You know a smell is real bad when a room full of nurses are taking turns dry heaving into a trash can.
Real Life Nursing Moments
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Life Lessons with CrossFit
CrossFit is teaching me some important lessons, but they aren’t always the lessons I expected.
Some of them are the normal lessons. For instance, today was a running day for me. I didn’t want to run because my legs are still sore from the 30 minutes of jump-roping we did yesterday, but I went anyway. And then after I was out, I didn’t want to run up the giant hill in the neighborhood, because that hill sucks real bad. But I did it anyway. The whole time I was running up the hill I was like, “I’m so strong! I can do this! CrossFit is teaching me not to limit myself! Booyah!” Then when I was nearing the end of my run and my calf muscles seized up like a motor without any oil in it, I wanted to quit early. But I kept running anyway. I was like, I CAN keep going, and so I SHOULD. That’s totally a CrossFit attitude. 10 points to me.
10 idiot points, that is. Because I just hopped out of bed to give the house the final pre-sleep lock-down and my calf muscles were all EFF YOU, STUPID. WE WILL STOP WORKING NOW. I hobbled my way back to bed using the same pivot step that my nieces use to make their knee-less Barbies strut around their doll houses.
Another thing that CrossFit has taught me is how rarely I fully extend my arms. Zack called tonight to check on me; he asked me how I was feeling, and how my elbows were doing. I had stretch out both of my arms all the way before I could verify that, yes, they do, in fact, hurt super badly. I just had previously been unaware because apparently I walk around all day long with my elbows bent.
So I just wanted to share those important CrossFit lessons of the day with you. I am always capable of more than I think I am, and, uh, also, I don’t extend my arms very often.
Howdy, Strangers.
Something happened when we moved into the new house and all of the sudden, I lost my blogging mojo. I’ve spend a fair amount of time performing some self-analysis of the situation, and I’ve come up with a whole battery of semi-valid reasons that I haven’t written on here. I’m not going to list them, though, because they all just read like excuses and everyone hates excuses. The standard “no news is good news” rule doesn’t seem to apply to blogging — especially not when you announce the return of your sometimes-crippling depression, and then drop off the face of the earth. I recognize that my timing has been poor, so I’ll try to resolve some of the grey areas that have been left standing with an update-post. Perhaps that will get the blog rolling again.
I’m seeing a therapist on a weekly basis. I was very blessed/lucky to find someone that was a good fit for me right off the bat this time, as opposed to the disastrous results I got last time I looked for a therapist. She’s young and hip, and we spend a good amount of time in our sessions laughing, which is exactly the way that I like to deal with things. If I can’t at least laugh about something, it makes it impossible for me to talk about the really hard things.
And there are some really hard things. This therapist has helped me dig around in my mess of a brain long enough to find a few things that were really bothering me, even though I couldn’t put a finger on them before I started seeing her. In short, she’s done what therapists are supposed to do. So, that’s great news. I’m getting medically sorted and I’m getting therapized on the regular, so, wins all around.
Zack and I are still loving the new house. I of course have big plans for furniture and decorations for every room. It took me about a month of living here before I realized that all of the furniture and decorating wasn’t going to happen immediately, that, in fact, it was going to be a very slow, laborious process. After that I chilled out a little bit, and started to really soak up the glory of being in this stage. It’s a fun stage. Instead of spending my time flipping through real estate websites, I’m back to looking at magazines and imagining the perfect craft room set-up.
I started working out at a new CrossFit gym that’s right here by the house. In short, it’s pretty much kicking my ass. I did my second workout there today. I’m exhausted even though it wasn’t even a miserable day — we were just doing skill work. Learning how to do kipping pull-ups and double-unders. I am very proud to say that I can do pull-ups with the kipping. I might be less proud tomorrow, however, if the way my arms and chest feel is any precursor to how sore I’m going to be. I hyper-extended my elbows about 23 billion times as I was coming out of the pull-ups (apparently you have to be strong to do a pull-up AND to STOP doing a pull-up, too). That should make working tomorrow a total delight.
But anyway, y’all: fear not about the state of me and my mental health. I am improving, undoubtedly. And I am coming back to you. I promise, I haven’t quit blogging. It was more like a leave of absence, and I’ve missed it the whole time I’ve been gone. Thanks for checking up on me every once in a while, though. It was nice to be missed.
On Finding My Wallet
If you saw a girl in a pink dress jumping around in the middle of the road today, wonder no more. That was me. And the black thing in my hand? That was my wallet. I was quite glad to be reunited with it again.
The fact that I was wearing a pink dress was important. Even more important was the fact that my pink dress does not have pockets. Neither does my jean jacket. So my wallet, which I usually keep in my pocket, didn’t have any pockets to go into. Naturally, that meant that after I scanned my credit card at the gas pump, I set my wallet down on my car. Then I got distracted by something shiny and/or the numbers flitting by on the gas pump’s meter and POOF. Wallet forgotten.
I didn’t figure out it was missing until 3 hours later, when I was trying to wash my car. Cousin Amy and her husband are coming into town this weekend to hang out, and they always have very, very clean cars. I feel peer pressure when I’m around them to also have a clean car. I was sitting at the car wash digging through my purse when I realized my dumb wallet wasn’t there. I fretted.
I called my friend to see if I’d left it at her house this afternoon. I went to her place after I got gas. She didn’t find it. So I called the gas station to see if someone had found it. No, he said. No one had turned it in. Then I went and grabbed friend-turned-neighbor Josh and had him search my car, in case I was just not seeing something, or not checking some obvious place. He didn’t find it either.
So then Josh, MP, Juliana (Josh and MP’s 6-year old) and I all piled into the car and we drove back to the gas station (a 30 minute trip) where I had last had the wallet. We pulled into the same pump, and it was nowhere to be found. Josh asked, “Where did you go after this?” I said, “To Josie’s house. I didn’t even go inside the gas station!”
We both turned our gaze to the street, and that’s when I noticed the black lump in the middle of the road. It looked like it could have been a blob of tar that had been formerly employed as a yellow reflector keeper-downer. I said, “WAIT A MINUTE! IS THAT?…. THAT’S IT!!!”
I have never, ever, not once in my life, wished more that I was a free runner. Absolutely nothing could have displayed my excitement more than turning a series of badass kick-flips and possibly bouncing (in a suave and awesome way) off the hood of a car or two. Alas, I am not a free runner. Instead, I just had to settle for bouncing up and down, and excitedly pointing to my wallet as each car that drove by, hoping that my smile + my bouncing + my wallet in my hand would effectively convey the above story to each of the car’s drivers as they passed.
On Temperature Control
One of the best things about living in the new house is how unbelievably temperate it is in here. This house is always exactly whatever temperature we tell it to be.
The first three* houses Zack and I lived in were all, uh, a wee bit drafty. The first one was at the camp where we used to work, and that house was basically a double-wide with a sliding glass door. Not temperate. The second house was built in 1922 and the windows were literally falling out of the window panes. I used two rolls of duct tape just to prevent rain from coming inside during thunderstorms. After that house, we moved into a “newer” place, built in 1941, that had a brick exterior and 150% better insulation.
Unfortunately, 150% better than The Worst EVAR is still pretty terrible. Zack and I started out sleeping in the back bedroom of the house, but had to swap bedrooms to sleep in the “warmer room” during our first winter we were there, just so that I could crawl into bed at night and not spend the first hour shivering. But even in the warmer room, Zack still got annoyed at the outrageous amount of clothing I wore to bed in the winter. Apparently, he doesn’t think it’s sexy to sleep ski bibs.
Anyway, the ski bib thing’s not a problem anymore. In fact, the only problem I have now is that I’m going to have to re-think our bedding because we’re currently more suited for an Eskimo-type situation than our current brand-new-house-with-insulation-and-a-fully-operational-thermostat situation.
*That’s 3 houses in 5 years of marriage; we are getting very good at packing and unpacking, and we can sometimes even assemble furniture while in the same room together and not want to kill each other, just so long as neither one of us has low blood sugar. Our #1 marriage rule is this: Thou shalt not assemble furniture together when thouest art hangry.
Quote of the Day
“You know what I was thinking? If Mary Tyler Moore married and then divorced Steven Tyler, and married and then divorced Michael Moore, then got into a three-way lesbian marriage with Demi Moore and Mandy Moore, would she go by the name Mary Tyler Moore Tyler Moore Moore Moore?” – Max, Happy Endings
On Starting Therapy
I met with a new therapist today, and I was only halfway through my first sentence when my voice cracked for the first time.
I felt I had to pause what I’d been saying, (which was undoubtedly something incredibly emotional and revealing, such as “I have been depressed for a while now,”) and explain what was going on, as if I was the first person who has ever cried during therapy. “I’m a crier,” I said, “You should know that about me. I’m going to cry the whole time I talk to you, and that’s just how it’s going to be.” She laughed and said that was fine, of course, and she would grab me all the tissues I could possibly need. “Oh, it’s alright,” I explained, as I reached around to my back pocket to grab the handkerchief I’d knowingly brought along with me. I told her, “I came prepared.”
I’m not sure why I even thought it would be possible, but I had convinced myself that I was going to be able to discuss my life with this therapist without snotting all over her couch and crying the whole time. I was so, so wrong. Before we even started talking about me, I knew I was wrong. I was sitting on the couch listening to her explain the legal forms that I’d signed–disclosure statements, right to privacy explanations, etc.– when I started to feel the inside of my sinus cavities start to tingle as if I’d just snorted a giant pile of crushed lifesaver Wint-O-Greens. I’m sure a lot of people cry during therapy, but I’m willing to bet that not everyone gets choked up while their therapist is running through her personal education background. But I do. Ooooh, I certainly do.
Before I picked up where I left off, I told her that I’d basically just shown her everything she’d need to know about me. I know that I’ve got a lot of stuff going on in my life, I know that I have problems. And even though I haven’t figured out how to fix them yet, I have learned to compensate fairly well. I understand my particular collection of -isms, and I prepare accordingly.
Then I blew my nose into the handkerchief that I’d brought, and we dove right in.
A Catch-Up Post
A fun way to break in the brand new oven at your brand new house is by using an over-sized dish towel to pull your steak fries out of the oven, and then, in the process, setting that dish towel on fire. Don’t worry, though. Because my brand new faucet for my brand new kitchen sink has a pretty impressive spray range. I took care of it*.
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Zack heard Scout growling the other day and thought that someone was trying to break into the house. She barks at people when they come over, and she barks at squirrels and stuff in the backyard, but she never growls. She growled for so long that Zack was able to shoot a little video of it to show me.
So, there’s a pond in our new neighborhood, and that pond has ducks. Scout was growling at one of the ducks, who was across the street, in one of the neighbor’s yards. You could see it on one part of the video; it was scarcely bigger than a period at the end of a sentence. But Scout could see it, and boy, was she ever pissed.
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Zack and I decided to sign up for a run/race at the end of April to motivate me (us?) to get back into the swing of exercising on a regular basis. We’re going to go for the gusto and register for the 10K. Wish me luck, but don’t wish me good sense, otherwise I would surely back out while I still have the chance.
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I’ve slowly started to make the medication adjustments that the doctor suggested that I make. I don’t feel a whole lot happier but I do feel more stable. I explained that concept to Zack earlier by saying, “You know how sometimes we’d go to dinner and have the best time, and then on the way home I would start crying, and then I would go straight to bed? I don’t feel like that anymore.” So that’s good news(?). It’s hard to think about things in terms of emotional stability as opposed to just happy vs. unhappy. I don’t feel better because I don’t feel happier, but stable is better than unstable, so I’ll count that as a win. So far, the biggest side-effects that I have from detoxing off of Medication #1 are jacked-up sense of spacial awareness (running into walls, trying to set things down on the counter but totally missing and dropping them on the floor, etc.) and feeling like everything is happening in slow motion. Neither of these are surprising to me; I expected them both. The side-effects just leave me wishing that psych meds weren’t so miserable to adjust.
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Pictures of the house forthcoming. Zack and I have been enjoying settling into the new house. It’s perhaps a little bit obvious or redundant to say this, but we have such a sense of ownership about this place — like we’ve never had before with any of the places that we’ve rented. It’s been fun to celebrate being in this house that we’ve dreamed of for so many years while we do normally-mundane things like decide where to store the dish towels.
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*Just kidding. I mean, I really did catch the rag on fire, but I was able to put it out with a couple of frantic waves and “OH SHIT”s. Problem solved.
And now, a break from our regularly scheduled programming…
To tell you this breaking news: Zack and I are spending our first night in our NEW HOUSE. And, I gotta say, it is pretty crazy cool.
Also, moving is exhausting, so we are going to bed super early. Good night.
(!)
All of my friends are Action Jacksons.
Well, I said that I was hoping that my post yesterday would get the ball rolling, and boy did I ever get what I was asking for.
I have a lot of people in my life who love me and care about me. What’s more is the people who care about me are real go-getter types–the kind that like to DO things about stuff. So when they ask me what they can DO to help me, and I say, “I don’t know. Why? Did you have anything in mind?” They are like, “UH, yeah. Here’s the plan. Let’s get started.”
So that’s how I wound up talking to a psychiatrist today. I didn’t have any intention of talking to a psychiatrist today. I was going to wait until we got settled into the new house, and then I was going to go to see a counselor. Instead, the go-getters in my life saw to it that I got the help that I need–the help that I’ve needed for months now. They saw to it by literally walking me to help’s front door and dropping me off.
Today wasn’t the worst day I’ve had recently. In fact, it wasn’t even a particularly bad day at all. That made for funny conversations with the doctors and nurses doing my initial psych evaluations. Usually people are at the bottom of their proverbial barrels before they finally go in to an office to see a doctor; I know that’s been my pattern at least. So when the nurse asked me to rate today on a scale of 1-10, I was like, “Uh, well, today’s actually been alright. But these last few months have been pretty rough. So, you mind if I give you a range?”
I’m feeling thankful today. Thankful for a husband, family, friends, and co-workers who care about me. Thankful for the go-getters who surround me, and help me when I don’t have the energy to help myself.
