my parents drive the 6 hours each way from PR to Chilliwack so that I could see them. Visited. Hugged. Even nomads need love. Stayed with my Dad's family. Had a scintillating debate with my uncle about how not all Muslims are terrorists. Was informed that all bad things happen on the 7th of Ed (a month on the ancient Jewish calendar) by my aunt. As she is not actually sure what day on the normal calendar that is I'm deciding to ignore the predictions of doom. Had another debate with my uncle when he threatened to not order me a pizza because I requested spinach on mine, rather than sausage. Apparently vegetables on pizza are "crap."

2. Went to Van and visited B. Ate a LOT of sushi. Drank coolers in the sunshine. Attempted to sunbath in the wind and cold the next day. Froze myself almost to death, but got a sunburn (SUCCESS!). Shopped. Randomly ran into my little sister in La Vie En Rose. Had coffee with her like two grown-ups would do. Felt weird. Hung out with a group of very, very serious kareoke singers. Sang. Did not impress anyone.

3. Went to Tofino for 3 glourious days. Attempted to surf. Mainly failed, but caught one wave on my knees. Loved every second of falling off/attempting to catch waves. Hiked straight down a hill for an hour. Lost shoes in mudhole mid way. Hiked barefoot for half an hour. Got incredibly soft skin. Considered patenting process- cardio bootcamp/spa day. At the end of the hour hiked to the world's most awe inspiring beach. Questioned decision to travel ever again. Pondered possibility of becoming a hermit. Ate the world's best chocolate chip cookies and realized that, as a beach hermit, I would have a difficult time aquiring said cookies. Gave up hermit plan. Sunbaked in first ever bikini!!! Got wicked tan, thanks to recessive Metis genes. Hiked straight back up hill. Died a little and then continued to die for the next week everytime moved legs. Hung out with surf instructors, got very jealous of lifestyle. Learned to sing every single word to Desaparacido while drunk. Now feel fluent in Spanish. Ate life changing sushi (seriously). Learned how to make fruit salsa. Never, ever wanted to leave, but had to as:
a) not a good enough surfer to be instructor
b) selling spray painted t-shirts won't pay student loans
c) job being crazy and stealing empty bottles from people's garages is taken.

4. Returned to Kamloops. Spent almost a whole week recuperating. Watched a lot of movies. Became laziest person in the world and loved every minute of it. Almost bought bike (with streamers on the handlebars) but checked bank balance first. Dream of cruising down road with streamers flying crushed. Then realized that Kamloops is 90% uphill no matter which direction you go and felt better.

5. Went out to Barriere to visit second family. Went to Pow Wow, watched very cool native dancing. Ate bannock. Was, apparently, there to be hooked up with future husband (according to second mother) but didn't know that, so failed to fall magically in love with anyone. Got drunk. Very drunk. Somehow managed to explain single transferable voting to my second mom while shloshed. Very impressive, as I don't actually understand it when sober. Pet the dogs, threw the tennis ball for them a thousand times. Sat in the hot tub once, for five minutes, before getting way too drunk to handle hot water. Ate chocolate for breakfast (it kills the hungover shakes).

So. That's what I've done. You can see I've been far too busy and important (read: hungover) to blog. I anticipate a much better blogging to time ratio in the next three weeks....I'm tired of playing hangman with whoever is sitting next to me and plan to bring my laptop to class and play hangman online instead.

Regression is a Circle

It's actually kinda funny how life seems to move in a circle. I mean, they talk about it in pretty much every single new age-y book there is. The Lion King gets all the animals in the Serengeti to sing about it. Working in the hospice everyone is constantly talking about "the circle of life and death." But, as a general rule, they are talking about the fact that you are born, you live and then you have the potential to be turned into compost and grow plants to feed people but will, in actual fact, be buried in a big box or burnt and pollute the air just a little bit.

OK, so that's the big circle. I get it. Cicular. Awesome. But I wasn't aware until just recently that there's a lot of little tiny circles in that big circle, too. For example: my housing situation. I seem to be regressing in the housing world and doing it in a very,very circular manner (see visual aid 1). Or possibly a sideways bell curve. Or a straight line and now I'm just going backwards. I'm not sure, but for the sake of my first paragraph lets just go with circle. It's actually weird. Let me explain.

Step one forwards: I started out living in my parents house. That's normal, the average person lives in their parent's house when they are growing up.

Step 2 forwards: I moved to my cousin's house, then to the ranch, then after a series of short term things (Thailand, ranch one again, ranch 2)

Step 3 forwards: I moved into the dorms.

Step 4 forwards: After two years in the dorms I moved in with roommates.

The top of the circle?: I took off and spent a long time living in a random collection of hostels, Tim Horton's, Costco parking lots, TV rooms at Cambodian bars, kitchens and bus stations. Just for argument lets call that the top, the point of the circle where I start turning around. I know in the regular definition of living spaces (4 walls, you pay for it, it's generally safe and you have the ability to wash your hair) these might not have been what most people would define as the high point.....but it was fun.

And now it all starts to go backwards.

Step one backwards- I get a roommate again. But the second half of the circle is apparently not as much fun as the first half. This time, instead of a roommates that I can buy wooden "simple" signs for, who dress up like superheroes with me and bake tater tot casseroles, this time I get a girl who acts like she's 15, lets her dog shit on the floor and has loud sex that forces me to leave the house.

Step two backwards- I move back into the dorms. This time it isn't free. B does not live across the hall. Instead, across the hall lives a girl who spends equal amounts of time screaming at her boyfriend (SHUT UP! No, YOU shut up! I'm not doing that! YOU do it!) and laughing like a hysterical jack in the box. It's like living across the hall from a mental health case study and really I feel like there should be a PowerPoint on the wall asking me what medications I expect to be prescribed for this cut and dry case of bipolar disorder.

Step three backwards- I actually expect this one to be a good step. I think I may have maxed out the negative in 2009. So I'm going to move in with my uncle, aunt and cousins and look forward to it. I have nothing to rant about here.


THE FINAL STEP- I move back home. Actually another one I'm looking forward to ....but there's something anticlimactic about moving back home. I'm going to be an RN and my parents are still going to have to drive me to work.


Isn't that weird? I'm actually retracing my steps through time. It's like Father Time read my Dear John 2009 blog and decided to take me seriously, but accidently just set the dial on reverse and left it there.

Copycat

I love reading over other people's blogs and seeing them laugh about all their analytic stuff. So I decided to try it out. It took me about a month to finally get around to figuring out how to add tags or whatever they are. I still don't quite understand what I did, but it worked. So now my site is being tracked by internet things......I'm not exactly computer literate. I've only been signed up for a little while. I have one search query that directs people to my blog. Somehow 3 people have typed in EXACTLY

"How wearing sunglasses can be positive reinforcement."

Hmmm.

Dear 2009: 2008 wins

Dear 2009

We haven't had that much time to get to know each other yet. I know that we've only been together for two months, and one of those months was a short one. I just feel like if I let this go on for any longer it won't be fair to either of us.

2009, in the time we've spent together I've been almost homeless twice, been told that I am a horrible nurse and lived through personal financial crises that were resolved only by borrowing a lot of money, sorta the same effect you have had on the world in general.

I know this is hard to hear, but I just think my relationship with 2008 was much healthier. We were adventurous, '08 and I. At this exact time in '08 I was happily hungover and sleeping through a bus ride from Siem Riep to Bangkok, about to fly to India. '08 and I hitchhiked across Canada, we slept in Costco parking lots and befriended other parking lot hobos. We drank formadehyde based Thai beer, ate poutine from pie plates and got free muffins from the Tim Horton's night guy in Winnipeg. We expanded our horizons, learned new things and let the world come at us as it wanted to.

With you I'm starting to feel stifled. The adventures I had with 'o8 are something that never seems to happen with you, 2009. All we do is go to class and clinical. Your financial demands and extreme need for time commitment mean that I can't do fun things like go to Montreal for the weekend whenever I want to. You've turned me into someone that gets upset over the idea of sleeping on a floor rather than rejoicing over the thought of reduced rent.

I don't want to be harsh. I'm sure for someone with a need for stability you will be the perfect year. In this world there is someone that will love you and all your scheduled activites. I just think that you should be free to find that person and let me be free to go back to '08. I hope we can still be friends. Maybe we can hang out next week? '08 and I will be on the beach in Malaysia.

Love

Millie

Imitating a Washing Machine and Other Fun Things To Do When Your Roommate is a Shithead.

So my roommate moved out. After all the initial drama caused by her surprise announcement that she was doing so I'm pretty glad she's out of my hair. Her family came and moved her out at 8 am on Saturday, a time when I am not exactly known to be at my very most chipper. At first the fact that she left me with absolutely no dishes, furniture or storage space (she took most of the cupboards) made me angry and the way the eerily empty apartment echoed whenever I walked freaked me out a bit. But then I realized that not having any dishes means I won't have to wash HER dishes and a completely empty livingroom translates into a brand-new, hardwood floored yoga studio, complete with candles (she took the lamp). So yesterday I bought a frying pan, a plate and a fork and today I turned Mates of State way up and danced around the gloriously dog shit free kitchen.

Then I decided to do some laundry. When Tian moved out she took the nice, new washing machine with her and replaced with some old funky looking thing that is probably from the same era as Claire's old stove, just less of a cheerful harvest gold and more of a depressing cold porridge brown in color. Tian, her mother and her sister (who all look disturbingly like the same person) assured me it worked. I'm naive. I fell for it.

So I took all my clothes and threw them in and poured in a generous cup of expensive-ish yummy smelly laundry soap. And then I tried to turn it on.

I've never heard an appliance sound constipated before. I makes this weird, low pitched, "I'm going to blow up soon" type buzzing when set at the "wash" part of any setting. At the rinse and spin cycle it rattles like an unmedicated Parkinson's patient but remains mysteriously free of water. In short, it is not a functional washing machine. And now I'm really angry.

I washed my clothes tonight by dumping them all in the tub and walking back and forth on them like I was making wine. I am now reduced to backpacking-through-Asia standards of hygiene, except there, if I shelled out the 50 cents, someone else would walk on my clothes for me. Since I don't usually get angry I no longer have appropriate ways of dealing with my anger in my repertoire of social interactions. Would someone with more experience being upset please tell me what to do?

Time for a New Coping Mechanism

Apparently, somewhere in the world, there are people who have mastered the art of coping with stressful situations. These people have come up with some actual productive thing to do that helps them handle badness. I've talked to people who claim to be this type of person. They don't drink copious amounts of gin from a bucket or purposely make happy people miserable when shit goes down, like a normal person would do. Instead they do things like go to the gym, write poetry or bake apple pies.

I have not mastered any of these useful and mature ways of dealing. Instead, when things get rough, I assess the situation, decide how bad things are and then, calmly and collectedly, run as far away as possible.

Yes, it's true, I am an escapist. The only thing that cures my stress is getting as far away from what causes it as possible. When actual physical distance is not possible I like to destroy my brain function to the point that I can't think, and therefore can't stress, any longer. When credit card bills come, I go to the movies. When school works piles up and I suddenly come to the realization that if I want to pass this year I will have to pull 5 straight all nighters, I drink a bottle of wine with a friend and go to school hungover, smelling like a brewery and absolutely unable to string together a coherent sentence, let alone focus on the lecture. I'm pretty sure I've always been this way. I have a vivid childhood memory of packing my piggybank and teddybear into a plastic suitcase to run away from home at age 8 because I couldn't understand my math homework. And the worse a situation is, the farther from it I want to get.

Up until this year this strategy has worked very well for me. Running away from shitty roommates has led to better living situations. Running away from immediate financial crises has led to jobs which allowed me to correct said crises. Running to Asia to cure a nursing-school-boredom induced coma was a definite success.

I'm starting to think, however, that this method of coping needs reevaluation. Apparently as you grow up your problems do too and if increasing stress equals increasing distance needed.....I may have to start spending all my time in Fiji. But then what if Fiji gets stressful?

Still Not Convinced?

Today I got written up, made to cry at least three times and told I needed to have an emergency meeting with my instructor all because one client said I didn't smile enough and was short with them.

A Plea For Innocence

Lately it seems that every second person wants to be a nurse. They want the good money, the long stretches of time off, the guaranteed job, the ability to travel. They want all the perks that come from having a job that has one of the most powerful unions out there and uses it's power to get nice big pay raises. And, let's be honest, they want to wear scrubs and run around the hospital giving CPR and yelling things like "I need another round of Epi, STAT!"

Now, I want to make this very clear. I'm not judging. I am in nursing school for all the reasons listed above. And I'm honest about it. When they asked us all in first year why we were in nursing our whole class sounded like a Miss America pageant with "helping people" replacing "world peace". When I said "for the money" people looked at me like I'd just flushed their goldfish down the toilet while smoking a cigar made out of the last panda bear.

So, I'm not judging. I just want people to make informed decisions. That's part of being a nurse. It's too late for me. I'm 3 1/2 years in. At this point I've written 300 pages of self reflection, 100 papers on topics as enthralling as "Uncle T's Chronic Ulcer" and "How My Personal Trauma, Explained in Depth in This Paper, Makes Me a Better Nurse". I have spent what feels like 9000 days in clinical, worked two summers as an undergrad (read: low level labourer) and worked as a care aid to support my scrub buying habit. I owe like $30,000 to the government and still haven't managed to find a way to make it go away. Basically, if I don't finish the last 6 months of the program now I will hate myself forever. But it's not too late for everyone else.

As a public service I have decided to put together a list of reasons that you, and everyone around you, really, really shouldn't become a nurse. I mean, there's the obvious. There aren't enough nurses. There are too many patients. There aren't enough beds. Still too many patients. Doctors are mean and NOT hot like on Grey's Anatomy. You will, most likely, ruin your back. Blah, blah, blah. There's also the other reasons. Here they are. Read, contemplate, run in the other direction.

1. Shit.
Literally, shit. As a nurse you will get shit on. And I don't mean you will accidentally get some on your hands when changing an oldies bottoms. That happens pretty much every 5 minutes. I mean that sometime in your career, for most people several times, someone will find a way to actually expel shit directly from their body onto yours. I personally have been sprayed by a patient while I was standing 5 feet from her bed. My friend had a client poo ON HER HEAD and spent the rest of the year being called Capt. Bowel Movement by her instructor. The same goes for vomit, sputum and blood.

2. People call you names.
Sure most of them have dementia, so really it doesn't mean much. But after a whole day of being called things that I'm pretty sure even sailors don't call cheap hookers anymore it becomes VERY difficult to remember that all the nastiness being sent your way is really the result of the twisty bits in old people's brains. The forty-eighth time someone calls you a rancid donkey carcass with maggots where your brain should be Alzheimer's starts to sound a lot like an excuse. The lady that came up with that gem couldn't remember what cheese is called for christ's sake.

3. Other nurses.
Remember my two blogs about my class? Get a good mental picture of the stupid girl. Now, give her a massive sense of entitlement, an inferiority complex and 10 years of experience, just enough to forget what it was like ever being new and lose all the knowledge she gained in school and replace it with bad habits and antiquated techniques. Multiply by twenty, add some mean spirited gossip and backstabbing and you have a nursing floor. Worst of all the second a nurse turns 40 she gets the nursing haircut (the one that looks like someone was cutting hair with a weedwacker) so they all look alike. A bunch of scary, mean twins. It's like a Steven King movie.

4. Patients.
When my little sister was three she got her ears operated on. She went to the hospital, got to eat some popsicles and had to take medicine that made her all dizzy. She weighed a whopping 40 ish pounds (I think) and I'll bet you she was as nice as pie. That is what patients in hospitals USED to be like. Patients now are only in the hospital if they are siiiiiiiiiiick. Apendectomy? You can go home the same day. Bowel resection? A couple days. But a 54 year old smoker that weighs 650 pounds, doesn't have enough upper body strength to turn themselves over in bed and has laid in one place for so long they have a bedsore the size of Texas? Welcome! Our hospital is your home. For the record, trying to turn a patient that size over is like going cow tipping, except you aren't allowed to be drunk.

5. Monotony.
You don't get to yell "STAT!!" Doctors yell. You hand them shit. And hang IVs. And change dressings. Anytime you switch areas it's cool for awhile, and then its the same old same old. Work is usually either boring or soul crushingly terrifying and they don't let you take home samples of the good drugs. While its a big step above the old days, when nurses scrubbed floors on their hands and knees.....sometimes I still want to yell things and cut.

So, I don't think that any of you that read this actually want to be nurses. But if you know anyone that does, please, for their own sake, save their innocent souls. No one deserves to be shit on.

Feminism for Dipshits

You may think there are stupid people in your class. They probably make inane comments all the time, manage to offend someone every time they talk and just generally annoy everyone so much that it's a wonder they haven't been choked with a live salmon or drowned in their own coffee mug yet. You think that you can rightly assume that this person is one of the more challenged people in the world. Everyone thinks this, everyone assumes that the kid everyone throws mental daggers at in their class is one of the worst out there.

You're wrong. You are all wrong.

The stupidest people in the the world are not in your classes, no matter what class you are in. I know this because I have come to the conclusion that people that possess serious, mind numbing, make you want to chew off your own arm and throw a tonic-clonic seizure just so that they'll stop talking stupidity, are not allowed to enter random programs willy-nilly. They are systematically searched out, rounded up and convinced that they want to be nurses. And then sent to Kamloops to become major players in my own personal version of hell.

Today we had a class in feminism. For nursing this is an important concept. It goes way beyond being the reason that we no longer wear short skirts and little starched caps on our perfectly combed-back hair. Feminism is why we no longer have to stand when doctors enter the room and give up our chairs to them. It's why we actually learn about physiology and pharmacology in school rather than JUST the best way to dust door frames and the fastest way to turn hospital corners when making a bed. Feminist nurses were the driving force behind the shift from thinking of hospitals as places where good behaviour was forced on patients to places where people made their own choices and got well.

It's pretty darn major and, I thought, pretty basic. I knew all of this before I got into nursing. I consider myself a feminist in an understated kind of way, I think that in an ideal world everyone would be equal and that helping women and men reach equality is a good place to start. Sometimes I'm pretty naive but I sort of thought that in nursing, a career dominated by women, feminism would be a pretty well universally accepted concept.

Not so my friends, not so at all.

You've all been introduced to my class in earlier posts. My favorite friend ever was super duper active in discussion today. Here are a few of the gems of knowledge that jumped from her peanut sized brain to the wide world:

"If everyone was a feminist then everyone would hate men and be gay, and then where would we get kids?"

"I think we need to embrace people with traditional beliefs. So my dad thinks women belong in the kitchen, I do too and I don't see anything wrong with that. Why are we punishing people for acting the way they should"

"I think it makes sense that men have more power in the world, they're more logical and women are so emotional we need people to lead us."

Last week I said she took me back to the 50's and I could hear the martini shaker in her voice as she mentally prepared the perfect dinner while awaiting the coming of her strong manly man. I take it back. Did I say 50's? Try 1910. She might as well be wearing bloomers and carrying around a bottle of smelling salts for when her corsets get too tight and she faints.

I'm surprised that our teacher, a wonderful, opinionated feminist theory professor didn't kick her out. I guess she has a level of tolerance I'll never have.

The worst part of this day wasn't the really, really stupid girl though. She's so over the top that it just makes me laugh and wonder how on earth she ever wrote an essay with enough 2 syllable words in it to get into the nursing program. The worst part was that, with the exception of me, one guy and two or three other girls, everyone else in the class seemed to agree with the basic ideas that she was expounding. This university is letting out a class full of people that think all feminists are gay, all homosexuals are slightly less than human and a woman's place really is to follow the big strong man she pledged allegiance to the day she got hitched.

I want out.

The Coolest Kids in the Bar

There are some things I hate about Kamloops. I hate that it snows but never stays snowy, just melts and then freezes into sheets of death on every flat surface. I hate that people think driving their stupid muscles cars and yelling out the windows is a normal social interaction. I hate that any bar you go to you will DEFINITLY hear the Pussycat Dolls, probably at least 3 times.

But I love that you can go to the bar in costume and not only will people find it normal.....you actually get rewarded for it. Here's the story:

My friend B and I have a full blown obession centered around the TV show "How I Met Your Mother" and in particular Neil Patrick Harris' character Barney Stinson. I didn't have too many giggely girl crushes in high school, so I make up for it now by doodling "Lisa Patrick Harris" on my notebooks in leadership class. You can laugh but I know that someone who makes up a third of this blog's readership is a full blown Battlestar Galactica addict. I'm much cooler than that. But yes, focusing. Anyhow, we made t-shirts
You'll notice we didn't stop at t-shirts. We went a little crazy. And then we got a little drunk. It's been a long time since I've been drunk and I think my body is punishing me for Ottawa.....cause I am now officially the worlds cheapest drunk. Remember that mug of gin? That would now kill me. I was a little sloppy by the time we left home and I guess I went about being super friendly at the bar. I explained our shirts to eeeeeveryone. I remember trying to talk the coat check girl into checking two coats for the price of one. Trying to convince the bouncer that he, too, should become a HIMYM addict. Shaking off some old guy who claimed to be 20, looked like he'd grown up with a vice clamped around his forhead and kept trying to hold my hand. And, of course, dancing like a flaming tard. B got in trouble for wearing sunglasses on the dance floor (who knew that was a rule), we played a supremely untalented game of pool and did some sort of shot that combined whisky and banana liquer. And then, in a ThePeach inspired moment my liver suddenly realized what it was being asked to process and demanded that it be taken home immediatly.

During the night I had sort of been operating under the impression that no one was really noticing our antics/costumes/stumbly drunkness because there were so many girls wearing napkins as dresses and grinding on the stage to look at instead. I guess not. After getting our coats, as we were about to walk out the door the coat check girl stopped us. We walked back over to the little coat window and she handed us a pink gift bag and said "I have to give this to someone. You guys are cool. So here you go."

I have now officially been given positive reinforcement for going to the bar dressed like a bag lady from the eighties. This positive reinforcement comes in the the form of:
-two sets of dirty dice
-two spin the bottle buttons
-a chocolate heart
-a teddy bear that I have now given to my roomates dog
-about 20,000 sickly pink suckers and
-a bag of heart gem stickers

In retrospect it might not have been all that amazing. But, being slightly tipsy, I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I proceeded to drunk dial everyone who's numbers I could dial by memory and leave rambling voicemails about how stellarly cool B and I were. The taxi driver just kept shaking his head and I think he was laughing at me, cause at one point all I could see was his turban shaking in that distinctive way everyone shakes when they are trying very hard not to laugh at idiots. After that point the night is a blur of leftover sushi, chocolate and staring dumbly at episodes of Friends.

But hey, this is why I (sometimes) love Kamloops. Sometimes, for no reason except a crazy t-shirt, you become the coolest kid at the bar.

The 80's stage a hostile takeover

My house has become the 80's, as invisioned by people who lived 1 year of their lives in the 80's.

My roomate's friends are in their final year of nursing, and they are all finishing up for the year. After a hard year of learning how to bedbath and discussing deep thoughts (like, really, how do you even KNOW if someone needs gravol, like, emotionally?) they are ready to let loose and party. At my house.

I was okay with this when I was first told. That's because in my world parties work like this:
1. Buy beer/gin
2. Drink beer/ pour gin into bucket and drink
3. Leave

Not in the world of nurses. I worked a night shift last night and woke up at 10 this morning, after 2 delicious and inadequate hours of sleep to loud pumping VERY bad hip-hop music and alot of people blowing up balloons in my kitchen. Now my whole house looks like a cross between an 8 year old's birthday party (but not in the Laos sense) and an explosion at a flourescent paint factory. Every time I open my door I get hit in the head with a Blondie poster. So that's nice.

I remember having theme parties in my last apartment. They were fun. This is not. My roomate has called me 2 times a day for the past week so that I can tell her if she can wear flourescent green fishnets AND a pink tank top....or is that too much. Eventually I just started to tell her my cell battery was dying. My computer suddenly has a lot of really bad 80's music on it because, in a moment of weakness, I told her she could download stuff for the party. "Like a virgin" keeps working itself into my playlist, like a parasite.

I am working out a plan so I don't have to be here tonight. Maybe I'll work another night shift.....hospice sounds like more fun than this.

No one can know

No one in Kamloops can know I have this blog.

Actually, that's a little dramatic. No one I go to school with can know. Because I am about to rant endlessly about every single person in my class and, even though I don't really like any of them, it's more pleasant to be in class if everyone doesn't hate you. And this is nursing school. Which means that all social interactions can be 100% accuratly predicted. Whatever a class full of 15 year old girls would do is exactly what will happen.

Example #1.
Student A slept with Student B's ex. One more time, that word was EX. Student B proceeded to recruit a posse and whip them into a tizzy of A hatred. They then refused to sit on the same side of the classroom as A, pinned spiteful little notes to her back and later on got drunk, drove by her place a bunch of times in a row and then egged her car.

I love nursing school.

I have a new favorite classmate though. She never fails to say things in class that make me wonder when EXACTLY someone invented a time machine and took us back to the time when women's magazines all included a recipe for cheese balls with olives and 101 ways to say "I have a headache" to your husband so he'd leave you alone in the bedroom. Here a few of the gems:

"Where are their husbands. I mean, I know the gays have a place in society, but these women need a man around."

"Well, of course tall men are always leaders. They're stonger than women and we need leaders that can protect us and hunt and fish and stuff."

"I think first nations people should be cut off from welfare if they start drinking. I don't want my tax dollars to support bums."

I'm glad she said first nations. It would be sad if nursing students weren't able to be politically correct.