oh happy day!

i'm back! kind of. i never really left but i have been very much avoiding this blog after becoming so very frustrated with editing it. and as you can see i didn't get to far with that. however today i have some exciting news!

it began much like any other, quite mundane really seeing as i haven't worked in number of days. but it soon became the awesomest day ever when i got to the local harris teeter's.

that's when i found these

"what are they?" you may ask.

only one of God's most precious gifts to us, tomates de arbol, aka tree tomatoes, aka tamarillos

i became addicted to them while living in Ecuador so much so that i may have even tried to smuggle them back into the country on more than one occasion.

but that's another story, the fact is that i've been looking for these small pieces of perfection ever since i came back from Ecuador. i've been to every latino market and specialty food store in the greater DC metro area and couldn't even find anyone who know what i was talking about. then today i was in the harris teeter just perusing the fruit aisle with nothing in particular in mind when i found them!

They make the most amazing juice ever known to man so for the rest of the night i'm just going to sit here and sip my amazing tree tomato juice and listen to my new favorite song, "Could We Survive" by Joseph Arthur. don't worry kel, i'll bring it with me for thanksgiving.

i give up

this is to hard, i have no time to figure this crap out, why is this the only picture i could get up there...and why is it so oddly spaced?

Happy 4th!

Happy 4th of July everyone! i would post a picture but i'm at work so i really don't have access to any.
it's a slow day here in the PICU, not to much happening, thank goodness.
i just have one patient and it's not been very demanding for the last few hours. occasionally he'll wake up and try to sit bolt upright and start kicking his legs, would be no big deal except that he's intubated which means that's a very bad thing to do to his endotracheal tube. otherwise though, he just sleeps.
i have plans of meeting up with friends to watch the fireworks on the mall after i get out of work but it's been raining off and on all morning so i may opt out of that one.
as for now, i'm just going to sit here at my computer next to my patient and watch him sleep. because that's what a PICU nurse does. soooooooooooo fun.

this is what happens when you leave aunt katie in charge.

kelly and dan have left for the day which leaves me as the only adult around here...i promise i'll have it all cleaned up before they come home.

i'm awake now

so the only reason i was able to stay awake during my shift last night was that about 3 hours ago, at almost 6am, somebody extubated themselves and then decided to code on us and it became my job to crack open the code cart (something i've never had to do before) and draw up rounds of epi.
i'm still shaking from it.
and don't worry, the baby's doing ok.
one more week and i'm going to be turned loose on the PICU sans preceptor, hide the children.

remember me? i used to blog here once.

so much has happened since last i blogged. multiple weddings have been attended, trips have been taken, friends reunited, family visited, and apartments cleaned...sadly i don't really remember all the details of my life since my last entry.

i find that very sad, at 26 i no longer have a short term memory.

once at work we had to watch this video, the precursor was that we had to watch the team in white and count the number of times they passed the basketball to the team in black, the video was all about how we get focused on the details and lose sight of the bigger picture. (in the end the whole purpose of the video was to see who could spot the man in the gorilla suit walk through the frame, beat his chest in the middle of the circle of the black and white teams throwing basketballs to each other and then walk out, we watch it twice and i never saw him) but aside from losing sight of the bigger picture i also learned the the human memory can only hold up to 7 things at any given time after that things just start falling off the list (side note, also learned that nurses are supposed to remember upwards of 20 different tasks in one hour alone.) but that explains why i can't remember anything any more...more important things are clearly taking up that previously occupied space in my brain.

it was awesome to be back home a few weeks ago though, i do remember that. spend a little time with the fam and see my brother get married. i took not one sigle picture though, my sister took tons though so i'll just steal copies of hers, they came out better than mine ever would have anyways.

being home made me miss the northwest even more. the air smelled clean, the people were so nice, i never once got so angry i started yelling at anyone who would listen. i really felt quite relaxed...until i started thinking about having to come back to work. i actually had a nightmare the night before i left. i dreamt that not only did i leave my patient at work, but i didn't tell anyone and for some reason i had to leave the hospital and then i was in the back of a van driving somewhere to get something when i thought "i should really have mentioned that i was leaving to one of the other nurses." i was so stressed out in my dream and even when i woke up that i had just walkedd off the floor of the ICU and hadn't told anyone. even now when i think about that dream it stresses me out. it's just not done in the ICU, you can't even go to the bathroom without making sure someone is covering your patient.

i am learning a lot in the PICU, a lot. (another culprit for the lost memories.) i can hardly remember my life before the ICU.
it has created such a source of stress in my life i find myself constantly clenching my jaw now and ending up with these tension headaches pretty much every day. part of the stress is really feeling like i need to do everything perfectly and be as good of an ICU nurse as my preceptor is...i know that sounds retarded because clearly she's been an ICU nurse for the last 5 years and i've been an ICU nurse for the last 3 months, skill levels will be slightly different.
i'm just not used to not being really good at my job, not knowing everything i need to, not being able to anticipate what the doctors are going to need or want. i constantly freaked out that i'm going to miss something huge. i go to work scared and i come home feeling frustrated at the mistakes i make. maybe this is the humility lesson God is giving me and i need to learn this lesson...however it's a freaking scary lesson.
but it does give me a little comfort to think that God's in control of the whole situation. i pass a church on the way to work every day, right before i get to the hospital, and i always pray the same thing every day "God, please help me to NOT do something really stupid today"
and then i pray for my patient and place all my work in His hands, then i cross my fingers and hope for the best. so far the only thing i 've gotten yelled at for was that i forgot to label the tubing that i changed on a patient. if you want to discuss degrees of anal retentive behavior i think ICU nurses take the cake there, especially the longer you've been an ICU nurse.

so...other than the fact that my job terrifies me so much that it gives me nightmares even while i'm on vacation, and it's affecting my health, i do like my job. i know it's giving me the experience that i need to do something else later on in life. i don't know what that something else is right now, i just know that when it comes along i'll have the experience that i need.

i'm back

So i'll apologize for my fairly infrequent posts by explaining that i was clearly very busy down in south america on our annual medical mission trip....





















it really was an awesome trip as it always is. i get so much out of this trip every year and it helps me come back to my job re-energized. this year we went out to the amazon instead of the coast where we have always previously gone. it was a totally different environment with all new challenges.

for me one of the hardest things was that i was que solo in my triaging of patients. as you can see from the picture below there was no one else there translating for me! i think i did a decent job considering a few years ago my Spanish consisted of "yo quiero taco bell"


but between the bats, the boa constrictors, the monkeys, the spiders so big you could ride
them and the daily afternoon monsoons...i'm talking rain falling so hard i couldn't hear the
person standing next to me, i had an incredible trip. the amazon is a beautiful place and the people are so different. very stoic. that probably comes from the fact they drink gallons of chicha every day from birth on.
chicha is a drink made from the yuca root that is traditionally chewed up and then spit into a bowl and covered with water then allowed to ferment for a day or two. this delightful beverage is considered a gesture of welcome from the community and is offered to all guests from a communal bowl.
don't worry though, we didn't have the communal bowl passed around to us, they were generous to offer us our own individual mugs filled to the brim with that distinctly pungent beverage.
dee-lish! i've taken to making it myself and answering the door bowl with a bowlful in my hands, i could tell geek squad was truly impressed when the came over to fix my computer.


i was truly sad to leave my other home, my friends mom kept introducing me to different people my last night saying "esto es kate, ella es de los estados unidos pero ella es ecuatoriana, ella es ecuatoriana" i am ecuadorian. it feels like going home when i go back there and i miss my city so much. i miss the people, i miss the culture, i miss the life, i don't miss the smells so much but really who would? i can't wait to go back again. there is an amazing organization down in the south of ecuador that i really want to go visit next, if you check out my friend maribeth's blog that i link to she has a lot of information about it in there. they're looking for people to sponsor some of the orphan's there for $50 a month so let me know if anyone has any questions about it and i can get you all kinds of information about it.

well for now i'm still trying to recover from the trip, the new job and trying to figure what i'm going to do next so i'll write more about my PICU adventures next time. it's pretty intense.

where does the time go?

it appears that i forgot to blog the entire month of feburary, my bad yo.
much happened.
more to be explained at a later date.
currently i am in the middle of trying to fixed my poor barely functioning computer. i hate roommates right now.
oh by the way, in case you didn't know i went back down to the equator for a visit.

In Response to Kelly's Question

it's now doubling as a handy storage unit that my bedroom otherwise didn't have.

without further ado...

if only i had something exciting to share

it's 0500 and i have 2 more hours left... for tonight at least.
back on nights, which actually haven't been so horrendous as they normally are since i have one of my fellow cohorts with me to pass the time. and by fellow cohorts i mean that she also speaks english as her first language. seriously, when some of the other nurses get together and start talking...i just have to laugh. i suppose that they are speaking english because that's what they insist it is, but i honestly have no idea what they are saying.
tonight a full 15 minute conversation passed in which the only words i could catch were ".....lucifer....made her cry....Praise You Jesus!" there was a lot of laughing and "Praise You Jesus" was repeated multiple times...i find most of the time it's best just not to ask.
so life updates, i am officially another year older. my birthday came and went quite quietly. i know that sounds lame to most people my age but if you have a histoy that includes being tear-gassed on your birthday then really you're just happy that you got through the day in one piece.
next big event was the new couch. my apartment is absolutely adorable now. love it. it's cozy and actually looks like an adult lives there as opposed to the recent college grad who used to live there. i promise to post pictures soon so that everyone might bask in its loveliness.
i think i told most everyone but for those of you who didn't hear my last day on the floor is feb.28th. mark it on the calendars folks because that is a day to celebrate. it's a little weird that i will be changing jobs, i'll soon be in an entirely new atmosphere and pretty much a new hospital. the PICU is in our new tower so everything there is brand new, it only just opened up in November. then on top of that i'll be working with people i don't know, kind of makes me feel like the new kid at school and i have no one to eat lunch with. scary thought.
these are the kinds of things you ponder when you've been up all night and you're tired and there's nothing to do.
however i suppose that i should at least make the effort to look like i'm doing something productive. although i'm pretty sure my patient's all think i'm a crazy stalker because i have nothing better to do than check on them every 15 minutes.

King of Glory

this harkens back to my steubenville days, those were good times. more than once, i have to admit, i envisioned something similar to this while going to the FOP's. (if you know what a FOP is then i don't need to explain why i would be choreographing dance routines in the middle of one.)