Greetings and Salutations,
Dear Holy Mother of the Nazarene, I just had to enlarge the page zooming in (125%) to see this easier. Let's have a moment of silence for that major adulting moment, please, LOL. Well, actually, this is a great lead-in for what I want to blog about. As I always do nearly every day, I have been thinking about blogging again regularly. Two backstories first before we get going. As always, I hope this finds you all doing well, and life is getting better 15 months into this pandemic. While some may think it's completely over because we are all exhausted, we are now left with the task of processing the emotional toll we have been left to sort through. This is the next phase of the pandemic as I see it.
Additionally, I want to warn you that this may be triggering for some people. I will be discussing topics including mortality, grief, end-of-life issues, pondering my own aging process, and what this all looks like to me. Childhood memories of the painful variety may surface as well, and I just want to let you know all this up-front. It isn't anything gruesome (legit concern being that I am a nurse, after all, LOL), but just triggering for some non the less and I want to be cognizant of that fact. I encourage those to read further if you are curious, maybe in the same or similar place I am, looking at a mini life review and contemplating what life processing looks like from someone else's perspective or any of the topics I mentioned that I will talk about in this particular blog.
Back story number one: I have been doing The Commit 30 journal this year for the first time. Yes. Still going strong in July despite several bobbles along the way (the second move in seven months in the pandemic, an additional temporary five-month job in addition to my regular two, started school, and a few nervous breakdowns thrown in for good measure, but more on that in another day 😳LOL). Just think bullet journal but with a little more direction. You pick the goal (s). Get your action steps written out to help you be successful, and determine how often (weekly) you want to do said goal (daily, two times, three times a week, etc.). For those of you who know me personally, I am EXTREMELY (putting it mildly) goal-oriented. You can use lots of stickers for your progress as you see fit and ones that have positive and encouraging phrases on them. I just love that release of serotonin and dopamine when I put a sticker in my journal. Lord knows I love emojis 💕. Anyway, so for July, I have decided to blog again. Weekly is the goal but more if I get a bee 🐝 in my bonnet.
OK, now onto the second backstory. I've been a Registered Nurse for twenty-eight and a half years. I have my ADN, which is a two-year degree that I obtained in 1992. In 1996, I made a good intended stab at going back to school to get my BSN (four-year degree, same end game of still being a Registered Nurse), but life got in the way. I intended to go back but eventually vowed, past a certain point in my career, never to return to school again (nuts and bolts of the decision). Via a long story that isn't germane to this conversation, on January 4th, 2021, I enrolled in an online RN to BSN program. I figured with where we were (and still basically are by my estimation) in the pandemic, my ass wasn't traveling wold-wide to anywhere in the next year. No time that the present to go back to school. I'm far enough in the pandemic mentally to handle learning and the like. I'll spare you the gory details about how pro-educational I am but how much I detest 100% online learning. And the fact that I am an electronic dinosaur. It hasn't been a learning curve, it's been a learning vertical wall, about the height of Mt Everest, or so it feels. It's better than almost three months ago, which is to say it still sucks ass, and I hate it, but it's a little better LOL. I'll be fully in the swing in another three months. Anyway. So I chose " Care of the Older Adult," thinking it would be a pretty easy choice to get back into the swing of school and learning. In April, if you had told me what this course would bring out in me personally, I would have told you that you are more insane than I am. Today, however, I see it as a perfectly timed experience and lessons brought to me by The Universe. The questions I have been pondering have started to get answered with this class and my journey through it.
More than thirty years ago, I started my healthcare journey. While much of this current course has been straight-up bullshit, a greater majority has struck a deep chord (symphony actually) inside me. I have studied this class with the depth of being in the (real) classroom for the first time. I'm in school to learn, not skim or take bullshit shortcuts (OK, a few, but not this class. I'll save those for other torture). To say I have learned a lot academically so far is an understatement. Do I have any regrets about making this class stretch WEEKS and weeks longer than it needed to? ZERO. Regret is not how I roll. Nor is not giving something 100% and my best. Thank goodness my commitment to being a lifelong learner has kicked in, even in what feels like a mulligan of nursing school (eye roll emoji)
The tough parts of this class have been about the disease processes and what you (we) (I) have to look forward to as we get up there in age. What things can look like when you don't take care of yourself for decades plus. What it can look like if you did take care of yourself and what it looks like to just end up with the short end of the stick or simply age "normally." What aging looks like and all its complications. Mortality in your face. Page after page. It's tough stuff. Dementia, Alzheimer's, delirium, physical decline, effects of strokes, cognitive decline, Parkinson's, etc. This is not to say it is all shit, but hey, reading about the good things doesn't bother me in the same way. Then there is palliative care, hospice, and end-of-life care. More uplifting stuff.
I had to take a six-part, you guessed it, lengthy (but really great) End-Of-Life Nursing Education Consortium class that I actually got a certificate of completion for. I truly learned things that have already changed how I interact with my patients, friends, and family. Before beginning this part of the class, the things I read about drudged up many old, uncomfortable feelings. The kicker was when I realized that when I was in nursing school thirty years ago, the "older adult" (in the context of my book is sixty-five to seventy-four) was about as far away as the fricking moon. I was nineteen, twenty. Now tune in thirty years later. I am soon the be fifty-one. I'll be in the older adult age group basically "tomorrow," especially with the way time seems to have cruelly sped up. When I made this dot connection, it tripped me out. It also made me cry. I have cried a lot in this class, at my desk, watching my hummingbird feed outside my window. I was really tired of how much reading there was and how diligent a student I was being, but I trudged on. I was, after all, learning so much. And then, I started that end-of-life class within the class. Jeez, someone help me.
My college could have chosen any palliative care department from any state to participate and contribute to the curriculum. They chose The Medical University of South Carolina. At first, I was excited and like, "no way!" How cool! Not only is that my home state, but I also lived in Charleston (for many, many years) and worked at that hospital. The irony that this program would be the providers I would see on the videos, teaching me about palliative care, end-of-life issues, and how to care for the dying was an honor. When I was in school in the dark ages, this wasn't a formal class. I didn't know there was a difference between palliative care and hospice. I thought palliative care was when you died in the hospital in-patient after a lengthy admission, and hospice was when you went home to die. I am a better caregiver because of what I have learned in the entire class. Regardless of what stage the patient it involves: End-of-life, older adult, or young, middle-aged and healthy.
As I watched the videos, I wondered if I would know the nurse or doctor. Maybe I worked with them. I once had the same exact work ID. When they told stories of people dying in the ER, I knew what it looked like in perfect detail and could remember my own stories as a nurse there. I worked in that department (ER). As I moved through the class, I found myself suddenly getting homesick. Terribly homesick. Missing my brother horribly, deeply. It brought up grief from the death of my mom. Painfully remembering my mom died at that hospital and all that goes with 29 days of a sudden hemorrhagic stroke and the roller coaster of getting her back only to, on day 29, lose her again to a second stroke and this time having to turn off the ventilator. I've seen a lot of people die in front of me. Nothing prepared me for the witness of watching my mother die, even though I knew she was already gone. To this day, if I think about it too long, I feel like we killed her by giving up on her too soon. I know we didn't but damn. We got her back once. Why not twice? (the second bleed was just too big).
She had been in their palliative care program. To say it was a rite of passage that I finished this class within a class is an understatement. I cried every day as I took notes. It was really, really, really difficult, but I did it. I moved through it and have gotten to the other side with amazing personal insight. I realized I was processing through this course my grief of my loss as well as my own mortality and what I have done right and wrong (from a health perspective) as I studied. I am almost done with the class and soon ready to take my first attempt at the final test to pass (fingers crossed) or fail.
I have realized that in not taking shortcuts in the class and doing the bare minimum but applying myself as a true student, I have been immensely rewarded. Not only with all the really amazing things about care of the older adult through the end of life I actually learned but with profound self-reflection on what it means to me to be fifty-one and reflect on my life thus far. Of how long I have left on the planet and how I choose to spend it. It's trippy to see I am closer to the end of my life than to the middle like I was the last time I studied any of this.
My takeaway from self-reflection is this: Life is short. We get one shot at it. Along the way, I have collected "rocks" from people. Telling me what I can and can not accomplish. A reflection of how they see themselves, not me. People who may have had good intentions to want to protect me from harm, but in the process caused me more mental harm than if they had let me figure things out on my own. People who put a ceiling on me because of their own life limitations. I have long ago heard a drumbeat most around me didn't. Not in South Carolina in the 1970s and 1980s. When I set out to be a travel nurse in 2000, I'm convinced that was the start to pursuing life as I saw possible. I have a magnet on my kitchen that is my mantra: "Those who say it can not be done shouldn't interrupt the people doing it." I still believe in that wholeheartedly, but somewhere along the way, I got pulled back to early programing and can barely hear the drums like I used to.
I'm done carrying around suitcases full of rocks that people, childhood experiences, and society handed to me along the way, some I have carried for a lifetime. Some I've picked up myself because they looked like the shit I thought I deserved. I refuse to carry them around any longer. Instead, I have begun the journey in earnest to unpack and let go of things that I no longer believe in. Reassess my core values as they bubble to the top and reexamine them. Through this course and the self-reflection it has spurred, I am learning that compassion for yourself lends to deeper compassion for other people. Or is it the other way around?
