Ugh

Then. When?

I wrote this...I don't know, like, three weeks ago? (Has it really been that long? I guess it has. Time flies. Or it flees. These days time flees, you know?):

I passed the night napping and sewing and reading and watching episodes of Schitt's Creek on Netflix. I had a snack around one a.m. (potato chips, my nemesis) and then had breakfast (leftover dal and aloo gobi) around five a.m.

I'm having a half-caf coffee right now, black, the way I always drink it. I should slow down and try and get some sleep today. I have to flip my schedule for work tomorrow night, which means staying up as late as possible tonight so I can sleep during the day tomorrow.

It's 7:20 in the morning now and I've got a call with occupational health at 8:00 a.m. to get a release to return to work. After that, I may try to get some sleep. I may prep dinner (a spaghetti squash made "lasagna" style, with ricotta and marinara). I also want to prep a big chopped salad from vegetables we got with an Instacart order from Sprouts yesterday. It helps to have a big, prepped salad in the fridge, then we can just dish some up with each meal. It's an easy way to get some veggies in.

Unlike my lazy ass, my friend Grace has apparently been spending some time sorting through some of her life while we are all sheltering in place. In her digging, she unearthed two photographs that she texted to me yesterday.

This was me about fifteen or sixteen years ago. That's my peacock friend George (funny, I had an imaginary friend named George when I was about six or so) there in the background. (I wonder if George the peacock is still around. What is the peacock lifespan? Google says it's around 23 years. That peacock could still be around!)

This next photo was taken at a then-friend's wedding.  (Yes, I wore all black to a wedding. Better than all white, I guess.) That's Grace on the left, me on the right, and Dave's boyish face in the lower left corner.

 

We were babies! I think back on that time in my life and it is very vivid in my memory. I felt all the time like I was trying to breathe underwater and I was constantly worried. Constantly. Worse than now. Now feels like a cakewalk compared to then. 

May 27, 2020

So I guess that brings us to today.

I was up most of the night, doing not much of anything. I finally fell asleep around four a.m. and woke up around 8:30.

I got up, had a cup of coffee and, because I was hungry, a few Triscuits and some hummus.  Around two hours later, I was hungry again, so I made impromptu burrito bowls (soyrizo, potatoes, beans, cheese, sour cream, tortilla) for breakfast. Now I'm stuffed. We have a Zoom dinner tonight with friends and I'm trying to think of what to make for dinner and it's not easy when I'm so full.

So work. Sigh. I still have not gone full time. It's a mess and I don't want to talk about it. The hospital is full again. (The week before we were so empty that they were calling people, asking if they wanted to stay home. I did. I took a Saturday night off.) This week, no. This week it was so full and so awful that about four hours into my shift I got an ocular migraine from the stress. That was fun.

I work with adolescents (other units house the elementary and middle school aged children, but my patients are mostly in high school or would be) and this is the population in which adult psychiatric illnesses start to manifest. Things like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. (Those things happen in younger children as well, but far less frequently.) When you get too many patients with similar disorders and mix them in with depressed, suicidal adolescents and patients with intellectual disabilities and behavioral problems and then add aggressive, homicidal patients, it's not great. (I mean, nine adolescents in one place can be bad enough. Now give each of them a mental or behavioral disorder and see what happens.) The doctor who controls which patients come on the unit is a doormat and she will never say no to a patient even when it makes the situation dangerous.

I spent a lot of time on Sunday night on the phone, dealing with another doctor, a man who often sounds thoroughly drunk (I think it's just fatigue). We had a patient who the doctors--the attending, the weekend attending, the resident--disagreed on and I was in the middle of that, trying to care for the patient. I kept having to call doctors, trying to get a definitive answer, as the patient melted down and melted down.

That's a fractured picture, I know, but it was a mess.

I came home exhausted. And couldn't sleep. Because that's how my brain works.

We were running low on provisions, so I put in an order for pickup the next day and we scrounged for things for dinner. We've been in a grilled cheese rut these days (but we're running out of bread, oops).

To Be Continued