Sunday

Yesterday, I arrived to the hospital floor at 6:30 am and the night charge was surprised to see me. He said – you aren’t on the list! I said – I’m not on the schedule? I swear I was suppose to work today. But I’m happy to go home. He laughed said – no, no, no, I’m keeping you, I tried to get a float nurse today but they didn’t give me one. It meant that on Sunday, we were fully staffed for a full floor which rarely happens. Usually we are mostly fully staffed. hahaha.

I took one more N95 mask and put it in my locker. Now I have hoarded two. I think that’ll do. I had a few people cough within 3 feet of me (ok really more like 1 foot away) including one night nurse who gave me report. She kept siddleing away from me while giving me her patients, but I couldn’t hear that well so I kept moving towards her and she said – I’m trying to not get you sick! I said – you coming back tonight? she said – yes. I said – you have to call out because you are too sick to come back to work. And she said – you think? And I looked at her as if she was a crazy person and said – Yes. You need to call out now so that they’ll have more time to find a float to take your place.

It wasn’t a bad shift. Fully staffed, it’s pretty manageable. But I was dragging. I’m still needy for no good reason. Honestly, it’s hard to give to needy people when you are needy yourself. It takes a lot of energy to throw kindness to people. I tried to manage it by eating too many cookies. I brought my personally purchased girl scout cookies to “share” and left them in the break room but I ate a lot of them myself. And I had a bad handoff to a night nurse.

I feel like I’m working too much again. I’m basically at the lowest number of shifts I can do to be a PRN staff. I’m working more at my desk work. I have almost no space for seeing friends and/or truely recreational things (I’ve been meaning to watch more movies, but I can never carve out 3 hours to do this thing – though I did see Parasite!). I hang out a lot at home which is fun for me, but not very exciting. I’m cooking more dinners for the family. I can’t quite tell how much time will open up once Vince is in college. I don’t spend a lot of time doing things with Vince especially since he’s been driving, but I feel sometimes that I arrange my time so I can just be around when he’s around. I get rewarded for this. He’ll pop into my room with a funny story or little concern most every day for a few minutes, but it doesn’t happen on a schedule. Will I want to be at home less once he’s gone? I’m not sure. I’m thinking about going to graduate school for nursing. Jeremy is excited about it, Vickey is excited about it, my parents are excited about it. I’m in theory excited about it, but honestly, I’d have to keep my full time job, my part time nursing job and then pile on top of it going to school (which probably would mostly be online which makes it less appealing to me, but very efficient).

I’m still entertaining myself with the Duolingo app. It’s quite good at teaching me basic Spanish. I’m impressed with the app. And I’m learning all the time from my patients. Chew. Open your mouth. Blood. Blood sugar? More? Poop is the same in both languages. My Spanish is going to be terrible, but I’m hoping to be OK with that.

I dropped Jeremy off mid-day to National Airport. He’s in Houston at the beginning of the week. And then we are going to meet up in Austin for Valentine’s Day weekend (without the kids!) and then he’s headed to California for the middle of next week and I’ll head home. I’m looking forward to this vacation. I’m hoping to find a Texas dog to bring home. He’ll be gone from the house for two weeks. He promised that in exchange for the ride to the airport, we’d have a lunch date pre-security checkpoint, which ended up being subpar at the Dunkin’ Donuts.

He’s staying at a hotel which has a lazy river in the shape of Texas. There you go. Poor thing, he didn’t pack his swim suit.