so i'm back

Yeah, I know I just don't seem to blog often enough to even say that I'm back but here I am saying it!
I have decided on my future course and Nurse Practitioner it is. I took the wretched Statistics course and now I'm applying to the program with a mandatory summer course starting next week. I'm excited actually. I've had mixed responses from long term friends who think I will never see my family, and other's who think I take on too much... Maybe they are right but still I'm excited to start something new.
I'm busy writing the essay. I'm having a some trouble articulating spiritual values that are present in professional work. I'm very private. An interesting problem as the values are there and are reflected, or perhaps sighted is a better way of phrasing it, within the action of working with people. Right?

ghosts

While driving to funeral today (not, actually, something I do very often) I was on a road that winnowed to two lanes and started to turn and twist around country bends and past farms and a feed store. I knew what was coming up, I was conjuring the image of a patient as I drove. I had liked this couple. I found them sweet and sad and I worried about them. The road took a deep swoop to bottom out at an intersection of a gravel road were I would have turned left to go visit them.

Memories and emotions trailed to the intersection almost visible in their tangibility. An intrusive thought-ghost swirled and clung to the car as I drove by. It happens all the time. Everywhere I drive and everytime I drive. I try not to tell the poor people driving with me cause I see ghosts dozens of times a day. Well, sort of see them, anyway.

What is interesting is that it's all my old patients, not just the hospice patients but all the patients that I've visited in their homes. It feels like when you see people in the grocery store or something and for a moment it appears that it is some long lost friend.

It feels like regret. Is that what mourning is? Regret?

hospice nurses are dropping like flies

The holidays have been brutal, patients are SO sick, the family stuff is so intense and 3 out of 5 hospice nurses in my office are out sick!! Damn! Too much.
Three days ago I went to the house of a very dear patient who had just died. She was still in bed looking so young and beautiful. Her husband was sobbing and her mother was wailing and her little girl was placing stuffed animals by her bed. And then took a photo of it(eek!). It was all so wrenching and raw that I walked around with that light post crying hiccup feeling all day.
Then, two days ago I went to work on New Year's Day and was supposed to see three patients but two of them died right before I got there. I was able to spend time with those just departed, and there sorrowful families and found myself crying in weird spots. Then, again, today a long team meeting with tears and that drained but light post tears feeling through team meeting and after...then went on with my day and the second patient died right before I got there.
Jesus. Too much. Even for me, too damn much.

lightening quick blog post

New Year's resolutions:

1)write every day -blog' dream journal, fiction,non-fiction...whatever (not charting) but everyday.
2)more of a slow cooking kind of lifestyle. Cook more, eat better.
3)lose weight. I'm not proud. I'll lose it any way it'll happen these days.
4)change jobs
5)go to school (first math class then stat class then graduate school)
6)yoga. yoga. yoga.