Crossroads?

After a distressing shift in resus yesterday (Australia Day no less, when everyone else was seemingly drinking their weight in alcohol while listening to the Hottest 100), I think I have finally reached the point of burnout in emergency.

Critical care areas are, not surprisingly, the most stressful and pressurised areas to work in nursing. Emergency nurses don't tend to last beyond 12 months. This is my 6th year working in my Brisbane hospital's emergency department. I thought I was doing well. Normally I'm pretty unflappable; I might have a vent with co-workers about something that's happened, but I can leave it behind when it's time to go home.

Yesterday was seriously fucking awful. I can't say anything about the situation as it will be a media case at some point. My empathy is gone. How can I look afer people if I don't care, or don't like them for something they've done? Maybe I need to go and work in some quiet office, away from patients, doing staffing or bed allocations or some non-clinical stuff. What I do know is that my leave needs to start pronto. Only 35 days to go...

I'm just a bull. No bull.

I was pondering over my post from yesterday and wondering - do I sound like an obsessive freak?
I know I do think about things a lot, too much at times. But after the time it takes for me to trust and open up to someone, having to let go and 'forget' just seems that much more awful.

I read something on twitter today that kind of made me go 'whoa!'.
From @SexLoveScopes

Sweet, romantic #Taurus hate change, and you can't stand switching partners.

Breaking up leads you to become a ticking time bomb.

That sounds a bit harsh, but I suppose the unease and uncertainty means there is potential for things to turn bad if you don't handle them properly (by 'things' I am referring to your emotional state.) Which sort of relates to my post from yesterday and deciding when you should literally disconnect from someone to maintain your sanity. Last time, it put me in a funk for a lot longer than I should have been because I stewed far too long. I don't feel that I was a 'time bomb' but I wasn't myself, and I didn't like that. Aside from that, I quite like being a Taurean :-)



Ctrl-Alt-Del

CityKat's blog on Brisbane Times spoke the other day about what one does when you break up with someone and you have to split up favourite places you've been, eaten at, shared. Do you just pretend they were never part of it and continue patronage, divide them up or cut off visitation altogether?

It just got me thinking - when do you know it is the right time to delete everything of someone? You might feel that you are physically 'over' a person and it doesn't hurt to think of them anymore, but when are you ready to delete their existence so to speak? By this I mean texts, emails, pictures, phone numbers... the digital record. Physical stuff just doesn't seem to have the same meaning to me. No idea why.

I wonder if it is easier to do this at the beginning than once some time has passed. I know I've never been able to do it initially, but it seems so fucking hard doing it later on. Like you're literally severing something from your body. Melodramatic? Maybe. I get rather attached to people. I care too much. That's just me.

But then, is trying to wipe out the record of someone silly or childish? Should you just be able to get on with things, be mature, remembering the good stuff and just keep these things around? Obviously later on it's not going to mean as much, if anything, but that seems too hard to me, and a little bit masochistic.  As crazy as it sounds, I kind of like the idea of the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where you can remove the memory of a person from your brain.

This isn't a current issue I'm having with anyone, but I am interested in how you should deal with this. I don't want to think about being with someone then breaking up with them; I want to be with someone for keeps. But making the giant leap that this is probably going to happen again in the future, I don't know whether I should be more prepared or just take things as they come. There needs to be rules for these things!

When silence is so loud it drives you batty

This is going to sound like something of a rant. It is, but I'm not apologising for it. This is not a new issue, but it's been exacerbated shall we say by a few people in the last little while, and it's sending me slightly batty.

I DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE LACK OF COMMUNICATION FROM MEN.


Why can they not just tell you what they think? Why is that so hard? Being silent just seems kind of gutless to me. I'd rather know where I stand, good or bad, than be left hanging wondering what the hell is going on. This seems to happen to me a bit. I don't know whether it is just the kind of person that I attract, or whether I am too upfront in saying what I think that it scares them into muteness.

Anyhow, the main story I'm going to talk about involves a guy that I dated last year, who I had been seeing for a few months. Everything seemed to be pretty cool. All of a sudden, he drops off the radar. I say goodbye one day, then it’s like he disappears off the face of the earth.  Absolutely no contact whatsoever. Me, not wanting to be a pest, wait for a bit. Then I text, email, call. No response whatsoever. I have no idea what is going on. There was literally no clue that anything was wrong; if he didn’t want to see me;  if he had other things going on in his personal life causing problems. After maybe a month, I get a message saying sorry, that he’d been sick, but that he wanted to still see me. No other reason. Ah okay.


Then - total blackout again. This time it is a few months. I write him off. Suddenly after New Years, I get emails & texts asking how I’m going, how was your Xmas & New Year, wanting to catch up.. hmm. 

Him: Let me know when you’re free & we can meet up, I’d really like that. Be great to see you again, etc.

I get a flurry of texts from him then.

Me: I was pretty pissed off at you, but I just wanted to know what happened. I was on a run of shifts; I tell him I’ll be free after a certain day. 

I hear nothing AGAIN. It’s been another week. FUCK HIM. I would have liked to see him again, but my real motivation for saying yes to catching up was to get some sort of answer out of him as to what has happened in the months he had disappeared. Frankly I don’t really care what the excuse is. I expect he had hooked back up with his ex who he talked about quite a bit, or he was seeing someone else. I just want an explanation. And at least if it’s face to face then he can't run away.

But honestly this no contact again has just pissed me off that I really feel like I couldn’t give a fuck anymore. Unless he has been under some sort of detention/isolation where no contact with the outside world is allowed, or he is in a coma and can’t speak, then he can just piss off altogether. My time's too precious now to waste waiting around for someone who sorta-maybe-kinda wants to see me. One of my resolutions was to go with my intuition, and mine is telling me that this guy has absolutely no regard for anyone but himself. And I want to be with someone who actually is thinking about and wants to see me. And can pick up a phone.


So my response to this guy, should he re-emerge will be ‘who are you again?’.

Brain, please STFU!

Not sure how to begin this. I have been struggling a little bit in the last couple of days with insecurities and lower self-esteem than usual. Stupid brain thinking about things too much. And it always seems to be male-related *sigh*.

So where did this all start? At the end of 2007 I had lap band surgery. This is something that is still a bit sensitive to me, and I don’t make it public, but I will talk about it if people ask. I was majorly overweight, and for me having the surgery was a last resort. I won’t go into all the background leading up to it, because unless you have been in the same situation you really can’t relate and the number of well-meaning people throwing their two cents worth into the equation I had had more than enough of. Your grandma making you cry on the phone by telling you as a teenager that ‘you’d be so pretty if you weren’t so fat’ is not something you forget easily. Combined with the fact that I was a nerdy straight A student, I had almost no self confidence for many years.  Dating was pretty much non-existent. I was sociable and had male friends, but none that I thought would ever want to go out with me.

Fast forward to the age of 31, I decided on the somewhat radical approach (in many people’s opinion) and went for surgery. I could prattle on about every other method under the sun that I had tried previously, but it’s moot now. I wasn’t unhealthy physiologically, but I was psychologically. I wasn’t happy with the way I looked; I wanted to lose the weight to get fitter and to avoid family health problems. Suffice to say, I made the decision and only told my immediate family. Took a week off work, paid for the surgery myself (wasn’t covered by my private health insurance and I wasn’t waiting). It took a while, but I lost 50 kilos. The thing I remember the most was that Justin Timberlake’s concert was the day I came out of hospital. There was no way that I was missing that! Mum was a bit concerned, but I analgesed myself up and went.

As the weight dropped off, people obviously began to notice and a few asked questions. Slowly as I felt comfortable, I would tell people about the surgery. Almost everyone was very supportive and happy for me, but there were the odd few that considered it ‘cheating’ and questioned why I took such a radical route. The saddest thing about this journey was losing some friends, one very close. There was a fair bit of jealousy and I don’t think in the end they really understood why I did it or why I kept it to myself.

When I hit my doctor’s target, I felt great. I was not over-brimming with confidence, but I was happy with myself, proud of what I had achieved and I felt ready to face the world as a ‘new’ person. I knew nothing had changed about me, apart from my clothes size and the fact that I was more outgoing. I’ve put on about 10kg since, but it feels more manageable and I like not having to be as strict with things.

So then I started dating properly. And it was really hard, a lot harder than I expected. I’d meet guys, they’d seem interested but all the time I would keep feeling insecure about my looks, my body and what could anyone possibly see in me? It took one brave guy who had a lot of problems of his own to get me to open up and see how much I had to offer.

I guess as I’ve gone through the dating game, particularly in the last year (some of which I’ve blogged about), the not getting called back / getting dumped / cheated on etc etc has given my self esteem a bit of a hit. The old insecurities are creeping back. And I don’t like it. I know this isn’t unique to me, it happens to the majority of single people. I know it’s flawed thinking, that I am this smart, wonderful, sexy woman who anyone would be privileged to get to know. But every time something happens I go back to that shitty place, like when I had to go to my year 12 formal with a girlfriend because no one asked me.  I had just imagined that those feelings were all in the past. So I refuse to be a slave to my self esteem anymore. I don’t want to feel like crap and unattractive and undesirable every time this happens. I will continue being my honest & fabulous self; assume that the universe knows what it’s doing with me, and that everything will work out right in the end.  Hopefully not before I’m ancient.

B is for blues, and..



Google images

I haven't had anything fixed that I wanted to write about in the last week, so I'd taken to trying to sort through some older writing on the computer & in a few random notebooks.

Wow. Big wow. The majority I had written at a point last year when I was feeling pretty horrible, so it was dark and low and not like me at all. I thought they were pretty blah but it was the point when I had started writing again so I was just happy to have rediscovered my interest in it.

A friend of mine runs a 'Bad Poetry' group and I had sent some of them to her, which ended up getting up posted out. I wasn't that fussed because I had only written them to try and vent some of the emotions I was feeling. As it turned out, they were received pretty well. I think the comment I liked the most about one of the poems was that

it was like liquid nitrogen to the heart, followed by a light but ominous tapping at it.

So as much as I was unthrilled by the suckiness of 2011, I am grateful that it started the writing process again, even if it began with some not-so-happy-place stuff. I don't think I can bring myself to make them public, not right now anyway, so they'll just be a little reminder to myself of good things coming out of something not-so-good.





An anniversary

Norman Park, January 12 2011 - bottom of my sister's street

I've been wanting to write something about the January 2011 floods that so badly affected Brisbane and south-east Queensland in general. It's proving more difficult than I thought. I was not physically affected by the floodwaters, but I saw many friends, family, colleagues and patients lives turned upside down by the event.

It was truly surreal. Where I was living at the time was a fair way out of the city, and apart from the incessant rain, there was no evidence of any impending doom. As I travelled to work in the inner city, it was like looking at something out of a movie - the swollen river, pontoons and broken boats being carried out towards Moreton Bay if they weren't smashing against bridge pylons, floodwaters slowly creeping their way into the streets and buildings around the city.

The hospital I work at was not flooded although streets surrounding it were temporarily flooded when the river peaked. I had coworkers stranded at work for days because they were cut off from their homes, and others who were isolated at their houses by the water. The Exhibition grounds nearby became an evacuation centre, and the stories people needing medical treatment would tell of being rescued by boat in nearby suburbs was mindblowing.

I was in the process of buying a unit in what turned out to be one of the worst hit suburbs. Settlement was actually due the day the river peaked, January 12 - cancelled when the CBD and therefore the bank it was to happen at were evacuated. Fortunately the property was fine but that was a little extra unwanted stress. The local shopping centre was seriously inundated and was closed for nearly 6 months. There are still houses around the area that are unlived in or still undergoing renovation. Up until around 2 months ago there were still broken pontoons in trees and on the river banks around Graceville and Tennyson.

Looking at videos and photos now, I remember how bad it was and how scared some people in the city were. I can't even imagine how those out in the Lockyer Valley must have felt. I guess what I take from it now is that it could have been so much worse. The river peaked lower than it did in the 1974 flood. The generosity of the residents of Brisbane was phenomenal and unexpected. And Anna Bligh was a hero (for a little while anyway). People didn't lose their sense of humour along the way either - evidenced by the King Wally statue outside Suncorp Stadium with floaties, a snorkel and boardies. At least if something similar happens in this lifetime, we may be a little more prepared for it. But we won't ever forget the experience.

Five minutes up the road from me - January 12 2011.
Photo courtesy of Neil Ross, redbubble.com

Feng Shui-y things

One of my favourite astrology pages, Mystic Medusa, posted an entry called The Peach Blossom Remedy a little while back. Apparently it is notorious in Feng Shui in attracting love/lust into your life, although it carries a warning about the 'quality' you might get. Now, I don't know a great deal about Feng Shui apart from the basic theories behind it, and had never really applied any of the principles to my life. Apart from having no clutter under the bed. And having the foot of your bed not facing the door in your bedroom.

Anyway, since the latter half of 2011 was not the finest time in my life with regards to the L words, I thought there would be no harm in giving the Peach Blossom Remedy a shot. Detailed instructions on how to carry it out are here. According to this site, my direction is west, and I am to use 7 flowers of white or yellow, in a white, yellow or metal vase. Done.

And what happened? Nada. So I just left it, kind of forgot about this silly vase of white flowers sitting in the most westerly part of my unit (which is my study). Then I heard from one ex out of the blue. Then another. Then someone I had dated a while back who just disappeared off the radar with no explanation. And then I met someone in a completely random way which I find difficult to define. It may mean something, it may mean absolutely nothing. It's intriguing and unnerving and fantastic and serendipitous? I don't know. But I like it. So I don't really care whether it was as a result of my Feng Shui or simply coincidence.

I looked at the vase today. I had bought the flowers weeks ago. The "7" are still going strong - no petals falling, still healthy looking. The remainder of the bunch died ages ago.

Google Images

Blending in

I was taking in some sunshine & coffee at New Farm Park today, admiring houses on the far river bank at Hawthorne. There is one house in particular right on the water that has always been a favourite. When I was muddling my way through university, I did a year of architecture. I've always been fascinated by design and how space can be utilised in different ways to create something hopefully extraordinary. I liked the beauty and the idea of designing,  but my skills were more technically focused than artistic so it didn't end up being my thing. However, in first year there was a lot of observation of environments; thinking about space, getting an idea of what you felt worked and why, much abstract stuff.

Anyway, this house is this fantastic looking timber, multi-level dwelling with towers and decks; it just looks amazing. It was built around the time I was enrolled in this course, and I recall really focusing on it because it just appeared 'at one' with the environment and as if it had always been there. In comparison, some of the river houses and units surrounding it don't gel with the landscape. They look beautiful and expensive and lovely in their own way, but just don't seem right to me.

It started me thinking about the similarity with people. It all depends on others perceptions of course, but in your own environment, you tend to either be conspicuous, or camouflaged. There are really only the two groups that exist. But what if you don’t fit into either?  I don't stand out or attract a lot of attention, but I know and I’ve been told by many people that I'm different from the general ‘herd’ as well. With houses, my view is that it works or it doesn’t. But with people, I am stuck in the middle. It would have bothered me a lot before, the not-fitting-in-to-some-group. Now, I quite like being the individual that I am, and if that means re-thinking my categories for people, then that works for me.

Dodgy photo, but the house in question is dead centre. Will replace this with a decent (clear) pic soon.

Sometimes it's just a job...

I have been a nurse for 9 years now. During that time there have obviously been many ups and downs, days when I felt immensely satisfied to be doing the job I do, and days when I felt like some sort of masochist, wondering why I ever thought nursing would be a rewarding job. The last 5 years I have worked in one of the major emergency departments in Brisbane, and it has been wonderful in terms of my own self-development as well as a massive eye-opener.

There was a point during 2011 that I began to question whether I wanted to continue nursing at all. Traumatic deaths, being assaulted by patients, crazy workloads, feeling totally unappreciated by everyone apart from your nursing & medical colleagues – who would want to stay? One event last year then popped into my head that made me glad to be working in the area I work, and kind of proud to be a nurse.

The one thing I have always feared working in emergency is having someone that I know being brought into hospital in a bad way. One random afternoon shift, I was the team leader in the resuscitation/trauma area of the department; basically where all the bad stuff goes. QAS ring about a patient that is on the way - an elderly male who had collapsed and was coming with CPR in progress. Everyone is poised waiting. I’m running the nursing show. He arrives… and I know him. He is the father of my dad’s best friend G. And things are not good. It was a massive shock; I literally froze for a moment before something just kicked in. I guess it was fortuitous that I was coordinating anyway, because from then I just took over. I had rung G and met him when he arrived. He knew he wasn’t going to hear any bullshit from me about what was going on or the prognosis, and he was grateful for that. I was really proud of the level of trust our ED and ICU doctors afforded me, and it might sound strange to say, but I felt really fortunate that I was involved. G’s dad passed away a few days later after his life support was turned off.

I didn’t do much physical care for G’s dad, but I was there with him and his family, and I know it did make a difference to them. While that is an extreme and somewhat traumatic example, drawing on it when I am having a challenging time reminds me of the meaning of nursing, why I am good at it, and that sometimes one positive can outweigh ten negatives.