On the Road Again

I love my commute. Yes, I know that this statement alone is insane, but I really do. Maybe it is just me, but something about driving into a night shift is somehwhat of a religious experience.

It is dark when I leave my driveway and pull out onto my quiet street. There are lights still on in some of the windows - people puttering about their homes, watching TV or getting little ones off to bed. Some houses are already dark, their inhabitants settled into the warm spot in the bed, drifting on the edge of sleep.

I pull out and begin my nightly exodus. Sometimes I put the radio on, and what I play depends on my mood. Sometimes it is my Ipod, quietly humming along to music that I know well, or belting out fast girly pop like Britney Spears. Other nights I switch the radio onto the Christian station, where the songs are more unfamiliar to me but calming. But most nights I spend the darkness in silence.

I leave the little town and head to the city. There are only a few cars on the highway - one of the perks at driving in this hour. The darkness deepens as I drive over the big bridge, the blackness of the water eating up the light and sound.

I drive for a while and talk to God. I feel like one of His soldiers when I come in for a night shift, sneaking in while the world sleeps to do my work in His name and sneaking home once my night is done. I come over the hill and the city stretches out below me - buildings and cars all lit up like the emerald city, like Heaven. I drive in and wind down into the maze of on-ramps, first one way and then the other, fluid motion with other cars like we are on tracks in the night.

I drive up on the big cathedral and once again God and I have a conversation. I don't know why I talk to Him here, but I do it every shift that I work. I am not even Catholic. Something about the cathedral, magnificent and solid and larger than life makes me reverent. I talk to God, I tell him how I am feeling, how I think the night will be, how I want the night to be. I ask him for a good night, for my patient's health, for the health of my fellow nurses. I ask Him every time. And when the daylight comes and it is all over, I thank Him for the shift, His presence, the night. In the daylight the city goes back to being a city, the highway fills with busy commuters, the little town bustles with the activity that morning brings, and my moments of sacred silence are gone and I go home to sleep.

I just discovered something! I can write these posts at work! Oh, I am gonna be a super-blogger now! I cannot believe that in all of the censoring my lovely employer does of our computer use, that this is allowed! Every time I try to see a video on You Tube, see someone else's blog, or even shop for fricking swimsuits on victoriassecret.com, they get blocked! Big Brother is apparently not always watching! Yay! So people, you are going to get majorly sick of me. Tonight is a fairly calm night, considering my floor's general disposition, except for one fact - 3 of my four patients tonight are loony. One is in alcohol withdrawal, crawling his scrawny ass in and out of bed left and right. And he sleeps in bed sideways! Squirrelly. Do not drink bottles and bottles of booze, people. And my father will laugh when he reads this because I drink my fair share (full discolsure - I am a young person in the MidWest, it is practically a rite of passage) but I recall hearing stories about his loopy bum back in the day so take that. My loopy patient number two has a hitory of psychoses, which basically is super-doctor speak for "Mumbles Incoherently At All Times." And lucky number three has got himself a urinary tract infection which means he has spent his night talking about how a helicopter is going to fall through his window and kill him, or the most recent - "what are all of those gamblers doing out there? I think they are up to some kind of college prank." Did I mention that he too has been trying to crawl out of bed? Ahhhhh, night shift nursing.

I love you

I have found real love. How do I know, you ask? Because I have met my match. That sounds silly, because I we do not match whatsoever. I am in love with a man that is my yang to my yin, or yin to my yang (I am probably pissing someone off for getting that wrong, to them - whatever). I am loud and animated, he is moody and has a tendedncy to be sullen. I am cerebral and nerdy, he is hands-on and very black and white with his thinking. He can infuriate me from across a room, and yet... somehow I have this unending urge to hold him. He exudes this insecurity that I lack, some vulnerability that I absolutley yearn to take in. He, and his world, mystify me. I love to wake up in the night and feel his presence next to me, a subtle warmth and dip in the mattress just far enough away that I am not touching him yet he is there. I turn over and squint my eyes as the light sneaks in through the sides of the blinds, falling over his sleeping shoulders. They are broad and smooth, rising and falling in a rhythmic motion that reminds me that I am exactly where I want to be.

Sleep???

Is it just me, or is nursing as a profession lacking sleep? I feel that as a whole, nurses all need a little shut eye. Here we are, staring into the false light of the computers, trying to care for someone's mom/dad/kid/grandparent while half asleep. Maybe it is just me, but with all of the crazy hours we work, and the physical and emotional demands of the job - I sometimes require more than a little (full disclosure - a lot) of Diet Pepsi to get by! It is not as if we are working swing shifts in a factory, where all you might mess up is somebody's window/screw/crayon whatever-you-make - we are dealing with human beings here! Although, being tired at work is not gonna cost me a finger, which it may in the factory, but still. I work night shifts. I love night shifts - I love the calm of the night, driving in while the rest of the world is driving out. I love the dimmed hospital lights, the hum of the machines, the lack of personel. And the night nurses. Ahhh, I feel that we are a breed of our own. Night nurses all have a little something crazy, or maybe we are all so screwed up in the head as to what time it is that we seem that way - whatever it is, I like it. But, no matter how much I like the shift, that hung-over-somebody-inject-some-life-into-me feeling the afternoon after my last shift when I am desperately trying to get back to "normal people time" is like a kick in the pants. On that note, I am losing sleep as you read this, so off I go to bed. :) How about you? Are you lacking sleep on your day job? Or are you a night owl like me?

Letting Go

This is not a happy post, but hopefully a thoughtful one. The dog that my family has had for 13 years had to be put down today. I have never witnessed such a thing before, and did not know what to expect. I imagined a white room, metal table, and a doctor in a white coat pushing a needle into my beloved pet in a sterile goodbye. In short, I did not think it was going to be a good thing. My dog had cancer. He was old and rickety, and while he still had a little of that puppy spunk left in his eyes, you could tell that his happy carefree days were a now thing of memory. He reminded me of a frail little old man, stubborn and independent but with just a hint of sorrow in his eyes. It was time to go. My father and I brought him to the vet, and we were ushered into a dimly lit room with a bench and stone floor. A beautiful silver clock hung on the wall, a momento from a loving family to honor their lost pet. "Mood lighting," I thought. The room looked the the dim rooms at the eye doctor, not the creepy white room I had imagined. The doctor came in and expalined the process, and placed an IV in both front legs. She brought out a blanket, and we got to sit with him and love on him while she injected the medicine to make him sleep. The whole thing was so fast - one second she injected it, and the next he was calmly drifting from this world. I was surprised to see the look leave his eyes, his soul gone, body at peace. It was just like a dying person. He lay still, breath quieted, finally at rest. It was hard to watch, but probably the best way to go that we could have asked for him. We left him there, in the tiny dimly lit room, in the care of the professionals. And in good style, he will be returned to us in ashes, and we will remember him in the proudest way we could think of - in fireworks over the hill behind our house. He was a wonderful animal, companion, friend. He deserved to go this way and will be remembered joyfully for the rest of our lives.

Toilet Paper - a Generation Gap?

Why, oh why, do little old ladies use only two sqaures of toilet paper at a time? This, as a nurse and a fellow human being, drives me insane. It is not only the lack of toilet paper that annoys me, it is the way that it is used - usually the little old lady in question takes a full minute to carefully unroll exactly 2 (maybe 3 on an extravagant day) squares of toilet paper, and then proceed to take another full minute to carefully fold the said paper into a tiny perfect square. This practice, while very eco-friendly, is not sanitary or good time management. Why? Because it is damn near impossible for any little old lady (or anybody for that matter) to clean their under-business with a transparent-can't-even-see-it-with-the-naked-eye piece of toilet paper! This usually means that they either get their hands all dirty getting themselves dried off, I have to spend another few minutes cleaning them up myself, or, as one fine 98 year old patient of mine once said, "Ugh, how am I supposed to get myself cleaned off this way? I hate a wet pussy!" Which, by the way, goes down as one of the funniest things I have even heard come out of an elderly person's mouth. ANYWAY, after the "wet pussy" incident I went home and told my friend about my toilet paper pet peeve, and she told me that she is a 3 square toilet paper folder too! So am I wrong, is this not a little old lady thing? Is this something that I missed in kindergarten - was I sick on Tiny Toilet Paper Folding day? Yuck!

She said what?!?

Ok, I am starting this deal with a real post now. To preface this, I have an unhealthy love for people with dementia (for you non-medical types, that means the people that are a little off their rocker). It is amazing to see what remains when the mind starts to go.

More often than not, people that are losing their mind tend to focus on one little detail. For men, this is finding their wife. I have taken care of countless little old men that are on a mission to find their wife. It does not matter that it is 3 in the morning, they can't even walk, and that their wife has been dead for 10 years. They will try to get out of bed to find her. And if we try and stop them, these little old men will find them anyway. They think we are hiding them in the closet, that they hear them out in the hall, or (in a sadder rare case) that they have sat on them and they are being squished before our very eyes.

Old women with dementia, on the other hand, have TWO things on their mind. One is to find their husband, and the other is to go to church. It is freaking amazing how many old women I have taken care of that consistently think it is time to go to church. Sometimes I think they probably have to find their husband FIRST so that they can tell them that it is time to go to church! :) I actually lost a patient once for this very reason! It was New Years Eve, and this lovely patient of mine (who was too mobile for her own good), had been trying to get out of her room for the third time of the evening, fully dressed, because "it was time for church." After this third incident, I warned the staff that this lady was quick and to keep an eye out in case I missed her because she may make a run for it. Sure enough, she did. She managed to get fully dressed, open her suitcase and get her coat and scarf on, take all of her identfying bands off, and escape into the night. It took a few minutes of frantic searching, but there she was - chilly outside in the snow, trying to get to the bus stop so she could go to church at four in the morning!

It makes me think, you know? What will life be like for me, once my mind begins to drift away? For one, I hope that I find someone that loves me so much that all they can think about is me when they can't even remember what year it is. And I want to love someone that much in return. There is something so beautiful about the rest of the world just fading out of memory, yet that one person remains ingrained in our minds after eveything else has gone dark. What do you think? Have you ever had a parent or grandparent that has had dementia? What did they remember, or what were they like?