isolation and emotion

Some things help you relate with others. Some things make you feel far away from others. I think some of our deepest things make us feel far away from people, because we can't talk about them. It's not appropriate, or it leaves us too vulnerable, or it's just not quite like anyone we have access to.

One such question is on my mind tonight. How do you deal with the thought that you may have caused it? And by "it", I mean the death of another human being. You know somewhere in your head you didn't cause it. You know it was AML. But it doesn't stop the picture in your head. It stays with you.

I can't even say there's no denying it, because everyday, you walk around fine. You really are fine. But then, there are these flashes of what happened that day - the scene that summarizes the whole memory. It's PTSD, and we all have it. It must be the degree that diagnoses us. For me, it's seeing him lying on the bed all haphazard, lying on the bed not breathing. It's weird how you can be in two places at once. I can be in my car driving home, but then I'm not in my car, and then I am again.

I told the story once before. It's nice that someone can read it, and then forget they ever read it. But it's not like that about this. You forget, but something in you doesn't ever forget, and it pops up with no announcement. It's not everyday. But it's enough to make me ask the question.

Yesterday, I was thinking more about how our jobs isolate us from each other. I had a friend over, and I kept wanting to ask her about her job, but I couldn't think of anything to ask. "So, how's your desk been decorated lately?" No, bad question. "So, have you found some great new outfits to wear to work?" No. "Is your copy machine at work cool?" That one's really dumb. The truth is, I have no idea what interesting things there could be to talk about. So then I think about talking about my job. What I really want to talk about is some awesome pathophys or how human we are in life and sickness and death. But I know I should tone it down. I really try sometimes.  Like one time, somebody asked me about the grossest thing I ever saw. So I started telling some funny poop stories, and everybody was laughing. But then, I remembered a far grosser story about bile, and it might as well have hit the fan right there in that room, because it was all over.

Then again, our differences don't have to isolate us all of the time. Sometimes they make us better. I live with someone who is different from me, but when I talk about the things I experience that he doesn't, he helps me. I'm pretty eccentric in my emotional life. At least I think so until I talk to other women candidly. Just like everything else, it's all relative - and in this case, it's usually relative to our significant men. I live with someone who is a sort of emotional oak tree - slow to change and strong. I'm more like those flowers that come and go with the sun. I don't think our emotional temperament is something we can totally control, but we do have choices about our behaviors. I have a strong motivation to let my behaviors be governed by the truth of life in spite of what I am feeling. Sometimes Thomas helps me by reminding me about the truth of life when I can't feel it.

For now, I'm done trying to make myself feel less. I don't need to control my emotions. I just don't want them controlling me, and that's the real kicker. I want to teach my daughters someday. I want to say, "Dear one, I know you are feeling a lot," and I'll tell you: I really know, "but dear one, our emotions do not control us. We feel them, but they do not control us." It's truly something to be learned.

work

I made a friend yesterday. I have another friend that says that I'm good at making friends. She says that I just sit by somebody and say, "Hey, I'm kt," and then we're friends for life. I think she's right; that's usually how it goes.

But anyways, my friend Joe is in the same program I am in at M. He works on the floor above me. He works in the ICU. So when my patients get too bad for us to take care of (which is really really bad), we send them to his floor. He sees death more. And yesterday, he talked about it a little bit. He had a code on his floor, and he had to do chest compressions on this lady, and the family was wailing in the background, cause she was in her early fifties. And she died.

And he was going to leave it at that. But I can't handle that. Because there's more to it. There's coping with death. There's going to work again. "How are you?"

He went on to say that the next day, he just stayed in his apartment the whole day long and didn't really move. He just watched a little tv, ate a little, just sat there thinking. He said work was a relief when it finally came. Something to do. C.S. Lewis says that work is one of the best things in life. I agree with that. I get depressed if I'm not moving. And work is one of the best ways to move, because you accomplish something.

I worked at a state park for a summer, and I loved it. I worked hard every day. I felt really strong by the end of the summer, and I had the meanest farmer's tan. And my work pants were really dirty. I worked in the mud and in the dry dirt on sweaty, hot days, so you would take a shower, and the tub would be black. You had to make sure you cleaned it out so mom wouldn't have to clean it up. And there were always black boogers, and you had to be careful when you cleaned out your ears so you didn't push the dirty further in.

Usually after work, that summer, I would go for a run. Almost everyday, and it didn't matter how hot it was. I'd get my shoes on, get my tunes, and run to EastWest and Three Cord Wonder, my favorite pure volume bands. I'd listen to music about loves gone all wrong or being in heaven or seeing His face or something else that stirred a fire in me and run and run. I got pretty good by the end of the summer, cause I ran with Katelyn, and she said it was a good run for her, too.

And I was with my best friends at work every day. And we laughed until we couldn't move and would complain about how we'd lost all muscle control cause we were laughing so hard. We were stupid girls sometimes, but it didn't matter.

I think that's part of the reason I want to go to the jungle. I want to work hard. I want to move well and be strong like I was that summer. Even stronger.

There was this one time that I blazed a trail at that state park. My boss just gave me a tri-blade and said, "I want it to go from here to there." And I did it. And he came back later and said, "That's the best trail I've ever seen." My dad even got to see it. And he said it was a good trail, too.

I felt pretty good. I'm a good trail-blazer. I felt like that when I crushed beaver dams, too. I got sent on that mission by myself a lot. It was way out in the boondocks. Just me and the beaver dam and my awesome tools. I liked going out there alone better than with one of the guys. Cause they would say things like, "There's no way we're gonna get any more of that dam." or "We did everything we could." I never felt that way. That's usually how it goes when I have to quit something. If I just had one more hour. Just think of how much more awesome it would be. I always felt like that when I counseled at camp. I just wanted one more day with so and so. She would gain so much more in that one day.

I was on weekend maintenance, and I was the only one. So I would get there by myself and get to do whatever I wanted, mostly, which usually consisted of mowing or fixing things. Sometimes they were the things that I had broken earlier in the week and didn't tell anybody about. Sometimes my boss would even forget to make a list for me. But it didn't matter, because I usually finished the list in a couple hours anyway.

This one time, I was mowing on the weekday, and I ran into a sign, and it fell over. The 4x4 was rotten right at the base, so when I hit it (kind of hard), it broke. So I hid the top of the sign in the trees, and fixed it on the weekend. The sign was about a foot and a half shorter when I got done with it, which I still laugh about. But nobody ever noticed. At least they never said anything.

death

Three people died on my floor this weekend. I took care of all of them.

One was even yellower than yellow man. He was mustard colored. His liver stopped working completely. And his fingertips were black and hard - necrotic tissue. And they smelled awful. He was unresponsive, but was breathing through a trach on his own. His family took him off curative cares. It's called comfort cares. And he lived for five or six days after that. They had begun to wonder if they had made the right choice. He died on his wife's birthday just after my shift was over and before my next one started.

The other man was one I talked about before - the sickest man I ever met. You know, if you're in the medical field, you hear people say, "I could just tell when I saw him; it was cancer." or "I knew he wasn't going to make it. He had that look about him."

I get it now.

He made it home before he died. That was what they all wanted.

I didn't get attached to the other lady. It's a good thing, too, because hers was the first and only body I saw dead. I was in the room when she died. She was on comfort cares, too, but her family wasn't around when she died. They had gone out to eat. And didn't come back for a few hours after her death and didn't answer their phones. She had been seizing all day long, the nurses think. Her eyes were rolling back and forth, back and forth, slowly, slowly, all day long. She appeared to be in a lot of pain. And we went to clean her up, and it all happened so fast. Body processes I won't tell you about. I was amazed at the nurses I was working with. They were incredible. It happened at six pm, just before my shift's end at 7:30.

That morning, I had been teary-eyed. Everything I was doing was making me cry. So I took a minute. I thought that's all it would take, but when I got in the bathroom, I couldn't stop crying. I was beyond the point where I could wash my face and look normal. So this girl opened the bathroom door - she didn't know I was in there. And she was totally cool with the fact that I was crying so hard that I was hiccuping. And we talked about death. Cause she's a nursing aid on that floor. Has been for like...three years or something. And I was a little more composed until I went in the room of mustard man with my preceptor to clean him up. And we talked about death more. Death process. Death paperwork. Family coping. Personal coping. Still wanting to come to work, even though there are hard things. And how getting through this and coping with this job says a lot about a person. "If you can do this, you can do anything," she said.

I'm okay, really. Yeah, I think I'm okay.

PS: Sushi fell through.