Taking time for it all to soak in…..

I am not sure I could say it any better than Johnny Depp with that quote from Alice in Wonderland. I thought that maybe I would stay away from a traditional “blogging” site and stick to just the books I am reading and reviewing, with the occasional reminder that there are things and people out there we need to be mindful of. These people fight battles that sometimes no one ever knows about. You know…that “strong silent type.” The people who take on chemo and radiation while still working in health care because maybe, just maybe, there is someone that needs just a little more attention than they do. But really, who decides that? Who gets to say one persons battle is less than or more than another persons? Who says one journey is easier or harder than the next? What may be an easy walk around the block for one person, could be for another, the equivalent of having to walk Pluto’s 1,474 mile surface diameter…..up hill…..both ways…..carrying a 1474 pound bag of snarling, writhing, Chihuahua’s.

I have come to realize that the old adage of YOU are your own worst enemy is nothing short of truth, unless again you are carrying that frenzied bag of Chihuahua terror, and then I would have to ask what were you thinking, but that is a post for another day. My story is long and most probably quite boring as far as stories go, however I feel like for me maybe the journey through might be the journey out.

I won’t go so far back as to young childhood times in this post, because some of those tales are just way too funny to intermingle with this one. So I will start where this journey took several left turns for me. (I’m not sure whether the movie “The Shining,” or the movie “Misery,” both by Stephen King, would be more appropriate as to how my journey turns and rolls….but what do you do? Both movies people have gone crazy, and in both movies there is something physically or mentally wrong with the characters. They both seem to fit my current predicament.

Much like Alice, I seem to have tumbled down my own sort of passage, landing me straight into the depths of…..well let’s stay with the theme and say that its led me to Aneurysm in Neverland. Though this is a place far darker than sweet Alice had to go.

You know that day that comes once a year, and belongs to you, your birthday…..well that started my “tea party” where the black out pain rabbit informed me how I was late, so late, for a very important date. Honestly, the only invitation I had received was that magical work invitation, requesting my presence at work without fail, even if it was my birthday! And let me tell you, if you knew or know me……late is something that drives me up a wall! I can not stand to be late ANYWHERE!

Though I arrived at work on time, and was in my Emergency Department busily handling the tasks of middle management, while also taking care of patients who needed far more than I did, I realized that maybe that “little bit sick” I had been feeling may not be so little. If you work in healthcare, you know there is NEVER enough help, and an Emergency Department is a creature that changes and pulses as it feels the need to surge and stretch beyond the capacity of the walls trying to hold it in.

The foot and calf pain I had been feeling when I had awakened that morning, now was becoming unbearable. The sweat, (yes gentlemen, women do sweat……that’s not spritzed water to freshen us up on a hot day,) was rolling down until without exaggeration, there were puddles of sweat where I had sat down.

Without the slime and dirt slinging, the nurse over me in a higher position than I held, missed every sign of the impending train wreck I was about to encounter. (And I must say I think every car on my train derailed, the tracks went sideways, the conductor was driving his race car, and the poor Go-Cart I was traveling in had no chance at all.)

So, instead of becoming a patient at my own hospital, I drove almost 30 miles with tunnel vision, and no recollection of the walk from my job to my car to the hospital, where I proceeded to wait in an emergency room for 8 hours after check in, with my poor plastic patients band, a room full of people that by all rights I should be taking care of not being waited on. (Maybe that’s why even though I couldn’t see, it took me 20  minutes to make a 2 minute walk, my oxygen saturation was 84%, (which is no bueno in a young lady like myself, ) my sweat was running like there was a faucet left on in my hairline with my heart beating in its own new style dance, and I pushed a little old lady whose Alzheimer’s husband had went to move the car and he was lost coming back and she couldn’t push herself to the registration desk…….so I did it for her…..) , only to be told with a blood pressure of 198/114 and a pulse rate of 196 and an oxygen saturation of 84%, that I could have a seat in the lobby until a bed opened up for me………

No problem. I propped myself in the corner of the waiting room so no one could get behind me, and slowly began my descent into hell…… (to be continued tomorrow)…..

I do hope you join me for the continuing nightmare of my time in Neverland……I mean Wonderland……because the horror and parties have yet to begin………

Until tomorrow then…..pray….

 

~J