I'm sure it's fall somewhere, but not in Florida. It is as hot and humid as ever here on October 29th-- and has been for over a week. I have never really experienced much fall short of a few backpacking trips to northern Georgia a few times in high school. Never watched the leaves fall, or had too much of the cool crisp air. I know that people up north will tell me this is so much better, but I just wish we got four seasons here. I want to live somewhere and experience that, even if it's only for a couple of years. Florida's great for vacation, but not really living. Oh well.

I found out this week that I will be off Thanksgiving and Black Friday. I'm so relieved! My family will be here, so that was the holiday I really wanted off. Christmas I have accepted that I will very likely be working (in fact I wouldn't mind much since my family won't be here). I wish I could get the entire weekend off, but I will only have to work Saturday. Unfortunately I do work every single weekend this month-- and only one Sunday off. I will make sure that changes after this, because I don't mind every other Sunday. It seems a little unfair to put someone on every weekend, but then who am I to judge that? I'm the newbie anyway, they can do what they want. Yesterday someone even told me that it's not a big deal for me to work the weekends since I don't have a boyfriend. I wasn't offended, but actually thought it was funny because they just automatically assume my life is void of anything fun or exciting without a man. I actually am really enjoying my life right now, thank you very much. :)

I have today and tomorrow off, hurrah! For the next few weeks my schedule will off 2, on 2, which I don't think is too bad. See ya!

Well, not much to update on in my life, but I thought I'd write a quick post. I've had a good couple of weeks, with the exception of certain days at work... specifically my 3 in a row this past weekend that was (and I don't exaggerate) horrible. Thankfully it was followed by 2 days off, 2 days on, and now 4 days off! I slept like a rock last night, especially after being at work until 8:30. Yeah, you can say a crazy day- started out great until about 4 o'clock everything started piling up and there wasn't enough time to get it done.

I really am enjoying work. Sometimes when I tell people about it I think I must be giving an awful picture of it. Really, it's not bad. It's beyond stressful some days, but the rewards are pretty great. I don't mean monetary, but just knowing that you have made someone's day or their experience a little bit better. I had an older patient yesterday who I could hardly understand, and it seemed nobody really listened to him- but I asked him all about his past life to find out he used to ride motorcycles, sports cars, play jazz and ragtime piano, and guitar- rock'n'roll being his favorite kind of music. I could tell he loved remembering, and I wonder how many people take just a few minutes to listen. I hope I can keep that mindset. I also hope that I don't get to a point where I would rather give a patient Ativan before letting them talk through their fears and anxieties. Of course, most patients would rather have the Ativan, but still. I'm somewhat disillusioned by the lack of compassion I see at times among some medical professionals. These patients are people, and no matter how drug-seeking they may seem, or annoying and mean that they are, they are people and they are hurting inside and out.

Ok, off my soap box. Maybe I'm just not jaded yet. I hope that doesn't happen. I am already finding myself to be so over-stressed when I get home that I am snapping at people, and just feel angry for no reason. I feel as though I have no outlet for the stress.

I'm thinking of going to the pumpkin patch today. I'm ready for some fall! We ate dinner at the Kerchers' a couple of nights ago, and it was as fall-y as it gets. Loved it!

And I'm dressing up Star Wars with Tricia and Alex next week... any ideas? Tricia wants me to be Princess Leia, which I think I could pull off maybe, but that's not really much fun. Oh well, maybe I'll bust out my old elf cape and be a Jedi. We'll see. Anyway, I need to go now because I said at the beginning that this would be short and it most definitely has not been. Good bye!

Today in the midst of stress, craziness, yelling doctors, and busyness, a random patient said to me, "Smile, it could be worse!" And though I detest the occasional jibe at my lack of smiley-ness, it actually improved my outlook and was something I needed to hear for that moment. Work was crazy today, yet still a good day. A good day because I learned so much more about the whole process of being a nurse than I ever have before. Yesterday I was feeling as discouraged as ever about work. I have a terrible tendancy to get down on myself for no reason, to become anxious for nothing, and worry myself over things I don't need to worry about. Today I'm exhausted, but I do feel pretty good. Accomplished?

Odd experience- a student was there today. She helped me and my preceptor with patients, and I felt badly because she wasn't getting to do much since I'm still new and need to learn the ropes by doing as much as possible. So I decided to let her give some meds. When I asked her teacher if it was ok, she said to me, "Sure, as long as you quiz her on them and make sure she knows them!" And that was WEIRD, because I think the reality of not being a student anymore, the reality that I'm a nurse, really hit at that moment. Wasn't I just being quizzed over meds? I remember feeling so stupid barely a year ago because I couldn't remember certain things. Of course, there is still so much I do not know. I have learned a hundred new things every day. Sometimes I have to re-learn some too...

Needless to say, the job is going well, even if it is really stressful. The other nurses are great, always willing to lend a hand when I need it. My preceptor has been charge nurse a few times, and so I have had different nurses be preceptors for me. It has been awesome to see how everybody has their own way of doing things, and picking up on the methods that work for me. Now, off to sleep!

I think the exhaustion from my three days of work has only just been hitting me yesterday and today. All of the excitement on Saturday with Hannah and Damon's wedding sort of masked it, and after all the fun I had I'm so tired (and the wedding was a BLAST! I'm so happy for them!). I go back tomorrow, but thankfully will have two more days off before another lovely three in a row. This is going to take some major getting used to. I never really even got around to my BSF lesson this week, so already I'm missing out tonight. On top of that being tired is keeping me home.

Weary, exhausted, tired, worn out, and the list could go on. Maybe it's horrible that I'm sitting out BSF. I was even talking to my mom about the legalism that exists in Christian circles when it comes to missing church or Bible study or Sunday school, etc, for such reasons. We begin to measure our holiness or where we stand with Christ by keeping a tally of how many times you don't miss church. I'm not sure this exists so much in my church as I have seen in others, but it's still there. What ever happened to us being human? I'm so tired I want to cry, and physically what I need to do is just rest! Maybe this is just me trying to ease a guilty conscience.

So, I did have a good weekend. Melissa and Allison were home, and Hannah and Damon's wedding was fun. I did not catch the bouquet, and for once did not even really try. The camera even caught my look of enthusiasm (note sarcasm) when the DJ announced for the single ladies to come out on the dance floor. I made a face and when I looked up, there the video camera was, pointed right at me. Awesome. I wonder if Hannah will see it, she would probably laugh! :) Ask Allison about her experience!

I'm still adjusting to this new schedule, and I think I will be for a few months yet. If you think about it and can pray for me, I'd be grateful. I am realizing this is an indefinite period of my life. I won't be graduating from this in four years. Just realizing that holidays will no longer be the same, my weekends will not always fall the same time as other peoples', things like that. I guess this is what they call being an adult?

Out of the blue thoughts

Sometimes I wish I could sit down and have a talk with teenagers-- particularly girls. Facebook gives you quite a bit of insight into these young girls' thoughts, actions, and entire mindset. I find it unsettling. And yet in so many ways I was so much like these girls when I was younger. Maybe not to quite the extent of some of them with alcohol or boys, but I have little doubt that had I been presented with these issues more I might easily have fallen into it. It just saddens me to see so many of them striving to be something they aren't.

I wish that when I was sixteen I could have realized that so many of my problems were truly trivial. I wish I had known that being skinny was not the most important thing. I would have saved myself so much agony had I not let that become such a focus. In the end it has hurt me more in the long run than if I would have accepted myself for the way I was. I wish I had learned who my true friends were early on, to save myself the heartache of losing them. And although I never dated in high school, I do wish I had not spent so much time striving to be noticed. Honestly, most of these are issues I still struggle with to some degree. I can see that they took root when I was in high school, and uprooting them has been one of the most difficult and seemingly impossible tasks ever.

I think that for women particularly it is so difficult to live in today's world. I'm not trying to downplay the struggles that men have. I'll be the first to say I don't know what men go through on a day-to-day basis. But in our society, women must be everything. We must be smart, we must be beautiful, we must be independent and successful, we must be size 4, we must have 36 DD cup size, we must have a man at our side, we must be Super Mom, we must... we must... we must..... just check out commercials on TV or ads in magazines!! And on top of all of these expectations, we long to simply be noticed, loved, and accepted. It's no wonder so many struggle with insecurities, anorexia/bulimia, depression, drug addictions, and the list could go on.

Looking back on my sixteen-year-old self (or even my eighteen or twenty-year-old self) I see a very different person than who I am now. It's not that I find my personality changed, or that I've become someone I'm not. In some ways I find good, positive changes in that I have grown up and, I believe, matured a lot. But I find myself to have hardened over the years. Walls have been built. My bright expectations for life were not met in the ways I had dreamed (and yet there is so much time for that-- why can't I understand that?!). I suppose this is something that every woman comes to realize in her life. In the end I think that most of us struggle with all of these issues, and they never really go away. In fact, I think it is a very normal part of life and part of growing up, but I wish it didn't have to be that way. I wish I could go back and tell myself all of these things-- to not worry about my looks, my size, about my social status, or about boys, etc... because these things eat away at you, never letting up.

The awesome thing is that God is not done growing me yet. This is not the finished product, and am I ever grateful for that! "...He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus" (Philippians 1:6). Someday we will no longer struggle. Our expectations for eternity will be met beyond what we could ever imagine. I suppose this doesn't always connect from my head to my heart, because I continue to struggle. But I just wish I could get beyond the insecurities, the past hurts, and my shortcomings to truly understand where I stand in Christ. But, I think, it won't be until the day of Christ Jesus that all of this is really gone.

I enjoyed my first weekend as a working woman. After five days of orientation I was exhausted, and definitely had a good weekend. Even though I have to study up on EKG stuff, I think I am really going to enjoy my days off. There aren't going to be huge deadlines, papers, projects, presentations, etc, hanging over my head. A little studying isn't so bad.

My med dose calc test went well. I think I stressed too much over it, but they did pull some crazy stuff out of a hat for that test.

My first day on the floor is Wednesday. I'm trying not to let myself get too nervous about it. I will only be given 2 or so patients, and even then I'm supposed to only shadow my nurse this week. I have the same preceptor that I had this summer, and even though I was up to taking a full load of patients as a student, I'm going to request to start off like any other new RN. In a sense I don't just want to start where we left off, because then I was a student. Now I have a license, and I'm taking that very seriously. Not to mention it has been over two months since I have had any patient contact, and you can forget very quickly.

I think I'm going to go back to BSF tonight. It has been a long time. I was only able to be really committed last fall, and even then it was hit and miss with getting the lessons done. Because I will be in GN/New RN classes Monday mornings for 10 weeks I won't be working on the floor on Mondays. I really need to get back into a routine with having a quiet time daily. I have let the craziness of life take over, and that's got to stop.