Snapshot from the ICU

Well, work seems to be straightening out a bit (or at least none of the rumors spread about me have made it back to me, heh), and my at one time promising love life has apparently crashed and burned. I am considering giving up on relationships and buying a dog but that is another story (and one that should probably include my cats' opinions as well). Anyway....

The setting:

Two o'clock in the morning, in the cardiac ICU of a large metropolitan hospital. The telephone has been ringing and ringing, but there is no one to answer it: there is no unit clerk and the nurses (all three) are in their patients' rooms. A consulting neurologist sits at the desk, finishing up his notes.

Willow comes out of a room in which she has been trying to care for an elderly patient who has been trying equally hard to bite her. She sees the neurologist, looking a bit confused, reaching for the telephone. "Don't worry about it, I'll get it," says Willow.

The voice on the other end, from a nurse on another unit, is irritated. "Why don't you people ever answer your phone?!" Willow replies, "Because we're all in our rooms helping our patients." After a short conversation, Willow hangs up the phone and mutters under her breath, "Don't ask me stupid questions at two a.m.!"

To which the neurologist replies, "Welcome to my world."


Hey, if you can't have a sense of humor in the ICU where can you have it?

And yes, in a large teaching hospital, it is possible that consults are done in the middle of the night. So if you are in the unfortunate situation of being in a cardiac ICU, and the cardiologist can't find anything wrong with your heart, you may find yourself awakened by someone in the middle of the night who starts testing your hand grips and asking you strange questions like, "What is your name?" "When were you born?" Take it from me, it's best to answer truthfully, lest you be diagnosed with some weird neurological condition.

Well, this was interesting...

I hope this comes out. Jimmyjames, who always seems to find interesting flotsam on the Information Highway, had a quiz entitled "Which Tarot Card are You?"

Here is my result:

You are The High Priestess

Science, Wisdom, Knowledge, Education.

The High Priestess is the card of knowledge, instinctual, supernatural, secret knowledge. She holds scrolls of arcane information that she might, or might not reveal to you. The moon crown on her head as well as the crescent by her foot indicates her willingness to illuminate what you otherwise might not see, reveal the secrets you need to know. The High Priestess is also associated with the moon however and can also indicate change or fluxuation, particularily when it comes to your moods.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

I have always had a bit of a Jungian inclination to my philosophy, and I have for a long time considered Tarot cards to hold many of the gifts and wisdom of the collective unconscious. I have known people who have really taken the literal meaning of Tarot cards (as well as other spiritual teachings) a bit too seriously. However, I find that they are one of the tools that I use for becoming closer to Creator, as well as for developing insight into my own spiritual progress.

That's probably more than you wanted to know about me, but, well, it's my blog. Heh.

Willow

Sometimes I prefer animals....

Note: I wrote this several months ago, before legal compost really began hitting the proverbial fan. But I find that it is just as relevant today as it was when I first wrote it.

I have had several very disappointing encounters at work lately. One involved another nurse filing a report on me that was basically a work of fiction. Other incidents were the unrelenting rudeness of other staff members. I became very discouraged, and almost quit (although it's nice to have a way to pay the bills), or at least started to look for something else I could do in nursing. I've been in this profession for going on 14 years, and I have encountered rudeness, bad treatment, and "back stabbing" for want of a better term, periodically throughout my nursing career. I have had several people, at several different places try in one way or another to get me into trouble. All I really want to do is take care of my patients, in the best way that I know how.

But after my shift, the more ferocious, "she-wolf" part of me began to surface (those of you who know me as the liberal, "give peace a chance" type person don't usually see this side of me). I decided that leaving nursing because of one more person's bad behavior would be like condoning it, and making myself wrong for trying to be honest and decent. I am certainly not perfect--there have been days when I was under stress and lashed out at someone, but I truly try to bring a peaceful energy to what can be a chaotic environment.

But anyway, as I got home the other night, and my two cats greeted me, I realized that one of the reasons that I am such an animal lover is that animals are pretty much not deceptive. Certainly they have some irritating behaviors at times--Sam constantly tries to get outside, especially when I am bringing in groceries, and Rosie sneaks into the bathroom to drink out of the toilet (yuck), but animals are honest in a way that many of us humans (we humans?? Oh, well, you get the idea) are not. Animals are authentic in who they are, and after a week like I had with this nurse's report on me, it was wonderful to come home and know that my two cats would greet me, ask for food, play, sit on my lap, and hog the bed when I went to sleep.

Well, I'm back

For some masochistic reason, I am using the endquote from J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" series for my title.

It has been a rather horrendous couple of months. I really don't want to go into details, but the short story is that 1. I am embroiled in what may turn out to be a legal battle with my employer, 2. I think I have met the love of my life, but he wants to move far away from the Mitten, as early as July, and 3. I have had some mystery medical symptoms, which although they do not seem particularly life threatening, they are certainly getting in the way of my general lifestyle.

I did a Native American-style Vision Quest a couple of years ago, and the image and personality of Frodo appeared many times during my Quest. So, since I really don't want to go into detail about some of the "real life" problems that I have had, I will share with you a 'persona poem' about Frodo after he returns to the Shire.

For those of you who don't know, a persona poem is written in the voice of some other individual, whether it is someone you know from "real life," or a fictional character. I posted this poem at Poetry-Free-For-All during National Poetry Writing Month (another reason that I have been absent lately--I have been trying to keep up with the poem-a-day pace of the NaPoWriMo while simultaneously finishing graduate school).

Frodo's Homecoming

It has only been a year since
I last slept in this bed. Now
the soft sheets beneath my
back and legs are foreign.

It was not the nights
sleeping on rock and ash
or the days without comfort
that removed me from this land.

Trees bloom again.
Water flows and roses grow
out of the bare soil,
slowly healing the wounds of the earth.

The sounds of joy replace
the forced silence of oppression:
Weddings, music, and laughter fill the air,
but only jangle against my ears
like the discordant sounds of strife
that I grew so used to hearing.

Now
as my arm goes cold
and the burning in my chest
keeps me pacing through my silent house,
I think of that night long ago
when my last ancestor bid me farewell
and disappeared,
innocent of his dark bequest.

On some days, when the wind is warm from the West
I can walk to the top of the knoll and stand quite still,

I can faintly perceive the scent
of the sea as it drifts inland, and for a few moments,
I shut my eyes
and feel some echo of relief.


I want to make some changes to this poem, but I decided to post it in its most "raw" form.

Peace, Willow

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Thanks to JimmyJames for this delightful link!

Making Trouble

I thought I'd better post here before my few readers decided that I'd been captured by the aliens or something. I just haven't had much to say lately, at least on my blog. Yesterday I started a "tempest in a teapot" so to speak, on the poetry website that I frequent by suggesting that some of the newbies were treated badly by the veteran members of the site. It went well for the most part (other than the fact that many of the responses that I received went along the lines of "you are entitled to your wrong opinion), but there was one response that really irritated me.

One individual suggested that much of the problem with education these days is that teachers, parents, etc. are so afraid to damage a child's self-esteem that they don't set boundaries or expectations of them. I replied that I am certainly not someone who believes in saving a child's (or an adult's) self-esteem at the expense of learning, or the truth. I also mentioned that my viewpoint may be a bit skewed because of my experiences working with Native American people, many of whom had either been forced to go to U.S. sponsored boarding schools. I also mentioned that my view was similarly affected by the number of people who I have worked with who live in abject poverty, and that the "cycle of poverty" is much more than a cliche: if the parents don't care about learning, the child already has an uphill battle, so to speak. Sheesh, I can't keep cliches out of my post...oh, well, it's early.

Anyway, this poster replied that he didn't see what Native American boarding schools had to do with posting on a poetry board. Now, I am wondering what part of "my viewpoint may be skewed by my experiences" she didn't understand. I just replied that I was sorry, I must not be expressing myself correctly, and left it at that.

But all in all, it was a disappointing experience. I really don't think learning has to be made painful and I don't believe that beginners should be ridiculed for their attempts at poetry--it's hard enough to find that the poem that has been hanging on Uncle Joe and Aunt May's refrigerator is actually without literary merit. I did have a couple of people send me private messages indicating that they thought I was correct in my opinion. They didn't post this publicly. I guess they didn't want to get into "trouble," something that I just don't have any fears about, expecially when it comes to advocating for people who I think are being treated unfairly.

Certainly in the scheme of things, people who (in my opinion) misbehave on a poetry board are not going to end the world. But I just wish some of the people there would treat newcomers with a bit more tact. And anyone who has seen me deal with a situation in which I think a patient is not being treated well knows that I have no fear of letting my voice be heard. Well, that's about it for now, I have to get ready to go to work--it snowed last night, which means that the drivers in my corner of the world will be driving like fools. :)

I haven't been blogging much lately--my days off have been filled with not much more than resting up for the next day at work, and I had a medical misadventure that had me out of commission, so to speak for a few more days. Happily, though, I am feeling much less depressed now that the days are lengthening and my other medical issue, a severe bout of asthma has also resolved.

But my rather sedentary, isolated home life of the last couple of months has allowed me time for a great deal of reflection. Not surprisingly, the inspiration for some of my reflection came from one of my patients. I had been taking care of a man for a couple of days, and we'd had a little time to talk about more than just how he was feeling and his medical progress. One day, he said to me out of the blue, "You're a loner, like me, aren't you?"

It really took me by surprise. First of all, I didn't think of him as a loner. He was extremely outgoing, and often even the nurses who weren't taking care of him at the time, but who had taken care of him in the past, would stop in and say hello. But also, it made me think about whether or not I really am a "loner," and what that might mean if I am. I had another friend who set me up on a date with a guy last year, and she described him to me as being "a loner, like you."

Now, at the time, I was working for Indian Health Service, and many of the people I got to know who were of primarily Native American descent were extremely family and community-oriented. It was not unusual for the staff members to get together regularly, and extended families often stayed close. My family is basically scattered from the Eastern Seaboard all the way across the Midwest, and I do not regularly see many of them. I am also an only child, a phenomenon that seems to some people (especially those like the friend mentioned above, who has something like 14 siblings) to be the equation of being from another planet. And since I am finishing a Master's degree, my social engagements are not exactly plentiful. I am looking forward to next fall when I will be done and don't have to say, "No, I cannot join you, I have homework/a test/a project, etc."

But looking back on my life, I can see where the designation of "loner" comes from. As an only child, I didn't have brothers and sisters to socialize with, although I was lucky to grow up in a neighborhood with many children my age so I had plenty of friends. But still, I remember going to kindergarten and feeling a bit overwhelmed with all of the people there. I also couldn't understand why some of the other kids cried when their parents dropped them off. Actually, I was rather impatient with them. Didn't they know Mom (in those days it was usually Mom) was coming back to pick them up? What was all of the fuss about?

Unfortunately, as a child, and even as an adolescent, I was one of those kids who was periodically bullied by others. The attacks, as well as the people involved, changed through the years, and some were made by people who had initially been my "friends." I think these experiences drove me to have an inherent distrust of people for quite some time in my life. One of the really damaging things about having "friends" who turn on you is that it becomes hard to trust someone who claims to be a friend.

But I don't want to make this about self-pity regarding my childhood. I have grown far from that place, and I have a life that I enjoy, and many friends. But I think that the combination of being an only child and being very withdrawn when I was growing up has made me less dependent on others for my happiness, and more comfortable with "alone self" (if that makes any sense) than someone who had different experiences growing up. I vividly remember an argument that I had with my now ex-husband in which I snapped at him, "I don't need you!" He said something like, "Well, that's obvious; that's part of the problem." One of the fundamental problems in our relationship was that he wanted to be the center of my universe, and I am not cut out to be that kind of person.

But maybe there is something to this "loner" persona I seem to have. Maybe my life experiences have made me more emotionally independent than the average person, and maybe that comes off as being somewhat separated from others. I don't know, and I am finding it to be difficult to put this concept into words.

I also went to Summer Camp for many years as a child (even worked there one summer), and the experience instilled in me a love for the outdoors, especially the Northern outdoors. I was so passionate about outdoor living and camping that I dreamed about growing up and "living off the land," like Grizzly Adams, if anyone remembers that old 70's show.

Although I never did make it out West to stake out my homestead, I still love the outdoors and go camping whenever I have a chance. There is just something about lying outside, looking up at the stars, and being able to see the entire Milky Way in all of its glory. But I also love to share that experience with others.

Well, it's time to get ready for work. I hope this post makes some bit of sense!