First off, apologies for the prolonged absence in posting. My residency has been true to the usual residency reputation lately (16 hr shifts, 70-80 hr weeks, getting only 3 or 4 hours of sleep per day from switching back and forth from night shifts). HOWEVER - I did bring a bit of it upon myself - I would have had a little calmer of weeks for a couple of these if I hadn't switched some shifts. Instead, I got 4 days of straight so I could go to North Carolina with James and his family for Thanksgiving! Totally worth it. We had a wonderful trip and wonderful holiday. Great company, great food, great chance to reflect on blessings and what we're thankful for. So, sorry that meant the blog had to suffer!
Since we last wrote, lots has happened. I don't have time to write about it all. From my side, I finished my month of night float, did another month of ICU until Friday morning when I then went straight to inpatient medicine (THAT-ICU night then straight into medicine day-was a long shift!). This ICU month started out calmer than my first ICU month - pretty low patient census - but then after Thanksgiving we've had some really sick patients and sad cases. I think I had my "intern year low point"/breakdown/whatever last Sunday - it was a really tough shift and made me wonder why I had chosen such a career. James was so sweet and comforting and gave me a blessing, which helped. Luckily I had 24 hrs of hospital-free time until the following shift so I was able to recover. Good news: I am forever done with ICU - no more in my life! Also luckily, last night's shift ended at 7am instead of noon so I was able to at least go to Sacrament meeting. I had felt the church void pretty strongly from missing meetings for work last week, so it was a good refresher. We also got a new calling in addition to being assistant employment/welfare specialists: we will also be the CTR 5 primary teachers (team calling again-whew!) starting in January. Time to pull out my rusty babysitting skills. Any tips you all may have would be helpful! The only thing I've really done with kids in the last several years in convince them that my stethoscope is not a vaccine in disguise (ie no crying required)...but I don't think that'll translate to primary very well!
James has almost finished another quarter since we last posted. He's working hard on final projects and homework assignments and I am not envying him at all. His program is so tough! Med school is easy in comparison, I think. He showed me his "HW" (which to me looks like Einstein himself wrote it down) and there were so many Greek letters (mu, theta, sigma, blah blah), vectors, infinity, limits, integrals, "if this...such that...prove this theory...", sequences named after famous thinkers, etc, on that paper. It made my head hurt! Send successful vibes James' way!
My favorite thing (besides our rad trip to NC) over the last few weeks has been getting our new house ready for Christmas. It has been a long and drawn out process and is not totally done, but I have appreciated 5 min here and there to hang an ornament, or set up a nativity, or whatever. Our house is finally looking quite festive! It makes me happy. We got a live tree from Home Depot (someday we'll have time to cut one down ourselves but for now I'm thankful for Christmas tree lots!). We got a Douglas fir, because I think that was what we usually got when I was a kid (don't kill me Mom if I made that up). Since our house has tall ceilings, we decided to grab one from the taller bunch. The measuring stick there said it was shorter than 9ft (our ceiling height) and then we had them cut off a few more inches. Good thing we did! There were only a couple more inches to spare at the top til our ceiling, and so the star fits and our tree looks so huge and lovely. We decorated it with childhood ornaments our parents handed down (including ones Ben and Jake made that are really funny), a couple ornaments we've picked out on our travels together (1 from honeymoon, 1 from our Maine trip, one from our trip to MI last Christmas when James met the fam), and set of 50 from my beloved Costco. Turns out, 50 ornaments = a ton! Our tree is very homey now. Check out some photos below!
Our Bar Harbor, ME, lobster claw Santa. Goofy and clever!
Our star, courtesy of Michaels crafts. Amazing what florist wire can do to attach things (like the star) to other things!
Our honeymoon ornament from Colonial Williamsburg.
The whole tree, next to our new file cabinets I got on sale at target.com and put together myself. PS I love power drills...vrrrrrrm!
James' mom made us some absolutely gorgeous stockings as a birthday present for me. They are perfect. James was very skilled at dissuading me from buying ugly/on sale stockings over the past month or so since I was antsy to make sure we had some...so glad he did! Love these!
I took some time after "the breakdown" to craft and get some angst out. I am pretty happy with how my second homemade wreath turned out. Again, florist wire is the best!
One more lucky moment I just have to share: so I was going to vacuum the house after a long and tiring shift as "cleaning therapy" (haha, this only works sometimes) and while getting ready to carry the vacuum downstairs, I dropped it down the stairs and it broke. This, of course, made me cry (seems to happen too much when I'm working in the ICU). I love that Shark vacuum! I will spare you an exhortation on the virtues of Shark/Europro, but suffice it to say that I love it and breaking it was awful. After having a pity party for a bit, I had the idea to call Shark and see if they could mail me a replacement piece or tell me how to fix it (hot glue maybe?). To my surprise, they sent me an entire piece, brand new, for free, shipping included. 7 year warranty, baby! Plus the customer service person was so nice. I did a phone survey on my "service experience" after and was annoyed that I couldn't rate things "11/10" with their automated system. It made my day! The new piece has arrived and I happily vacuumed up all the pine needles that had been accumulating.
Well, time to go to sleep for a new shift tomorrow. Only 5 days and then 7 days off, Mom/Dad/Ben are coming to visit, and Christmas!
2 comments:
Thanks for the update. Your tree is lovely. And it's fun to share your excitement over your life-with one exception, if course, Hope you both have a wonder holiday with your folks and NYC. Love from ggh
She's alive!!! And I got your present in the mail today--just in time! I'm glad you sound better than the other day. ICU sounds rough--mad props to doctors who actually stay ICU doctors.
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