I just learned that journaling is one way to help prevent nursing burnout. I wonder if doing burnouts is another way to help prevent burnouts?! If so, sign me up!
...but find me some tires to wreck, too, then. Those things don't just grow on trees, you know. I kind of need the ones I'm using now.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this entry. I started off wanting to write about depression, and I even found an image that I sort of liked by Googling "nurses with depression" that wasn't a nurse in blue scrubs sitting in a hallway with her head in her hands. Because seriously, ewwwww. What nurse in their right mind would sit in a hospital hallway?! Those floors are NAS-TEEEE! Yuck. That's definitely not where an emotionally-wrought healthcare worker would sit and contemplate the challenges of their life and career. Not unless they were hoping to pick up some conglomeration of God-only-knows what diseases that lie in wake on the floor. (No offense to the environmental services team; I know y'all work your asses off to keep the facilites as clean as humanly possible, and we all love you for it! But just in general, you know. Health care facilities are germy places. If I didn't see you just go by with the super deluxe heavy duty cleaning thingie set to Max Clean, or whatever, I'm going to assume the floor is as contaminated as the cleanest part of the bottom of my shoe. Yuck.)
But depression really does suck, though. Yesterday I was driving to work at The Office (do you watch The Big Bang Theory? You know in that episode where Leonard is seeing Dr. Stephanie whatever her name was behind Howard's back, and the one night he tells Sheldon he's going out but doesn't want him to tell the rest of their friends where he's going, so he tells Sheldon to tell them he's going to "the office" and when Sheldon says "Leonard is going to The Office" he says it all dramatically with the hand gesture and everything? Well that's how I say it in my head, which is why I have to capitalize it now.) and I took Warner Road. For those of you who aren't familiar with Warner Road in St. Paul, it runs parallel to the Mississippi River in downtown St. Paul. I do love being next to the water, which is why I take that particular route. It calms me. Being next to a river makes me feel less like I'm in the city and more like I'm, um, I don't know...not in the city. But the problem with Warner Road is that it goes under several bridges from which people tend to like to jump. I have an almost irrational fear of witnessing this one day, although it's not entirely irrational because I have missed several events by half an hour or so on that route in the last 5 years. Sometimes it scares me away from driving there, but usually not because the call to be near the water is louder than the sorrow and fear. In my mind, I refer to that part of Warner Road as "Suicide Row".
And right when I turned on to Warner Road, the song "War on Drugs" by Barenaked Ladies started playing. Have you ever heard it? It's super depressing. Here, I'll find it on YouTube -- with lyrics even!
Anyway...that song, combined with the driving where I was driving at the time, combined with my anxiety about being in the city and at work in The Office that day, combined with the kind of week I was having (can't tell you -- HIPAA!) just got me thinking... it must be nice to not have depression and anxiety. To not have to wake up and deal with this shit every single day of your life. To not have to fight with yourself to get out of bed, to get dressed, to take a shower, to go to work, to eat, to clean the house, to do things that normal people do without even thinking about it. To hope that today is a day where your meds work really well so you can actually accomplish something because lately, they haven't. Which means YOU haven't. How hard is it to just DO something? Other people do it all the time.
I just want to be normal.
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