I’ve been watching and waiting for this particular place.

I put in my application the same day and e-mailed the nurse manager.

She wrote me back saying she’d be happy to meet with me regarding the position.

There’s a banquet tonight that she’s attending, and I’ve made sure I will be there.

A chance to dress up and impress – wouldn’t miss it.

I wrote that in on my calendar, and I waited.

I had told a few people that I had been feeling down: a friend, my sister, and my boyfriend.  What I hadn’t done was be honest about how far down I was feeling.  I don’t like to cry in front of others.  All this time I cried when I was home alone or in the car alone.  The week before my appointment, I was sitting on my boyfriend’s couch watching TV with him and a neighbor friend of his that wouldn’t leave no matter how hard I wished he would.  And I was struggling to hold it in.  Visibly as they both asked me if I was okay.  That guy finally left.   And as soon as it was just my boyfriend and me, I started crying quietly.  I couldn’t stop. And I told him how bad it was and that I’d made an appointment to see someone.

He sat there by me as I cried and rubbed my leg.  And I felt a little better.

The next morning I felt a lot better.  It was as if that switch I couldn’t find had finally flipped.  I sent my boyfriend a text thanking him for  listening to me.  He told me he’d been thinking that morning, and then sent a list of ideas to do that might help me feel better. I called a long-distance friend and shared with her.

By the end of that day, I was feeling like my old self again.

I decided to keep the appointment if only to establish myself somewhere as a patient, but  I was feeling so good by the time the appointment date came around that it felt silly to go.  At first I felt like an imposter among the others in the waiting room.  But the longer I waited, the more some of those old feelings started to resurface.

It was a rather depressing office for a psychiatrist: ugly building, poor lighting, cramped seating, and sad decor on wooden paneling.  I waited an hour to have my name called.  I finally entered a musty office with out-dated carpet and  an older man sitting behind a large desk.  He asked me if there were many more people waiting.  There were a few.

I told him that I was there to establish myself as a patient.  That I had been feeling depressed and anxious before, but that it was mostly situational and it had already improved.  That I did not want medications at this time.  He then went through a series of questions, typing my answers on the computer with two index fingers.

Once he gathered that I hadn’t had any history of abuse or trauma, he seemed to dismiss the idea that I could have any real major depression.  He said I had some mild depression.  I disagreed as I didn’t think there was anything mild about crying all the time for months now.  He said I had some anxiety after the car accident.  No shit.  I had already told him that I did, but that it had improved as well.

He asked me what he could do for me today.  I repeated my initial statement.  He acted surprised – as if I hadn’t already told him that I was just there to establish myself and was not seeking medicaton at this time.  Oh!  I didn’t want any medications!  Great.  Let him teach me some exercises to get over my anxiety.  Something about reality vs feelings.

Thank you so much.  That really helps me since I already told you how I manage depression/anxiety with self-care (food/exercise/sleep) and talking myself though what is actually happening versus my feelings.

I felt cheated out of my $20 co-pay,but it was nice to know that I could probably get whatever prescription I want out of him in the future.

In the meantime, I’m feeling better.  I’m back at work.  I’ll be able to start running in 2 weeks. I’m doing workout videos and walking for now.

And I now have that experience under my belt.  I can take that with me during any other future depressive episodes.  I can know without a doubt that I can climb out.  I need to make myself talk about it with a few trusted people.  If I think I need to see someone, I will seek  counseling first.

I came across the following quote in the days after I finally started feeling better:

No matter how long you can hold your breath underwater, you will always feel the worst right before you surface. The same is true for most challenges: the most uncomfortable part of the experience usually happens the moment before you feel better. If things are hard now, just remind yourself a long, deep breath will be coming soon. (via Smart Pretty and Awkward)

I’m breathing again.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.

It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five time in life. It face – or seemed to face – the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

“Anyhow, he gives large parties,” said Jordan, changing the subject with an urban distaste for the concrete. “And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”

But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

He took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously – eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand.

He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.

But I wanted to leave things in order and not just trust that obliging and indifferent sea to sweep my refuse away.

“I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.”

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed things up and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…

“I love this guy.”

It’s been fun.

A group of nurses have been off floor duty during this time to help nurses and doctors transition. There are a few stations and several doctors who are lagging behind.

One of those nurses came by the station and informed us that they were actually told in a meeting to start taking pictures when they saw nurses doing things wrong.

Nice.

She has said they’re not going to do that, but such a demand doesn’t exactly inspire solidarity.

What it does do is motivate me to pose for her every time she walks into our station and, so far, pretend to be sleeping at my computer and ride an IV pole down the hall.

I’ve worked with her for 5 years and trust her, but part of me finds the idea of being called into a meeting over these and future photos hysterical. Almost as hysterical as the paranoid mind that thought to order nurses to photograph their peers.

Being off 2 months after my surgery gave me some much needed time away. I’m starting a new non-nursing job on the side next month. I’m hoping to be able to go part-time at the hospital if it works out.

I don’t expect to ever leave nursing completely. It’s a good job, and I generally enjoy the work and my co-workers. I’ve just had it with the suits.

“I wanted to be one of those people who have streaks to maintain, who scorch the ground with their intensity. But for now, at least I knew such people, and they needed me, just like comets need tails.”

“You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”

“There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow – that, in short, we are all going.”

“When you stopped wishing things wouldn’t fall apart, you’d stop suffering when they did.”

“If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can’t know better until knowing better is useless.”