(I’d deliver you an entire rant about the truckloads of words we misuse, but I, too, am guilty of calling everything ‘awesome.’)
(I will not, however, give in to my generations insistence upon using the word ‘like’ every time they take a breath. I listened to an NPR story the other day which contained quotes from people ranging in age from 14 to 20, and I swear to you, they said ‘like’ at least once every five words. Just shoot me.)
I had such a strong craving for an ice cream sandwich over the weekend that I made a special trip to the store just to buy one (OK, fine, A FEW).
And that, in a sentence, is why I shouldn’t have been surprised by the fact that I started my period today.
Don’t fret, though. I called Zack and apologized for my behavior this week as soon as I figured it out. I should seriously put calendar alerts into my phone or something.
I was going to write a post about my day, but I’m still processing it, so it was going to be hard. And then I saw that some of my friends are posting pictures of their Italian Vacation on facebook and now there’s NO WAY I’ll ever get focused enough to form coherent thoughts or sentences. So instead, let’s all be jealous that people get to go to Italy who are not us. Us should soooo get to go to Italy, am I right?
Whenever a patient goes to to get a stent placed in one of their coronary arteries, he or she is awake for the whole procedure. At one point during the stent placement, there is a balloon that gets inflated and blocks off all of the blood that should be flowing through that artery. It’s usually not inflated for very long, so it doesn’t cause long-term problems, but the lack of blood flow and oxygen sometimes results in patients experiencing chest pain at that moment in the procedure.
We nurses, being the sadistic-but-educationally-minded weirdos that we are, really love that moment. We love it because the patients can learn that the chest pain that they experience when the balloon is inflated is the exact same pain that the patient would feel if he or she was having a heart attack. There are common symptoms of heart attacks that most people know. Pain in the chest, shortness of breath, shooting pains down the left arm, etc. There are also less common signs, though. Some people have jaw pain. Some people have pain that they mistake for indigestion. Others have back pain, or just feel overly tired. None of us knows what our particular flavor of chest pain is going to be until we experience it for ourselves. But the people who experience chest pain during a stent placement are among the few that get to know for sure that THIS is MY chest pain, and if I ever feel like THIS again, I should go ahead and get myself on down to the ER, like, STAT.
Today I went to see my massage therapist. Usually by the time I go to see her, I’m experiencing numbness and shooting pains down my arm, and have been in pretty severe pain for at least a few weeks. Though I am not very timely in my appointment making, massages are very helpful to me. I am apparently incapable of dispensing of my stress and instead choose to store it up in all of my muscles in my back. Every time I go to see Jayme, she works on me for hours. She focuses on my trouble areas, which have always been between and above my shoulder blades. I have steel cables that run perpendicular to my spine, and those steel cables are emotional hoarders. I’m sure they’re going to get a call to appear on the show any day now. It’s disgusting up in there.
I didn’t wait until I thought I was going to die before I made today’s appointment. I had a gift certificate and a day off to burn, so I decided to do my steel cables a favor and try to take out the trash. I even gloated as I laid down on the bed at how wonderful it was that I’d come in so early this time.
I had been fooled. Jayme, however, was not fooled. It took her about 3 minutes to discover that while, yes, it was true that the area between my shoulder blades were in better condition than usual, that didn’t mean that I’d done myself any favors. Instead, she told me that, “It was like I was in a totally different body.” The places that had always pained me the most were healthy, and I’d developed all sorts of new problem areas. Problem areas that were (are) so jacked that even after two hours of unusually brutal elbow-kneading, my muscles still weren’t budging. Jayme and I had to book another appointment on Wednesday so that we can pick up where we left off today.
I guess Jayme could tell that I was baffled by the change, even though my face was smushed down into the little donut pillow. As she worked on my neck and back, she gently explained that this was normal because I had just experienced a big life change. The transition from nursing school to actual nursing meant that my stressors were changing, too. Before, I was experiencing nursing school stress and nursing school muscle pain. Now, she told me, I am experiencing good ol’ nursing-as-a-daily-grind stress and muscle pain. And my body can apparently tell the difference between the two, even though my mind sometimes (most times) can’t.
I just kept thinking, “So, my body’s muscles are a stress filing cabinet*? School files do not go in the same place as work files?” I thought I knew my pain. I thought I was like that Cardiac Cath patient who had experienced his chest pain during the stenting procedure. I thought I knew how to recognize my particular brand of pain, just like I thought I knew exactly how long I could ignore it. But I was wrong. Chest pain and Muscles-Hiding-Stress pain do not play by the same rules. Lesson learned.
*Is this a good enough reason to get a label maker? I could just put little labels all over my back** denoting the area’s stress sensitivities so that I could use it as a physical map to guide me to the source of my life’s stress when I’m all freaked out but I can’t quite put my finger on why.
**Logistically, this idea is pretty difficult. I could get the labels tattooed on, then they wouldn’t come off in the shower. But I don’t know if these areas morph, so that seems a wee bit permanent. Perhaps I should just draw a picture?
Today I had the kind of day that Mitch Hedburg was talking about when he describes the “complicated payment” in this (nsfw) clip. My prescriptions were backordered, I left the house to shoot a wedding and forgot my camera equipment, batteries, and heels at home. If today hadn’t been so uniformly against me, it might have been sad. But because it was so predictably bad, it just became funny.
I solved the shoe problem by grabbing a new pair at Payless on the way. I now have no less than 5 blisters on my feet. See? Uniformly bad becomes funny after a while! Ask Greg Focker. He can verify my theory.
I was going to write a blog post about working out and sore muscles tonight, but as soon as I opened my computer, I got a righteous case of the hiccups, and now that’s all I can think about. They’re coming fast and strong and they friggin’ hurt. I hate the hiccups.
It’s pretty straight-forward, really. In Hawaii, they have these teeny little bananas called Apple* Bananas, and Apple Bananas are way, way better than the Non-Apple Banana types of bananas. (Regular bananas? Gross bananas? Dole bananas? I’m not sure of the proper name for the gross variety.)
Apple Bananas are about 1/2 to 1/3rd the size of a typical banana found in an American grocery store, which is perfect because American grocery store bananas are too huge. Also, Apple Bananas are firmer, slightly more tart, and about 50 times more delicious than grocery store bananas here in the continental US. I ate my body weight in those little mini-bananas while I was on the island 
– I even hand picked a few bananas from the giant trees growing behind the Dolphin Hotel where we stayed in Hilo (the volcano side of the island).
After we got home from our vacation, all I wanted in this world was to go to the store and get some bananas. I went grocery shopping, I got bananas, and I tore into one on the way home. After the first bite I immediately regretted the following decisions: a.) buying the grocery store bananas, b.) eating said grocery store banana**, c.) foolishly believing that anything from a grocery store could be as good as a thing freshly picked from a wild garden behind a hotel in Hilo, Hawai’i, and d.) adhering to Hawai’i's very strict agricultural laws regarding the import and export of fresh produce.
*If you’re anywhere other than Hawaii, these bananas are called Brazilian Bananas. I didn’t know that before I wrote this post. The internet, man. It’s so full of information.
**Note how this is a singular noun? That’s because the rest of the bananas that I bought are still sitting in the fruit bowl getting (even) gross(er).
Even though Zack and I have been back from vacation for 3 days now, I didn’t start the Post-Vacation Clean until today.
Growing up, there were pretty strict rules in my house about when things needed to be cleaned. For instance, if someone was coming to the house, everything had to be cleaned. If, perchance, the person coming to the house happened to be anyone of the grandparent persuasion, the house had to be cleaned twice. The house also had to be clean any time we were leaving for any type of a vacation. Really, mom liked for the house to be clean any time that we were leaving for anything at all. That sentence could be more accurately stated by saying that mom actually preferred it if the house was perfectly clean 100% of the time, but mom had four children and having four children and a constantly clean house is kind of not actually possible.
One of the many, many neuroses my mother handed down to me was the Clean Gene. I clean the house like a maniac before anyone comes over. I like to have the house clean before I go to bed, before I go on vacation, before I cook dinner, before I bring home the groceries, and always. I find it surprisingly difficult to put groceries away while the dishes are dirty.
That being said, my house is not (even almost) always clean. There are several reasons for this. 1.) Nursing school. 2.) Marriage requires compromise and Zack does not have the Clean Gene. 3.) After being married to people for a while, you start to morph into some weird combination-version of you and your spouse, and, unfortunately, you don’t always pick up your spouse’s most desirable traits. Somewhere along the way, during the past 4+ years, cleaning the house before I leave on vacation became an optional task. No longer did I force myself to stay up long hours the night before I went out of town to ensure that every dish was washed and every morsel of potentially stinky trash was removed from the house. No longer did I prepare my suitcase far enough in advance so that I could put away the items that were originally selected for travel, but rejected in the packing elimination rounds. My new packing-and-leaving-town ritual is full of reckless abandon; my vacation mindset creeps in and takes over my to-do list a day too soon.
I used to have a post-vacation clean-up ritual, too. I found closure in coming home and tossing all of my sandy/dirty/salty/sunscreen-covered clothes into the washer, and putting all of the suitcases back together again like a set of nesting Russian dolls. Even though vacation is easily THE BEST, there’s always something therapeutic about getting back to your routine. (I say this after every holiday season. I love Christmas and New Years and seeing family all of that, but one of my favorite things about the holiday season each year is seeing it come to a close. God bless the kind of days that require a day-planner, you know? Schedules and order are the best and my maiden surname is German.)
Before we left for Hawai’i, Zack and I did not do the pre-vacation clean. We did take out the trash, and we tried to straighten up a bit, but the vacation kind of snuck up on us, and we didn’t get everything taken care of. The day after I got back, I spent some time babysitting the nieces for Sarah1, since her family was in town for her brother’s wedding. The day after that, I spent some time making fajitas for Sarah1′s family so that she could spend time with them instead of stressing over how to perfectly grill chicken* without drying it out. So, today was the first day that I’ve been here, at my house, since we got home from Hawaii. It naturally follows that today has been the day of the post-vacation clean.
After having just completed the kitchen portion of today’s cleaning efforts, I feel I can, without exaggeration, declare that my life has been endangered as a result of the things I was just forced to touch in my own sink. I am a nurse, I touch gross things on a daily basis, so as an expert in disgusting, I can officially state that there are very few things in this world that are as gross as the mountains of mold and who-knows-what-else that were growing on the undersides of every single item contained within those 4 (or 8, if you’re counting the middle divider) miniature stainless steel walls.
Needless to say the pre-vacation clean has officially been reinstated as of this moment, and that ritual will forever be adhered to, sleep and spousal coercion be damned. Never again, my friends. Never, ever again.
*I may or may not** be really awesome at this.
**I am. I just said “may not” to be modest. But there should be no modesty about how awesomely I grill chicken. I’m quite good at it.
Zack and I were feeling all earth-friendly (or cheap?) when we were leaving for Hawaii, and we took public transportation all the way to the airport. We connected a series of trains, buses and shuttles to get to our plane. We didn’t put much time or consideration, however, into how we would get back home again. We just figured we’d do the reverse of what we did to get there.
We failed, however, to take into consideration the fact that the train that brought us to the airport only runs about once every 2 hours in the afternoon. We arrived at the train station at about 2:25, having missed the 2:18 train, which was late, by only about 3 minutes. The next train was at 3:48, and was also late.
When we left Hawaii, it was about 70 degrees, breezy, and beautiful. That was at 10:45 p.m. Hawaii time. When we arrived at DFW today, it was 2:30 p.m. Texas time, and it was over 105 degrees outside, and relentlessly sunny. Neither Zack nor I got any significant amount of sleep on the way home, as neither of us are contortion artists, nor are we particularly fond of air travel’s unique brand of torture. Sitting outside at the train station for 1.5+ hours on top of a pile of luggage with no sleep or food in your system is just cruelty. Cruelty, I say.
If you are ever interested in truly experiencing the vast and brutal difference between Texas weather and Hawaii weather, I highly recommend traveling the way we did. If you do not want to have this experience, I strongly suggest you either a.) make travel arrangements ahead of time, or b.) at the very least, consult a train schedule before you leave the air conditioned bus depot.
Some people may wonder what happens when you climb a light pole to adjust a light, and slip and fall (20 feet) right when you get to the top. I saved y’all some time. You’re welcome.
P.S. There was a light box at the bottom that caught my leg and was like, “Hey! You don’t need that flesh anymore on the inside of your leg! You’ll be fine without it.”
- Love, Boo
