little blue sponges on short white sticks
a premature bouquet
before the long goodbye
your breathe slows and mine stops
life
is on pause

morning arrives just as chatter comes through the door
of juices undelivered and lunches incorrectly ordered
naps and families and where are his dentures
none of my concern anymore

but missed
and i wonder
if my work is only filler
to pass the wee hours

for no flowers or boxes of chocolates
appear on our desk
and everything you do is invisible and undone

how silly of me not to know that
incentive programs
only run in daylight

that’s a better description for us
vampire fishes
so invisible
people, especially managers, hardly even know we exist

except for those we turn
and clean and feed
funny how chocolate milk
goes missing in the middle of the night.

RNs working at a lesser position as PSWs because “they don’t want the stress.” RNs so negative that they tear down the work and brick and mortar everyone else is working so hard to build. RNs who puff up because of new management positions but refuse to return to the humility of floor work even when there is NO ONE else to fill in.

Everyone’s got their own path in life. I know, but they have startled me into realizing a new self-describing adverb. Stephen forgive me. I’m ambitious.

How dare they.

and getting off my soapbox now…

My thoughts turn to a book I just finished about another ambitious female, one Flavia de Luce of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. It was an enjoyable story, a great beach book, but still somehow a disappointment. I know, I know. I was surprised too! Everyone just loves this book.

But once again, mystery is just not my favourite genre and no matter how endearing as a character Flavia is, it felt like a juvenile novel. The whole way through I kept thinking that I’d pass it to my 10 year old daughter to read until I reached certain circumstances at the end which both failed to endear me to the book and made it inappropriate for her.

I can see however why it is beloved. It had some wonderful humour and delicious chemistry. No, not romantic chemistry but the actual carbon tetrachloride and sodium bicarbonate sort. All of a sudden I was nostalgic for a Bunsen burner. Flavia carries the story – and chemical formulas – forward just like you were with her on the front of her bicycle, pedalling away, never slowing down. It’s a fast read at only 304 pages.

But the most unique thing about Flavia, something I do not know if I’ve ever seen in a novel, is her positive self-talk. In any encounter with an evil sister or curmudgeonly adult, she steadies – buoys – believes in herself.  And tells herself so! For that, she gets a “Go Flavia!” from me too.

I’ve gratefully accepted a full-time position at work. (Can you hear the huge *but* coming?)… but it is the graveyard shift… but it is on another floor of the home. The short of which means that I will no longer be caring for the residents that I have been looking after for the past year.

I told the residents themselves of the change. Those that would remember, I told directly. Those that wouldn’t, I told with my hands. Change is difficult for all of them. Being cared for regularly by the same hands really does work miracles for those suffering from the many forms of dementia. They will be well looked after, I know, and get accustomed to new hands. It is just hard to let go. And there has been enough change on the floor of late already.  Activities of daily living irrevocably lost to inevitable progression of disease and several losses of faces that were familiar and beloved. Not a time I wanted to add more to their plate.

The families are a huge part of the home’s life. They were harder to tell. I didn’t want to disappoint or startle them either. And yet they were so amazing. The same lady who brought the staff two boxes of Ferrero Rocher last week – the dark chocolate versions were divine, fyi -  said something like,  “We understand. Change is good for all of us. Don’t forget us and come back to see us.”

I will most definitely be peeking in, but who’s caring for whom? /blush

This story by Tilda Shalof expresses part of the same journey she describes in her book The Making of a Nurse. Only she wrote A Nurse’s Story first and I read it second. Still very highly recommended — for anyone with a stout heart that is.

It is perfectly titled. In each chapter she explores an area of nursing care:

• How the primary object nurses are known by is a bedpan and its infamous contents
• Giving compassionate care without judgment
• When is SO much care too much care
• Graduation with a degree is only the beginning of the journey to becoming a nurse
• Finding your niche within nursing
• The complex complimentary and contradictory relationship between doctors and nurses
• Keeping you as a person separate from you as a nurse: for sanity sake and the patient’s sake

I was constantly surprised at her bravery and thankful for her sharing.

how she doesn’t care  who laughs or snickers at her opinions and what she feels strongly about
how many decisions about end of life care are left in a nurse’s hands
how she able to label when she was defencive or angry and then use those situations to improve her care
how determined she is to advance the profession of nursing and chuck out the bedpan
how her natural inquisitiveness led to  nursing research
how she overcomes herself to become an awesome nurse

Once again she had me in tears on one page, my fingers wishing I could be part of a procedure on the next page. I’d read anything she wrote.

And I’m so immensely proud that she is out there speaking on our behalf with such optimism about our profession. I think that’s what I love best about Tilda. She knows all the pros and cons of nursing, but she doesn’t seem hardened by them. Her writing shows that she practices with immense hope and energy, all to the benefit of her work and patients. If only I could be one-quarter of the nurse she is one day.

If I live up to it, please put this quote from her book on my gravestone…

“She was a woman who conquered herself so that she could serve others.”

I liked statistics when I took it. And I was thankful that it felt like a semi-easy math class compared to other maths I had taken and that it was an easy ok introduction for me back into university after a ten year hiatus.

So when the story they are regaling the breakroom with ends in “Yeah they had to lower the passing grade by ten points in order to get our class through the course.” Man, I really did a double take at who I was looking at.

Two nurses. I see them often. Young and new but still with *the* initials behind their name. My bosses for all intensive purposes when I happened to be assigned to their floor.

One talked of considering getting a tutor but had been prohibited due to the cost. Anywhere from $50 to $100 an hour! Right about now is when I start to wonder how very different the Canadian universites are from those in the States.

Because, man oh man, I did stinking awesome in Stat!!! I thought when I was done that I would consider taking more of that crap. Gosh, I don’t know if this sounds like bragging. It’s the furthest thing from where I am going. Do you guys know me, I wonder? Do you really know me? I am filled with self-doubt. It absolutely oozes out of my pores. I don’t know why really but I walk around with my head down most of the time, jumping like a scared ninny at anyone with the nerve to bark at me.

But after that eavesdropping, I felt like a helium balloon on cloud nine. Hell, all of a sudden I was in charge of cloud nine!

All I could think of was how come I don’t believe in myself?! These guys are sitting here with the same initials and degree that I want and the teachers had to bend the rules to get them there, bend rules that I would never need bent. All I could think of was — I can do it!

and i SO will.

I have been actively doing nursing care for a year now and the learning never stops. Every so often someone complains and duties get shifted around, and a new responsibility tossed into the salad of my eight hours that really cannot handle one more tomato. Those aren’t happy days.

Some of the cucumbers I have known about all along, but I had to race about like a madwoman to get them done, ignoring every co-worker and resident alike who might send a friendly word my way. I’m not ill-mannered or rude or conceited. I’m just busy! and I power-walk down up and down the halls in such a way that even Oprah would be proud.

Oh and then were the radishes that sometimes never got done but ought to have been, but I’m only human, right? If I tried my very best, but didn’t find the time to manage a few minor details, I’ve learned to just let it go. There was always a serious side-order of guilt associated with that, but in a job where you can never catch up one day in order to make your next day less stressful, where every day is as hectic and fast-paced as the next, just about everyone learns to adjust their priorities when they need to do so.

Funny thing is that the more I let go, the more I found ways to incorporate the uneaten radishes plus extra tasks even, safely, sanely into my insane schedule. And now I can stop to give a hug, encourage someone who is walking, give an extra shave or sit down to visit over tea.

Care is such a personalized task. We get people up, we help them have their meals, we take them to bed when they are ready. And yet the million tiny idiosyncracies in between sunrise and set are my job to know. Who likes their cornflakes with chocolate milk? And who gets breakfast early because she simply won’t eat at the table with everyone else? Who might appear to be independent but loves when you take two minutes to help with a cream on his face?

Recently, I spent all morning on one particular shift strained beyond my capacity. Everything that am was taking longer and harder to accomplish than it should have been. I couldn’t blame anyone, staff or resident. The situation simply was. Then as i walking to my lunch break and the staff room, the dark shades feel from my eyes. Their pieces fell to the floor at my feet and followed, leaving a trail down the hall of emotion piled on emotion. My stress was pent-up anger, and the anger was desperate raw grief. I didn’t get to say goodbye to the last dear one who left us. I wasn’t the one who held her hand. None of us were. Some hospital nurse got that priviledge. Oh my, that aches. The tears filling up in my eyes tells me that that one still needs more time.

However, that wasn’t the only thing to simultaneously dread and anticipate. Apparently the home moved our documentation from the usual hefty binder system into a software program that runs through the internet and our network onto tablet pc’s that we have at the desk. Ordinarily I’d be thrilled about such an advancement, but I missed the training for it - She is too old. Yes. Too old to begin the training. – and so it was on my mind all day that I would need to be able to set aside my last hour at work to learn for myself or pester my workmates to teach me.

I think that thought cursed my day. Because I only got half of the work done before breakfast that I ought to have. Catching up after the meal was essential and happened, but it meant that I missed my lunch break. Plus it took me like two hours to help someone with a bath when ordinarily that task is half an hour, tops. I collapsed into the chair at the nurse’s station with tablet pc in hand, barely scraping half an hour at the end of my shift to climb the mountain of electronic information on the nifty little white device in front of me. When out of nowhere a man walks up to the desk.

He introduces himself as the home’s pastoral associate. And today he has a new program. But not for the residents. For us. And it starts right now.

I look down at the tablet pc and back at him. I tell him that I must politely decline. I don’t tell him that it’s already been a day that would leave me in tears. I do say that it’s an impossibility for me today because of this system and my paperwork must be done and I missed the training. That next time I’d be happy to attend. He nods his head and excuses himself. Disaster, I thought, averted.

{You should see this software, by the way. I know the answers to the questions. I mean, I know my job and by the end of the shift, I’ve caught up with the resident’s and their needs, but seriously I would probably need a law degree to figure out how they want me to answer the questions.}

Not five minutes later, the nurse on the floor calls us into the program. Failure is not an option. I start stumbling over my once very cohesive and logical protest and she cuts right through it all, telling me to just bring the tablet pc with me and do my work while the pastor talks about whatever. This is where I inwardly and outwardly sighed. I’m being forced to be rude, forced to learn my work with the distraction of a program around me, forced into more stress.

Here’s the best part: the program was about learning how to de-stress our lives, about how to care for the caregiver. I wanted to cry.

Once I got out of there, today even, I can laugh about it. But at that moment in time, I really do believe that I could have punched a hole right through the wall.

I sat through a guided meditation and an introduction to him as our pastor, the counseling options available to us through the workplace and a discussion about palliative care and how we deal with resident’s family, each other and ourselves in the time immediately before and after someone dies. All *while* I am totally freaking out and not knowing what the hell I am doing or answering but going click click click with the plastic pencil on my screen, praying that management will understand it was my first day and that if I answer all the stupid questions wrong, they’ll forgive me because otherwise I have an excellent track record.

And the pastor, knowing my situation, never blinked.

Must have been slipping into that mindset again that spawned the realization that console game developers probably don’t make more of their games cooperative because they assume we who enjoy playing in that style are completely immersed in MMOs. We hear lots of flowery promises and see very little results. Fable II was a particular disappointment. Rather than being a truly “we are playing together” experience, it was more like “I’ll come over and bring my character to run around your game for awhile while we hang out” mentality. It seems that 360 developers are forced into this very constricting corner because of the online component, but it’s their loss. We’ll just drool over the upcoming but yet to be announced release of Diablo III and not buy their silly games. And sorry, I stand corrected… there are games that are cooperative out there, but I’d like a few choices that don’t involve using a chainsaw as a weapon. Thank you very much.

In good news on this front, what I always wanted and hoped and wished for in Warcraft – high-heeled shoes! – has come true in the new Sacred II. Which incidentally is the only RPG game to make good on the promise of being co-op recently. We are trying it out. Again, I magically picked the mage character without knowing any of her abilities, but thankfully fireballs are fun and rarely go out of style. And her wall of fire dances out across the landscape in a satisfyingly wide semi-circle, destroying everything in its wake. My only complaint is that the game, so far, is too easy. We will probably have to bump up the difficulty. Destroying demons and like monsters is fun at the end of the day, but you’d like them to give up a little fight, no?

Whoa. I totally lost the high-heels part of that thought process. One of the characters in Sacred II – not mine *sad face* – runs about in high heeled boots or shoes the whole game! She looks super spiffy. Wait a minute. Why am I suddenly reminded of 1950s kitchen appliance commercials? No apron on this lady, but mopping in high heels would be right up her ally. I feel like such a shallow bimbo. And yet I’m still thrilled about high heels… on a girl… in a game. Please don’t tell my daughter.

On the opposite side of that thought, was anyone else deeply offended by the nurse in the new Star Trek movie wearing a super mini-skirt? I was. She was only on the screen for a split second and yes, she was in the background, but still! Ehura donning said fashion blunder is one thing. She sits at a desk translating alien languages and never moves, never needing to move! But are you seriously going to tell me that the nurses of the 22nd century save lives in white micro-minis?! Incredulous would be an understatement as a description of my emotions. And I have a strong incliantion to report them.

The Glory Cloak succeeds and fails in turns. As a biography of Louisa May Alcott, I enjoyed every shred of information. As a historical fiction, the story simply was not enough. And the only parts that had merit of its own where the parts about Louisa. It was just too light for my taste, although overall I am glad to have read it. Most surprising was the full dawning of understanding that Louisa worked as a nurse during the Civil War. One of my favorite authors ever, the one whose book I have read repeatedly at crossroad determining intervals of my life, probably carried around amputated limbs and spent hours upon hours on her feet comforting, feeding, turning, sweating with the same achy back that I experience. Perhaps that’s it. The commonality of experience that brings a personality half-deified in my imagination back down to earth.

I think I could be a writer. I think I wish it. Though what it is I shall write eludes me. Long periods at a computer and indoors don’t phase me. I go out for inspiration, fresh air, to allow myself to forget all the ideas bouncing around in my head long enough for one of them to become real. Then I can write. I spend far too much time trying to be someone else, but this is me.

Stephen’s On Writing makes me with I could sit on my bum and not work and write something. Only that moment, that situation, hasn’t happened, but his analogy of writing makes me wish it to happen… one day. Where your story, your words are a fossil to be found feels exactly right to me.

The further I went in his book, the more I grew to love his blunt style. Once I thought flowery language or complicated sentence structure was the way to express tear-jerking emotion, I can see clearly now that it is not. Three word sentences of his had me weeping, others exhilarated. It’s not really in how you write.  It’s whether or not your Ideal Reader feels it too. That’s what I hear him saying, that’s what I feel has made me a better writer, even brought more joy to sitting here and clickety-clacking. It keeps me real, makes me chop sentences in half and think deeply about what about I am really trying to say.

I adore the idea of building a mansion out of one’s writing. I adore that nurses can also be writers. I adore that what I found true a couple years ago when I began this blog is even true for the King himself: Writing is for the joy of it.