Wednesday, August 9, 2017

Tempus Fugit

I've had a run of lazy days, sleeping late, reading novels for pleasure, watching movies on Netflix, painting my nails, cooking at home instead of going out. We even went to see a movie: Dave and I went with Paul to see Luc Besson's latest, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, which I wanted so much to like but which was mostly disappointing.

Yesterday I got out my gratitude journal and some art supplies and did a bit of art journaling, the first artsy anything I've done in months.

This plump little yellow orb weaver has taken over the hummingbird feeder and spends her days hanging out under the ledge there, probably dreaming of catching a hummingbird. The feeder needs to be filled, so I'll need to relocate her soon though I am loathe to do it.
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Last night Dave and I went to see a drag show--drag queens from the last season of Ru Paul's Drag Race--and we stayed through half the show. (Drag is close-up magic and our seats were in the balcony, for one, and for two, the chatter was mostly about the last season, which neither of us had seen, and for three, it was loud in that way that numbs your ears and reminds you of how old you are getting. But I am always happy to support drag queens, so they got my money and I got half a pleasant evening out watching drag queens lip sync to club music.)
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Today I went out to lunch with my mother then ran some errands with my brother.

After that, I came home and called the IT department at one of the local hospitals so that I could start doing their online training modules for next semester. I'm not keen on having to spend even one minute of my vacation on this garbage, but it's the trade off for choosing not to spend time doing it during the past term, the term from hell. Anyway, the videos are playing right now in the background as I write this. (Every once in a while I have to click over and do something on the screen, but mostly I can avoid paying any attention.) There are a metric fuck ton of these things, some of them with quizzes at the end, some with a box to click acknowledging that I've been exposed to the material. Used to be that you got paid to train, but with the age of computers comes training that you do at home, on your own time, for zero actual dollars. And they can force you to repeat it yearly. A school mate works for this hospital and he was taken off the schedule, couldn't work, until he completed the online modules on his own time, which...don't even get me started.

Anyway, I started those in the afternoon and will probably be working through them for the next several days.

When Dave got home, we were going to to up to Michael's to spend some of the gift certificate my mother gave me--I want to buy a rotary cutter--but on the way there I remembered that I had left the coupons I printed out on the computer. I could have searched for the coupons on my phone and used those, but I didn't want to mess with that, so we just went up to Whole Foods. I'll order my rotary cutter online tomorrow.

At Whole Foods and filled a shopping cart, willy-nilly, with lots of fruit and some vegetables and, oh, yogurt and beans and a few other things. We came home and had bean and cheese nachos for dinner.

I was going through my phone to look at photos and I came across a few that I took over the term but never shared:
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That is the stack of study cards (most, but not all of them) that I generated for pharmacology. In front is an unopened pack of 100 3x5 cards, so you can see that in twelve weeks, I wrote more than 1000 cards for that one course alone. The cards that I wrote over the semester for all my classes nearly fill up a shopping bag. I don't know what to do with them now that I've passed the courses. Do I save them until after I am licensed? Do I keep them to use to study for my licensing examination? For now, they're sitting at the foot of my bed.
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Ten Hallmarks of Emotional Health, my ass. This is the kind of stupid shit that is in my textbooks. Just reading that white-washed garbage makes me see red.
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I was often the first of my clinical group to arrive at the hospital so I would turn on the lights in the waiting room and amuse myself by taking pictures of the empty hallways lined with hospital beds. On the other side of the doorway, to the left, was a smaller waiting room where patients' families would often push chairs together to sleep (or they would sleep on the floors) under blankets the nurses gave them. I was always careful to avoid disturbing them.
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This was my view throughout much of the term, as I crammed for whatever exam was up next. In 14 weeks, I took eighteen in-class exams and four online exams. I took over 45 online quizzes and probably ten or twelve in-class "pop" quizzes. I wrote seven 10+ page papers. I did 144 clinical hours, split between campus and the hospital. That doesn't count the reading I had to do, between 7 and 22 chapters a week. When I say I crawled through the finish line, I mean I crawled through the finish line. Nearly fifty percent of the people who began the semester with me didn't make it.
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Mid-term tsukumen.
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Hail storm, two days after Saba died.
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Dave spent so much time leaning on his elbow while feeding Saba through her feeding tube that he developed this callous there. I took that picture the same day it hailed.

I'm still not ready to write about how losing her blew a hole in our lives. I crawled across the finish line this semester in part because grief wiped clean my memory. It was self-protective, I know, but knowing that didn't help as I tried desperately to slam information into my brain. And the drugs I was trying to study kept tripping me up, leaving me in tears again and again, because some of them were the same drugs we had given her in vain, the chemotherapy drugs, the series of antifungals, the antibiotics. I'm not ready to write about it.

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