Happy Birthday... to me!

Song of the day is the birthday song!


Today is my birthday!  I spent it like a grown up but had a great weekend!  I didn't have to work today (one of the joys of being a nurse!), but still had to go to work for an appointment, went to a dentist appointment, did laundry, and cleaned my apartment (which is finally back to normal after an amazing party on Saturday).  I was able to mix in some shopping/browsing along Michigan Avenue in between appointments and treated myself to a cute top from the Gap while enjoying the occasional sunshine that poke through the clouds as I walked.


The best part of my weekend was Saturday night.  I'm a triplet so my brother, sister and I hosted a birthday party at my apartment and it was a-maz-ing.  I started with dinner at a cute bar near my apartment with a few friends from college who I rarely see and then had a blast at the party!  All in all we think about 40 people showed up including friends we've known since we were 3 all the way up to friends from college as well as a number of cousins.  My parents even stopped by at the beginning and brought a giant cake.  It was a lot of fun seeing them interact with my friends and to see how much my friends like them - I couldn't ask for better parents :-).  Seeing how well everyone from our past and present meshed together and enjoyed one another's company makes me want to host a party every weekend (even with the aftermath) because we all had so much fun!


I'm off to get a cupcake :-)

She Works Hard for the Money

Oh. My. Goodness.  Boy, I sure earned my pay last night!

I haven't had a shift like last night's in ages and I fully deserved my Au Bon Pn blueberry muffin I treated myself to on the way out of the hospital this morning and if anyone questions my overtime, I have no problem telling them about my night!

Song of the day - Donna Summers, 'She Works Hard for the Money.'

The night was off the wall nuts.  I started out ok with four patients (one of which was an admission from the emergency room that rolled up to the floor at 7:35, just 5 minutes after my shift started - gotta love it, nothing like starting a shift off with an admission before you even start getting report on your other patients).  Thankfully he wasn't too bad other than some frequent IV pain meds, but I also had a crazy paranoid schizophrenic and a young quadriplegic who was having trouble and a lady who kept asking me about her oxygen.  I had everything under control for the most part until the real fun started at midnight when I picked up a 5th patient who had been on the floor for less than an hour and was received from a psych hospital.

He has a long psych history which includes flight of ideas.  I asked him about pain and he started telling me about his toaster and suitcase.  Huh????  His heart rate and rhythm were out of control and his doctor kept entering order after order and then called me to ask what I thought about it.  I wanted to tell him, "you ordered it, if I had a problem with the order I would ask you about it.  Stop entering order after order and make me sign of on each one individually!  Gather your thoughts and enter them all at once so I can stop wasting my time and sign them off all at once!"  Also, if he had been trying to teach me something by asking my opinion to see my thought process, I would have been ok with that, but in all honesty, I don't know that he really knew what he was doing, which made me a little nervous because he was asking me about medications and IV drips that I have never had to initiate or push before).  All in all, I think I probably spent a total of 5 or 6 hours in that patient's room trying to figure out the mess of so many orders, his meds and what drips he wanted started and trying to get IV access and lab draws, and blood cultures.  That's a lot of time when you have 4 other patients who need you too.

I don't know if that makes much sense.  My other current problem is that I finally got in bed at 10am and was wide awake by 1:15pm.  This does not bode well for this post which turned into much more of a rant than I intended it to be or for tonight- which, fingers crossed, will be better than last night!

Lean on Me

Today was a rough day.  My sweet, friendly, beautiful dog was put to sleep today.  My parents adopted her, a German Shepherd, my freshman year of college.  That was almost 5 years ago and she was such a loved member of my family.  

The song of the day is one of my favorite songs, 'Lean on Me,' by Bill Withers.

I went through a rough patch in college and then again when I started my first job.  I cherished seeing Tess on the weekends when I came home from school when in college and on the nights after a bad shift when I got home from work and nobody else was awake.  Tess was my steady companion and always made me feel loved, no matter what.  She never failed to show her excitement to see me.  I liked calling her Thumper because her tail thump was a frequent greeter when I arrived home.  When home, I could frequently be found on the floor petting or playing with her.  My sweet spot to pet her was on her tailbone, nobody else in the family pet her there but me, and she knew that.  Sometimes she would greet me with a bark and promptly turn around so her butt was the closest thing to me.  I loved it.  

The next time I go home and she isn't there to greet me is going to be a hard moment to swallow.

Tess and I had a special bond, the bond between a girl and her dog, or rather, the bond between her and her girl (me).  

Firework

I've realized that over the course of my life, I've defined myself as the shy, quiet girl.  Whether I did this to fill in a gap between my funny and athletic sister, outgoing brother or witty brother, or to just be a little more invisible in the crowd while going through school, or if I did this because I was afraid of being something else, I'm not sure.  While being shy and quiet are two things that I cannot eliminate out of my personality, they are only two aspects of who I am among many different qualities.


I'm not the biggest Katy Perry fan, but there is something about her song, "Firework," that really strikes a cord with me.  And especially meant something to me this weekend when I was surrounded by people both whom I know very well and not well at all and for once I felt like I had no walls up.  I wasn't self-conscious about the way I looked, or nervous about conversation, or anxious about seeing certain people.  I was really comfortable in my own skin which is a feeling that I am not used to.  It felt really good to feel that way.


Just because I've always been the shy, quiet girl doesn't mean that I always have to be the shy, quiet girl.  Even though we are now a month into the new year, my resolution is to try to step out of my comfort zone and to live my life outside of those two words that I have defined myself by for so long.  In doing this, I hope to continue to get more comfortable in my own skin and to be confident in who I am and what I have to offer those around me.


If you haven't heard the song, look up the lyrics, maybe the words will jump off the page and ignite something in you too.