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.