Only a Year Between Five and Nine

I went to a nice dentist today. He said, "Do you eat? Because you have the teeth of a nine-year-old," which made me feel very pretty indeed.

I'm listening to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in my car. The man who reads it is great. He does all the voices just right. He makes me wish I was British.

My dentist said that several years down the road, I may need my real tooth to be replaced with an implanted one. "We always try very hard to keep your own teeth intact as long as possible, because we can never make something better than what God already gave you." He was very nice.

I went out for supper with some more friendly people tonight. One of them is a nurse in the NICU. She says she hated her job for the first year, too. *Sigh of relief* because it gets better. Only a year, right? Only a year.

My dentist and I talked about the midwest and how people wave. And how people are rude here.

I introduced myself to a neighbor today, and he said, "Hi," without offering his name. There are probably a hundred people living in this apt complex, and I know the names of two of them. Bree, and her mom Trina. They live next door to me. Trina listens to loud hip-hop music. Bree is about five years old. I hope we can be friends one day.

Mistakes

I made a mistake this morning at work. It didn't cause my patient harm, but it could have if someone else would not have caught it. I feel terrible about it. And I feel anxious about it still, even though it's over. I'm ready for a day off.

I hear my preceptor's voice in my head about everything. I hear her explaining how to make the decision to give this med, to hold another med, to reposition, to wean oxygen, and most recently, when to change lanes in traffic. Her voice is very calm and she has a Dutch accent. She's great. I'm glad I don't have my friend's preceptor. Her voice is a few octaves higher and several decibels louder. Having her voice in my head might incite a new anxiety prescription.

I've been told a lot lately that I need to ask more questions and ask them sooner. I think it's this thing deep inside of me that needs to be reprogrammed. I can fix things. I've been pretty good at it, actually. At Curves, I would just wander around until I found something broken, and I'd fix it. It's instinct. For now, I need to take my fix-it hat off and put on my inquisitive hat. I need to ask before I fix things.

This is my biggest struggle in the PICU right now. Emotionally, I've been pretty stable, actually. I think it's our patient load. Many of our patients have been awake. And maybe I'm growing some thicker skin, too.

It's time for bed. Goodnight.

New in Town

So in case I haven't mentioned it enough, I've been recently married. Two months today, actually. I know this, because I received an email from TheNest.com, a sequel to TheKnot.com. Their emailing intention was to help me with all of the things with which I must be struggling at two month of marriage. I can browse easy recipes, get tips about battling the post-wedding blues especially the ones related to wedding debt, and even buy The Name Change Kit for $29.95. I admit to you: their help isn't really relevant to me. I don't need their recipes. Our wedding is paid for, and my name is successfully Katie Banley for all major government and financial institutions.

People talk a lot about marriage being a difficult thing. Right now, I feel that there are a lot of hard things going on in my life, but marriage is not really one of them. My marriage is pretty much an escape from all of the hard things.

The most difficult thing between us was uncovered by a recent conversation in the kitchen. Generally, I have been feeling that there is no food in our house. Generally, Thomas has been feeling as though we have too much food in our house. Bread is an example of this. I have been buying bread, English muffins and a loaf of whole wheat bread here and there. Thomas sees this bread and feels pressure to eat it so that we can start fresh and obtain something new. "We have so much bread, so I'd better eat it all up." I don't understand this mentality. Neither do I understand how the bread could be gone every time I turn around. Conversely, Thomas doesn't understand how we could possibly have a continuous supply of the thing he's working so hard to deplete. I'm buying; he's depleting. I'm gathering; he's preparing for the hunt. Our efforts are thwarted by the other.

This is the extent of the difficulty between us so far. I can't discount anyone who says that marriage is difficult, though, because I can see how things outside of a marriage could easily become things between two married people. There are plenty of difficult things outside of us. At some point, they will probably come between us, and we'll have to work hard to resolve them.

Thomas and I get along very well. This is a blessing from God. Many people are married to someone with whom they don't get along. My brother says that marriage is something in your life that God has given to you to manage. For us, God has managed the getting along part already. We just do.

What I am trying to say is that everybody gets their own things to manage. I don't know how he decides, and I don't know that his methods measure up to our idea of fair. I saw a homeless woman asking for money on a busy Baltimore street the other day. I've seen a lot of homeless men on the Baltimore streets, and coming from the Midwest, I am moved every time. But seeing a woman in her thirties on the streets makes me wonder what's really happening. It makes me wonder what I'm doing with all of my time. We all need to be somewhere. We're like hamsters on steroids around here, peddling away on our impersonal wheels.

It's the strangest thing for me - feeling like I'm overstepping social norms to introduce myself to my neighbor. Have you seen New in Town? Maybe you should, because then you'd understand that in my heart, I'm just Blanche, the lady with the clipboard who brings over tapioca and asks:

"Have you found Jesus?" -Blanche

"I didn’t know he was missing" -Lucy

I am a new PICU nurse.

I am a new nurse in the PICU, and that means that my schedule often leaves me wondering what day it is, what time it is, and what to call the meal I'm eating. It's very disorienting coming home in the dark morning and seeing people fresh from showers getting into their cars for work or to see kids waiting for the school bus. It feels like night, and I am ready for bed, but it is really morning. Do you say, "Goodnight," before you go to bed at 8:30am?

I am a nurse, so I pretend to be confident, to have things together. But sometimes I feel as though I am walking in circles. Sometimes I really am. Parking... There are several parking garages, several randomly closed streets, and a mountain of traffic. Navigating... After I park in the correct parking garage and find the correct exit, there are several tunnels connecting buildings. I must find my unit in a matrix of unmarked hallways and dungeonous-looking corridors. I function mostly by intuition, and this makes navigation hard. Once I come to a fork in the path, I first try the hallway that just "looks right" or "feels right". One of my classmates recently decided that she should invent a GPS for inside buildings. I have sarcastic feelings about that. Things like, "Then we can really rely on technology instead of our brains." and "Then nobody ever has to know where they're going just like we never know people's telephone numbers." and "I think they already did that. It's called a map." Stuff like that. But the other part of me is honest with myself and thinks it's brilliant. Storing my lunch... I must say that this is a relatively easy task, and I think that I can confidently say that I have mastered it. Finding a bathroom... Very few toilets service all of our nurses and visitors. It's incredible, really.

I am a rookie, and that means that I make everyone else feel smarter. There are new orientees coming through every three months. So right now, we're the rookies, but in a month, we won't be. The rookies who just graduated from rookieship helped me fill out a piece of paper the other day. Then they looked at each other and started laughing, because somebody is finally dumber than they are. It's a good feeling.

I am a new nurse in the PICU, and that means that I am in shock. In nursing school, our patients were mostly alive. Usually, we could have conversations with them, take them for a walk, ask them about meals. Now, my patients are mostly dead. I might've already said this, but I used to think sick meant throwing up, pooping your guts out, etc. Now I realize that "sick" can mean unresponsive, deformed, brain dead. When I first got here, I wanted to wander around the unit in spare moments and see what else was going on. Right now, I am having trouble. When I walk around, I hate what I see. It catches me off guard and I am pricked at the unnatural body positions, unnatural facial expressions, unnatural portion of death among the living. Sometimes I come home, and I just lay on top of my husband and cry.

"Are you wiping your snot on my shirt?"

"Yes."

"Man, now I have to change shirts this week."

He says other things, too, that help me breathe and function. Simple things like, "Why does it have to be your goal for them to get better?" And it's profound, because some of them are not getting better and are not ever going to get better. If my goal is for them to get better, I fail. If I can change my goal to just love the poor, suddenly, my work is meaningful. Suddenly, I am doing something that matters deeply to my Savior. "Jesus said you'll always have the poor."

I am a new PICU nurse, and it means I'm functioning. It means I'm wondering if nursing is really the right career for me. It means I'm crying more than usual. It means I'm tired. It means I'm leaning on my people even more than usual. It means I'm hearing beeping in my sleep. It means I'm learning to take care of the sickest kids in the hospital. It means something, and that means everything.

Till we have faces, I don't see.

I went to church on Sunday, and it was a long awaited relief. This East Coast thing is very...different. I have not met my neighbors even though I've got two doors six inches from mine. I don't really expect to know their names unless I get really ambitious and introduce myself. Anonymity is the norm.

The people at church were warm, but not fake. We sat by an oncology nurse practitioner who began her career at my facility. Her husband is a techie and musician. They and their children are hoping to be missionaries in the Middle East by the end of the year. They invited us for bagels with their family after church. They've adopted a kid from Guatamala and have three of their own. They also invited us into their small group. I'm itching to be a part of it.

Anyway, church. The pastor's laying the groundwork for a series related to life's big question: Why? He's speaking about the question with words that relay that he's asked the question before like the rest of us. Simple words weren't enough for him either. He needed more like the rest of us.

It's a tough thing for a pastor to address. It would be so much easier to preach a sermon on prosperity or to get people all hyped up about God being alive and everything else. But he's taken it down a notch and pricked every heart. He's treading carefully, thoughtfully.

He advises us all to draw a closed shape like a circle or a square. It represents God's wisdom and knowledge. He asks us to shade in our portion of wisdom and knowledge. "Do you have a dot on your paper? Can you even see it? Maybe some of the answers to the why's lie within God's wisdom and outside yours."

I'm glad it's not the end of the series; it would be a real bummer. But it lays the groundwork. Why deformed bodies? Why beatings? Why brain death? Why trauma? We wouldn't be asking if we understood. But perhaps there is an answer. Maybe we don't have access to it.

Haven't you heard so many people say, "When I get to heaven, I'm going to ask..."? I stole this idea from this sermon. It was stolen for the sermon from some writer (CS Lewis?). Maybe when we get there, our knowledge and wisdom will brighten and all we'll say is, "Oh, I see."

"Now we see through a glass dimly, but then, face to face." It's my hope, and I'm hanging on.

Nice About Death Flavor

There's this really cool girl in orientation with me. She's been a PICU nurse for a long time and traveling as one. Traveling nurses sign short-term contracts with hospitals who are short for nurses. They are thrown into the mix on hospital floors with very little orientation. They need to be adaptable and competent in their work. It is well-known in the profession that it is a very high-paying position. Hospitals go to travelers as a last option. It costs hospital units a large portion of their budgets. Most units would prefer to spend that money making new hires, but at times, there are none immediately available. When there are patients, hospitals must have nurses, so traveling agencies are services committed to filling those positions.

It's a general theme right now around the country that traveling nurses are landing regular staff RN positions at hospitals, because of the economy. They want stable positions, because the window of opportunity for getting staff RN positions has been closing. This girl has a rich background of experience in the PICU, and she's going to be working in my hospital as a PACU nurse. Pediatric Post-Anesthesia Care Unit. She takes care of kids in the transition between the completion of surgery and their transport to hospital beds. She keeps kids from dying as they wake up from surgery. She also reminds me of Meg Ryan, but looks more like Claire Danes. So I stare at her a lot. I hope she doesn't notice.

Anyway, she told me that people will come to me, because I am nice about death. Then our leader chimed in. "She has an oncology point-of-view." She says oncology and the PICU clash in their thinking. I guess PICU nurses are generally not welcoming to death. They generally do everything they can to stop it, even after it stops making sense. It's their job. It's the parents' wish. It's the doctor's order. For whatever reason, it's how they function psychologically. To switch the goal of care from "get better" to "die well" would be, according to our nurse educator, "too much" for the PICU nurse. I don't think that's true, though. But I have no experience to back it up. I think there are points where even PICU nurses want to tell the parents to give up. Anyway, my facilitator suggested that there should be a palliative care unit where patients can go after pulling the plug - a unit the specializes in helping patients die well, a unit separate from ICU nurses.

It's going to be different. In my last nursing experience, we were helping people die all of the time. It's a healthy thing to die well, to be allowed to talk about it, to be allowed to grieve it - even before it comes. That's how I see it. Death is a good part of life. But I would see it that way, because I come from oncology.

It all goes into the mix. Everybody brings their specific flavor to the team. There's a girl who wanted to be a vet and worked with tigers and dolphins and whales for a while. Another girl went to Bethel at Minnesota and prays before she eats. Meg Ryan brings her flavor. Us new grads bring our flavors. It's going to be a tasty treat.

Dream Theme

Last night, I had a dream about my childhood friends. I was at Michael Vandal's lake cabin with my friends Katelyn, Adam and Marla. We were doing lakey things like skiing and swimming and what-not. Katelyn was going to take me skiing, so she was setting up the boat. It was going to be the last ski of the season which is usually really warm, but for some reason, this time, it was really cold. Suddenly, the lake started flooding several inches a minute. The boat Katelyn was preparing tipped over! There was no choice but to start a rescue mission for her. The lake had two life-yachts tucked away around the lake, and one of the locations of the boats was Michael's cabin! So I navigated the boat a little. I picked up these two old ladies who were hanging out in the water in lounge chair floaties. The last thing I remember was thinking, "I should probably pick up some people who will be useful to me on this mission."

It's the strangest thing, though. I have had several dreams where Michael Vandal is a major part of the dream since graduating from high school. No big deal, right, but the kicker is that we were never really close friends. I dream about him more than any of my other classmates, except for Katelyn with whom I am still very close.

I don't remember having a huge crush on him or thinking about him a lot. We talked once in a while, but not any more than any of my other classmates. I have one significant memory of him from high school, but it's not anything that special. I had decided to quit basketball, and it was a major decision for me. We had a serious conversation about that. I don't even remember what we said. He might've said, "I think you're making a mistake." I might've tried to explain my decision. He might've listened. Normal stuff. It was significant to me, because I was having a really hard time with that decision. Somehow, he helped me a little bit...I think.

They're not racy dreams, either. Normal, everyday stuff. I had one once that we were sort of flirting and I wanted to show off for him. We took a bike ride, and I rode my bike right off of a cliff. I remember falling into the abyss and thinking, "Well, that was a dumb move." In another one, I was swimming in the ocean, and there was this polar bear that was swimming with me, and then a big boat came by, and I think he was on the boat with Jenna Milbrath.

But this morning, I was thinking about Michael Vandal - really analyzing why he would be in so many dreams. I think he might have been the very first boy I ever liked. I forgot about it, though, because it was in kindergarten. I remember saying stuff like, "I love you so much, I'm going to kiss you!" And then I did on the top of his head. He had a buzz cut and I liked that. I still like that, actually. I remember the kindergarten thing to do was to tell each other how much we loved each other with our hands, sort of like our love was a fish we just caught. "I love you thiiiiiiis much." And I remember that I told Michael that I loved him so much that the backs of my hands were touching behind me...which I totally can't do now. I wonder if that's a warped memory.

Now that I think further, I think he was the first boy that ever told me he liked me, and then said he hated me. I don't remember what happened, but I do have that vague memory. So maybe he's been stuck in my dream world, because early on, he was set in my subconscious maze as some sort of symbolic pillar. That must be it. Right?