gpg70's blog

I figured one thing out…

gpg70 — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 10:38:32 +0000

The same feeling I get when I hear a great song is the same one I get when I see a great movie or read a piece of literature that moves me in some way (from the intelligent like John Irving or David Deida to the mundane like a magazine or online article). All of it comes from the same place, everything that I do, see or feel that moves me, comes from that place. The only problem is that place is not always appropriate for public consumption. The problem with that is my life isn’t revolving around those things. That whole live your dash or the Greeks who used to ask when a man died, “Did he have passion?”

Well, I have passion but I’m just not living it right now and THAT is driving me crazy! How can I get to that place and stay there? How can I do that on a regular basis and still be fit for society?

It goes beyond that. The things I love and the things I love to do can often be seen and often are singular pursuits. I can’t make music but I love listening to it, all day, every day. My tastes are not what most people listen to so I often listen to what I listen to alone and sometimes with headphones on. I love cooking and I love creating, I don’t care if it’s something I’ve never made before, I feel better when people are watching me. I feel better cooking for myself as well as other people. My significant other shared with me a quote from the movie “Into the Wild”, “Happiness is only real when it’s shared.” How can I meld my needs, wants and desires with my need, want and desire to involve more people in my life and live a passionate life…?

A sleepless night tonight brought up so many hit songs to my head, one by Orleans, one by Johnny Rivers, some by Del Shannon, more than a few by Dion and the Belmonts, even more by Buddy Holly and the Crickets but the last one is the one I’ll sign off with…

All I know…

gpg70 — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 05:46:40 +0000

Is this costochondritis or Tietze’s disease is really pissing me off. I used to be able to sleep on my stomach which would spread out the pressure on my chest so it would feel better (much in the same way a shower does, warm or cold) so I could fall asleep. Now due to my CPAP, which is another story, I can’t do that because I can’t breathe that way. So the choice seems to be, sleep in a way that causes me pain or sleep in a way that causes me not to be able to breathe properly with my CPAP – either way, I don’t get proper sleep.

I can sleep on the couch, which is really cushioned compared to my bed and that helps but then why would I move in with my significant other if we can’t sleep in the same bed together? Buy a really thick and fluffy a mattress pad…? Maybe but the cost of one of those, I may as well buy a new mattress with the padding built in. And since I just received my first nursing paycheck this past Friday and I have bills to pay, it will be a long time before either of those are purchased…

I used to have some sort of respite, I could sit straight up, I could stand straight up but if I did either too much, it would start to strain and it would start to hurt anyway. Now I’m starting to take 500mg Tylenol for it, one at a time and that does the trick, for now. But even then that’s only dealing with the symptoms of the pain, not the cause. One thing I learned in nursing school, which I hammered home to several of my friends, one in particular – treat the cause! That begs the question, what is the fucking cause?

I do know that sucking in my rather large gut does put a strain on it, so losing weight would help to a degree but is that all there is to it? Sometimes I wonder if it really isn’t cardiac-related, which is why I limit my activities to a large degree, especially stairs and really strenuous activity. It doesn’t feel like it, I can walk the pain around my chest, especially around my sternum but then it sometimes feels muscular or venous because I can walk it around my chest and it doesn’t follow my ribs or cartilage. Chest pain, more or less localized to an area right where your heart is even if it is superficial, is very disconcerting. Not being able to sleep due to the fucking pain is a pain in more than just my ribs. I’ve wondered about the possibilities of it being related to temporal arteritis or giant cell arteritis.

All I know is I’m fucking sick of it. If I do too much of any one thing in a day it flares up. When I lay down to sleep, it flares up. When I eat, even a small meal, it flares up. What the fuck? I’ve tried omeprazole for 3 months on doctor’s orders and it’s not GERD. It was helped mildly by my recent foray into anti-anxiety meds and I can’t start popping NSAIDs or other analgesics as often as I would need to, so what is the fucking answer???

Fuck quality of life, this is life in general. I want my fucking life back. I want to be able to work out, I want to be able to do everything I used to be able to do and have fun doing it. This fucking sucks.

New Beginnings…

gpg70 — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 07:30:48 +0000

A new place and making it official by living with my significant other. Looking forward to it on many levels though I will say, I HATE moving but I LOVE traveling. Finally getting a dishwasher again after 7 or so years without one. If I never have to wash another dish by hand the rest of my life it will be too soon!

Just finished watching a fantastic old movie called “Double Indemnity”, the first and likely definitive film noir. One of my favorite genres of movies and inspiration for the movie “Brick”, one of the best recent movie surprises I’ve had over the last decade. Film noir set in a high school, love it!

“I’ve got knives in my eyes, I’m going home sick.”

Rumors of the demise of LotR BfME II was greatly exaggerated…

gpg70 — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 04:53:50 +0000

After being set aside for one day, it came out from hiding. Why? I can set it aside for 4 months or more at a time and never think twice about it during the previous semesters… Idle hands, apparently. Haven’t been to the gym much lately either. What is going on…?

What do I need to soothe at this point? In a week and a half, I will have my first nursing paycheck and be well on my way to achieving my current and future financial goals. So what gives…? Though my fellow students weren’t much for socializing, it was better than this!

Maybe that’s it, who knows? Just not busy enough I think…

The rare double post on a day…

gpg70 — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 04:58:32 +0000

I feel like the Twin Towers the Houston Rockets had back in the day, Ralph Sampson and Hakeem the Dream Olajuwon. XD

Something came to me today and I’m thinking it will work because I never like the idea of “losing” weight. It always seemed to me, like “oops, I just lost some weight, let me pick it up again!” Then you usually do… I finally figured out something to try and I think it will work.

Instead of focusing on what I don’t want, excess weight, then trying to lose. Things have a funny way of maintaining themselves when you focus on them, even if you want them to go away in the worst way. The fact that your focus is on it is what sustains it, so now it’s time to change focus.

That focus is going to be on achieving fitness or something similar, I’ll worry about the semantics later. The focus is not on losing weight but attaining a fitness level that I am comfortable with and able to maintain by simply focusing on feeding the muscle and not the fat, to paraphrase Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat… Wow, must be retro night… Focusing on what I want to be instead of what I don’t want to be. Funny, after all this time, I still teach myself things. I always would apply that to everything else in my life and not to diet, exercise and a healthy lifestyle. Yeah I’m a genius, should’ve started this years ago.

In the words of John Irving from “The Hotel New Hampshire” my favorite ending to a book, “…begin with the end in mind…” and “…you have to get obsessed and stay obsessed…”

The basics are out of the way

gpg70 — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 04:44:59 +0000

Now it’s time for the real deal tomorrow 0700-1900 as a nurse, finally 4 years of “studenting” finally comes to fruition in my chosen career. Computer sign-ins all work, I’ve been debriefed about benefits and basic computer use (non-nursing related) is finished. I start tomorrow and Friday doing what I sat down 4+ years ago to decide what I wanted to do with my life and when. I wished I would’ve started writing the things down, the plans I had down many, many years ago. Everything I wrote down 5 years ago that I wanted to accomplish I either have or am in the process of doing… In a lot of ways I look back on these last 4 years and outside of being a blur, I am amazed at what I was able to force myself to do (Freudian slip with “force”…?).

I’m still not sure why I was able to do it or saw it through. I had a plan and I stuck to it, the rest of my life plan is based on my being a nurse. That was the only thought I had during those times each semester where I wanted to quit, that was the only thought that kept me going each semester. After making it through sophomore year, I figured junior and senior year couldn’t be any tougher and aside from some bumps in the road, they weren’t. After making it through junior year, I figured it’s too late to turn back now – it would be stupid to quit so close to the end. Sophomore and junior years were by far the toughest things/years I’ve ever had to do or go through. The first semester of senior year really sucked because I had 11 hours of nursing classes, ugh. If I can make it through those times, by myself for the most part, I can do anything.

I am looking forward to tomorrow with a slight bit of anxiety, which I guess is only natural but the first 6 months I’m on the job I’m going to act like I’m back at school. Looking everything up until I know everything I come in contact with. I feel good about my knowledge base, I’ve worked hard on it now I want to add the real life experience to it. Knowledge + experience = one hell of a potent nurse and that has been my plan all along. I want to be the nurse on the ICU floor and I want to be a charge nurse, I want to be part of the LEAN committee, I want to be part of the EBP team, I want to part of the continuing education team, I want to be a clinical instructor, I want to be an adjunct faculty member, I want to do so many things as a nurse and if the last 4 years are any indication, I will…

I just need to write it down…

It’s so easy…

gpg70 — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 20:32:54 +0000

I’ve given up almost all of my game-playing with the exception of some XBox 360 games and I’m putting away my one vice, LotR Battle for Middle Earth II, for a while as I seem to have substituted one thing for another. The hits keep coming and all I want to do is relax – after graduation it was studying for the NCLEX, after stewing about the result for 2 days it was money and still is. Especially now that Sallie Mae is trying to draw money out of my checking account to pay for my student loans. What the hell happened to the 6-months post graduation grace period…??? The time where most people find jobs, relocate, etc. and NOT have to worry about money-grubbing corporate entities? I know I owe the money and have every intention of paying but are you kidding me? I never signed anything telling them they could take money from my account and overdraw due to the several bills/checks I had coming out at that same time. No notice, no warning, just take and to hell with your living expenses like rent, utility and phone.

I just want to relax, something I haven’t done in 4+ years. I know life is 10% what happens to you and 90% of how you react to it – as cliche as that is, it’s still true, I get it. You can’t change or even dictate your own life, only how you react to it. In the immortal words of John Wooden, “Things work out best for those who make the best of the way things work out.” How? I’ve had 4 years of programming on how to be completely on edge, always “on”, never resting because during the semester it’s always 10 different things to do, places to go, people to see…

I want to know why video games, computer games or web-based games like Evony are so easy to walk away from and food is not? I do know one thing, I’m tired of self-soothing behavior, no matter what it’s form. What can I do? I need money, one job ended 2 days ago, I start my new job tomorrow but any significant cash flow is still about 3-5 weeks away, so how to deal with the fact of no money? Better yet how do I deal with it effectively…?

I hate HAVING to do anything. I would LOVE to take the rest of the summer off and relax and ease out of the life of a student to the life of a professional. There should be some sort of exit counseling for students that come out of a program like then nursing program, at least one that involves something other than the exit counseling for the financial aid and student loans. Yes, make sure everyone gets their money but don’t help students reacquaint themselves with life on the outside.

I have no concept of self anymore. I don’t know what I am or what to do now that I’m not a student. I have few friends, fewer who are outside of the program and even fewer activities that I relate to anymore. Everything I’ve done the last 4+ years has revolved around making myself a nurse – I went to school to become a nurse, I took a job to further my healthcare/nursing career, I’ve ate, drank, slept and breathed nursing school the last 4 years. If I wasn’t in it, I was making preparations for it, if I was in it, I was immersed in clinicals, write-ups and everything else.

If I had known before I went into it how much it would have taken over my life, I’m not sure I would’ve done it. I gave away 4+ years of my life. My memories from that time that don’t involve studying are fuzzy most of the time, my memories before school? Still very much crystal clear. I can see why the turnover rate/burnout rate is so high for new nurses – quitting 3 years into a job you spent 4 years in school getting. I’m burnt out, I’m rundown and all I want to do is relax and not worry about anything so I can just decompress. This type of “education” I am sure contributes to the toughness of nurses and I get that, but I also thinks it hardens them to patients and having a sense of compassion for patients. The thought of “you don’t know how hard I worked to get here” attitude can come through when dealing with patients and other not-as-skilled (i.e., new) nurses. I’m sure it contributes to the way nurses can “eat their young” when it comes to other nurses. I just know there’s a better way to build tough but compassionate, competent nurses – this old-school, fire and brimstone, drill instructor-type education is antiquated and archaic and needs to be changed.

Older nurses say we had easy compared to them in school, which may or may not be true – it probably is. But they had it easier from one aspect – when they went to school, they could get their degree, diploma or certification for less than $2000.00 over the course of 2 years maximum. They didn’t HAVE to work full-time to make it through school just to pay bills or pay for school and if they did, they didn’t have the sheer expense for school we did – yes we have increased wages from what they made back then but the tuition has increased far greater than the wage has.

New job, July 6th…

gpg70 — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 18:52:37 +0000

ICU/cardiac telemetry float pool. A month of orientation in one and almost two months for the other. I am a murse, now it’s time to act like one! Four years of hard painstaking work is now about to pay off.

I have to go pee in a cup and get some blood drawn, then off to the first day of orientation by computer for 8 hours (whoo hoo!). I could think of better ways than by computer, especially 8 hours but hey it’s a one-day deal so fine by me!

RN, BSN

gpg70 — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 02:10:29 +0000

Monday I took my NCLEX and I felt okay afterwards but then I did a really smart thing – I starting thinking about the test, not keeping myself busy, analyzing my answers, etc. In short, I worried and fretted over the test after I had already taken it – the after test was way worse the pre-test phase of waiting. To make matters worse, I blew out a belt loop in my “fat” jeans. Now these are jeans I need to use a belt to keep me from looking like a hoodrat wanna-be so I realize it was likely just poor stitching and not that I’m too fat for jeans that are too big for me but it still bothered me.

This is the first time in 12 or 15 years I haven’t played some form of fantasy baseball. To distract myself from school in between study sessions, I created an alter ego Facebook account and played the 3 games I played on my regular account – Mafia Wars, Castle Age and Mobsters 2: Vendetta – but I shut that account down and deleted all of the games off of my regular account. I noticed as this past semester went on I started getting on them less and less and as the NCLEX started getting closer I did a lot less of everything else as well. I got rid of all my “distractions” as I was finishing up school, I found I simply didn’t need them anymore. In April, my Xbox 360 came out of my closet for the first time since last October and I started playing that again once in a while. I just wonder, why is it so easy to dismiss games on Facebook, get rid of my alter ego account and yet not be able to do the same with food…? I used them both for the same reason, to cope with the stresses and difficulties of nursing school and for an added bonus, the money troubles involved therein and that have followed since.

The good news is, I found out on Wednesday at 1330 that I did in fact pass my boards and I am now officially an RN, BSN – the ICU/cardiac telemetry float pool now awaits. That ended 2 days of hell, brewing and stewing, worried about how I was going to do and wondering what would happen if I didn’t pass.

My chest pain is still going strong even though I’m done with school, it seems I “like” to be stressed in that I have now switched to worrying about my money troubles since I have been part-time since almost this time last year. I cut down on that stress, job stress, job/school stress and replaced it with worrying about money – the fact that I didn’t have this last semester paid for until my parents took out a loan for me 3 weeks prior to the end of the semester. Since then I have been studying, studying, studying for the NCLEX and only picking up an extra shift here and there. My financial situation looks like an uncooked scrambled egg – 1/4 of a tank of gas, 2 checking accounts and 2 savings accounts hovering just above the $17.00 range and 3 credit cards that are teetering close to their limits…

Worrying does no good, I get that. But money problems are real, I’m not in danger of being kicked out or starving but worrying every single day about every single penny sucks. So why worry? How can I not worry with my situation? It’s not like money is just going to appear out of thin air. It wasn’t until Monday that I could really consider picking up extra shifts. I will start now but I am off the tech/secretary schedule starting July 3rd as I will be a nurse in another hospital by then – THANK GOD!

A note on the NCLEX, I wanted to feel like I’d been prison raped by several RNs after I was done as it’s been said that the tougher the questions are, the better you’re doing. Well, I got my wish. Tough, tough, tough, easy seemed to be the relative pattern but there was one stretch of about 10-12 questions where afterwards I needed to stand up, stretch and remain standing for a few minutes. Man I felt like I was owned by several nurses but alas I passed! Some final thoughts about that god awful test – from graduation to test date, I took over 3000 questions, half of which were pharmacology, did metrology – the ones I missed or was fuzzy about I looked up later – I had 20 pages of notes… I knew the items I had during the questions due to my research, I used the “decision tree” and my real-life experience in the ER all accounted for maybe 9 questions on the test, which is likely the difference in my passing the test.

My trouble with it is, out of all those 3000 questions, solo study sessions, several group study questions and some gaming study sessions, why in the world did all that only account for so few questions? I didn’t know about 2/3 of the medications on the test and I had A LOT of pharm questions. After 3 years of nursing school, about 100 patients in a clinical/preceptor setting, several hundred meds and a pharmacology class, how could I know so few meds compare to what was on the test? My 3 years ER experience gave me one question, my 20 pages of notes another 4 and the decision tree accounted for 4 more. I just can’t help but think that the lottery system with which you get the test is a bunch of crap. People’s lives and careers are at stake and it seems to me it is simply luck of the draw as to how well you do or which questions you get. Now I have to promptly forget everything I tried to learn in the NCLEX way because the real world never works in best-case scenario, ideal situation, textbook way that nursing school is taught in or the NCLEX tests over. Only once did I ever have a patient exhibit “textbook” lab results. The real world should be how it’s taught and tested over, school as always, really tells it like it ain’t…

Of the 3 days since, I’ve been in the gym twice putting in a total of 70 minutes, 4.75 miles and 470 calories of elliptical work. Just stretching the legs out, getting the dust knocked off a bit and will get down to business in a few weeks. 1 week of this, 1 week of circuit weightlifting of light weights just to wake the muscles up and then I’ll be off and running. And damn it feels good already, I’ve missed it so much…

Lakers, World Champions for the 16th time…

gpg70 — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 05:14:13 +0000

At least that went well! I was a little worried but they came through.

NCLEX on Monday and the compatibility issues between Windows and Apple continue. It seems iTunes 9.2 does not agree with Windows Vista as my CD/DVD-ROM+RW on my laptop is now missing – says it is not connected. 3 days before the NCLEX and I can’t review test questions on my CDs or run my metrology CDs. I am confident I know the information and yet, not being able to run through some questions and problems on CDs the days prior to the test is a stress I don’t need.

Traveled to Templeton, Iowa today with my girlfriend and visited the Templeton Rye Distillery and had a grand time doing so. If you have the opportunity to buy a bottle of Templeton Rye, and it’s not easy, buy it and savor the flavor because it is one smooth, sweet, lovely ride for a whiskey! The weather was horrible mid-morning, especially around the Perry township area. We pulled over, took some fantastic pictures on our way down and eventually ended up with a nice day in Templeton. We topped it off with some tira misu from Romano’s Macaroni Grill in Clive and we had a good day. Second time I’d been there, second time with tira misu – both times it was fantastic!

A question I’ve been pondering of late, in between study sessions for the NCLEX keeps popping up in my head… How can you live a life that matters, if you don’t matter…? I’m guessing I have the answer but I’ve had a long day that started at 0600 and another day tomorrow that starts at 0700, I want to be better rested this weekend and especially for Monday. So good night for now and I will check back in likely after the test.