Nurse Rick At Your Service

(Note: I’ve done away with the usual graphs for depression, anxiety, and stress in this post – based on the circumstances, I haven’t had time to really be depressed and stress and anxiety have understandably been through the roof. They’ll be back in the next Personal Life post.)

It’s been a little while since I’ve had the time to get anything done here. Instead of writing, I’ve been playing nurse.

My spouse had surgery May 27th. Things didn’t quite go as planned – a 5 1/2 hour surgery went over an additional 2 hours and a 2 day hospital stay stretched into 5. Needless to say, all my wonderful plans for his recovery went to hell pretty quickly.

Luckily, my job was understanding enough that they gave me an extra week off to help him recover. My spouse definitely needed it.

In the beginning, he was on a dozen different meds that needed to be taken at different times and circumstances. We had to create this detailed schedule with the same information shown two different ways: one showed each medication separately and when it was taken over a week’s time, and the second showed half hour time slots and when each pill was taken and next due so at any given hour, I knew exactly what he needed. Mini-meals, walks, and breathing exercises also had to be kept track of. Even with all this, there were still times when we weren’t sure something had occurred.

When we eventually showed our handiwork to the PA at my spouse’s one week check up, he laughed and said it looked like something an engineer would create. It worked, though, and that’s all that mattered.

Anyway, I needed to be there with him. My sleep was pretty screwed up with med times hitting 2 or 3 times during the night depending on what was going on. I napped as much as my spouse did. There just wasn’t that much time for writing, unfortunately.

Right now, he’s recovering nicely and I’m back to work. He should be able to go back to work in another week and a half. Thankfully, both our jobs are pretty low-impact.

I won’t say that I didn’t do any work on things – I actually had some major breakthroughs with some ideas that solved some issues I was having. (These ideas have radically changed the shape of the story, however, so I’m still sifting through the fallout from that. Still, I’m pretty excited by the way things are looking.) I’m going to try and put a story update out there by this weekend as I brainstorm things thoroughly. Stay tuned.

An Apology

I guess that leads to an apology that I need to make. When I created this blog, I told myself (and you) that I would be totally honest here about my writing processes. However, that hasn’t been the case.

I found myself journaling ideas offline and never even mentioning the outcome here. Why? Because it made me look bad.

I would make a decision about something and then 3 weeks later, I would totally change my mind. After reporting this the first couple of times, I began to feel embarrassment and shame – I didn’t want you to think that I was such a flake that I couldn’t make a decision and stick with it.

The truth? There’s a lot of times I can’t make a decision and stick with it. (Notice I didn’t call myself a flake – be sure and let my past therapists know that, ok?) Yeah, it’s a pain in the ass, but it’s part of my trials writing this story. By leaving things out like this, I made myself look more together than I really am. However, that didn’t help anyone struggling with the same issues out there in the trenches.

That stops now. From this point forward, I’m going to be more up front and honest about things like this, even if it does make me look foolish. That way, those of you like me see that you’re not totally alone in your struggles. And maybe you’ll find a way to break this pattern earlier by watching me go in circles.

Now, onward!