Lovely Kitachi! We celebrated her 35th birthday on Wed with this beautiful chocolate cake from Lauren. Jeremy made shrimp and steak fajitas. Kitachi has been by Edda’s side for five years! Kitachi managed all the online school for Edda during the pandemic. We are forever grateful for her help. She’s moving to Arkansas next week and we will miss her terribly.
It has been a very trying week. I was at the hospital on Monday – again tearing my hair out. The night before the shift, I woke up suddenly at 3:30 am and thought, omg, I need to quit my nursing job. I’m not going to make it through August without quitting the nursing job. I have no childcare, no camp for Edda and I have various other personal commitments that take time that I want to honor. And also, I can tell I’m burned out. There is always usually that one “difficult” patient per shift. Usually I’m entertained by the difficult one. I like talking them down from the ledge. But these days, I just want to strangle them. When I’m stressed, my first emotional reaction is to turn inward – to be like – I hate my life, I hate myself, why is this thing happening to me!!?. I do not (like many people), turn to anger. Anger is my emotion of last resort. If I’m about to strangle someone, I know I’m at the end of my rope. My favorite charge nurse was working and I called her over to me when I was about to cry somewhere and I kind of whispered to her that I needed to leave and quit. Anyways, I gotta go and get Edda ready for camp. I talked to my boss. I think we came up with a solution which is to drop my work commitment to the lowest possible amount until I get over this hump – I think it’ll be one shift every two weeks.
Hang in there. Just keep putting 1 foot in front of the other. You have a lot of loss. Your feelings are what you should be feeling right now. You are loved by so, so many if that helps any at all