addicted to change?
There's no question mark with the phrase. I know I'm addicted to change. Last year when I took a full time job after graduation, I said I would just cruise along for the ride, go steady with my life and be still. On a day-to-day basis I have no problem being "still" because I can easily sit still for an afternoon at Chapters or watching Sex and the City.
But when it comes to the bigger picture of life, I definitely got some ADD issue. The truth is, I like most of my co-workers, I have people to switch shifts with so I almost never have to work nights, and most importantly I know what I'm doing to not be a push over. And yet my restlessness overwhelms me and provokes me to move forward. I need a change of scenery to keep me on my toes. One of the senior nurses once told me that if you can work on this floor, you can work in hell.
A few e-mail exchanges, a friendly meeting and a rather intimidating interview later, I got hired to work in the Emergency Dept.
Amsterdam - protestant or liberal?
Edinburgh - absolutely beautiful despite the weather there. But people need to get a life outside of going to pubs!
Family :)
Vacation twice a month? Boo yah! It wasn't all fun and game, I went for my sister's graduation in London. But how can you not visit other places when you're in Europe?! Now I'm getting a hard dose of reality: back to work, credit card bills, co-workers leaving and friends moving away for their careers. All seem to be happening at the same time... Well I'll just have to use up more vacation times to visit them overseas then.
Refreshed
Gotta LOVE the sun. It makes people 100x happier than the brutal snow storm in Canada.
I finally took my first vacation to Dominican Republic with the Queen's peeps. It was a full week without work, but doing exciting outdoorsy things. I didn't wanna spend one minute indoor!
- ATV'ing and gunning into the mud puddle was my favourite
- Parasaling was $ well spent
- Way too many glamour shots because I love my camera that much
- We kept track of how many times girls got hit on this week
- Lunch in the country side gave us diarrhea; good bonding times =)
- Locals thought the boys were related to Jackie Chan or Bruce Li
- Windsurfing was much harder than I expected
- First time getting up for sunrise but no sunrise
- "O my mother" and "i love you for free" are token phrases they used
- LOTS of lying around and tanning
Currently listening to:
Hey There Delilah by Plain White T'sMaybe the song would resonate with me a bit more if I was still in university, still a really sweet tune.
After half a year of working full time, I think I've finally leveled out from my bitterness towards my job and the nature of shift work. You know something a student can never understand before he/she goes into the workforce is what you're really getting into. I had this big love affair for becoming a nurse throughout university. Heck, what do I know, I went to clinical once a week and barely doing what a nurse had to manage on a day-to-day basis. (like the work load, night shifts and such) So when I first started working full time, it almost came as a shock to me of how draining it was and how much I didn't like who I became. I was sick and tired of patients and families b!tching at me even though I had nothing to do with their complaints.
Then I came to hear stories that the seniors nurses go through over the years. Stories that made them cry, stories where they felt the world was on top of them, lesson in learning to let go at the end of life, and staying focused and at home during a chaos. After all, we are human beings and
it's okay to be human. One of them told me that, "when they b!tch at you for no good reason, it's because their own grief is too much to bare that it leashes out onto someone else."
Break time during night shift...
When you take your break during night shift, you usually nap in the staff lounge. But between tonight's craziness on the floor and my co-workers snoring up a storm, I'm in no mood to nap.
Albert told me to start blogging again. So here I am.
I don't wanna, but I think I'm still gonna take the chance to complain about my job, like everybody else in the world. This has got to be the most back-breaking, heavy patient load and stressful floor to work on. Because we're general medicine, meaning it's a dump for everything, every kind of patient you can imagine. There are some heart failure folks ringing all night because they're in pain. Then there are the febrile neutropenia or septic ones who demand all the attention cos they may be crashing any minute. Hanging out but not so happy... One of my coworkers said "if you can work on this floor, you can work in hell."
Once in a while, I pull out my ipod and listen to Barry White, my new found appreiciation, especially
my first, my last, my everything. Just to allow his optimism pass through me, feeling the energy even when i walk home after a 12-hour night shift.
I miss being able to go to ET every week. I'm telling ya, going to church every week has become a luxury when you have to work every other weekend. And the fact that the hospital computers block the facebook website is really not helping me to stay socially in tune with people's lives.
My 6-day off stretch will begin after I finish this shift is... 2.5 hours!!
fresh start, only it's not
After an irrational and emotional outburst at my mom, I attempted to apologize to her for my attitude. She simply said that I went through 4 important milestones within the span of 2 weeks, it was understandable the level of stress I was going through. Convocation, moved out of home, wrote my career license exam and started work today, all in 2 weeks. While I was desperate for rest, I was also hoping for a fresh beginning.
I walked out of the exam on Wednesday feeling even more overwhelmed, burdened by the result because it did not go well. I thought I just steped out of some sort of nursing random trivial fact contest that nothing could really prepare you for it. But I need to believe that God is a competent God and whatever He has started in me will be carried to the finish line...
Last night I was even more stunned by a friend who passed away in an accident. This was not someone I was particularly close with, but he was one of those people you knew briefly and would always remember him by because of his sweetness. RIP Dar.
