On Emotions / The Final Countdown

I listened to a podcast the other day on which a woman was telling a story of working at a call center for the USPS. She explained that after months of seeking therapy to help process hearing desperate and broken callers from Puerto Rico during the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, she realized that despite the difficult emotions that are guaranteed to follow each call, she still chooses to answer.

We all know it takes a special breed to excel in a career of nursing. Each and every day some nurse somewhere is faced with sadness, heartbreak, absolute loss or the aftermath of a tragic prognosis that we, along with the patient, are experiencing in real time. We are given a choice to either embrace our inner empath and drudge through the feelings or shove it deep under a hospital bed where needle covers and used alcohol wipes lie.

I used to blow up like an atom bomb. There were many occasions (some with less days in between than others) in my first few semesters of school when I would be sitting at my mom’s dining room table attempting to conquer the seemingly unsurmountable workload of school, and a flood of emotions would break my spirit to tears. It was overwhelming and exhausting and I probably lost quite a bit of study time catering to those emotional coaster rides.

Senior year is the figurative death of each and every nursing student I know – we have come to the evidence-based conclusion that there are active procedures in place to ensure we are as stressed as possible for these last two months. Despite this, I feel those feelings one at a time, like how a 2-year-old eats their peas. The final crunch is a bowl of stress-anxiety-intensity cereal. But deep down we know that this intentionality is preparing us for the field. Sadness of a bad test grade / a poor prognosis. Apprehension of an upcoming deadline / a crucial patient care decision. Anger toward a seemingly unlearnable topic / a skill we haven’t been taught yet. We must choose to see the benefit of the stress, deactivate our bombs, control the things we can and release the ones we can’t. We are learning to subjugate our feelings through acknowledgement, the beautiful camaraderie of knowing we’re not going at it alone, and the promise of growth.

Two more months.

Two more months. We got this.

meditation on a tilt-a-whirl

Sometimes I have to refer back to my more clear-headed self and remind myself that I’m still her.

This week has thrown flaming fireball-after-fireball at my head while I am tripping, falling, jumping, and running in frantic circles in a generally forward direction. Case in point: I am writing instead of studying the five (FIVE!!!!!!) lectures that we’ll be tested on this week. First exam of the semester and I’m… trying to figure out my feels.

All at once, this morning at 7:15 am, I decided to shut off social media for a while and begin practicing meditation. I moved my apps to a hidden far away corner of my iPhone screens, sat down on my floor and closed my eyes. I’ve been listening to a podcast about the science of well-being; more simply, the art of happiness. One of the episodes the host has a guest who speaks to the power, and format, of meditation. He made it sound pretty good, and given my current car crash of an attempt to stay focused, I thought it’d be worth a try. I have been all over the place mentally – busy, lonely, full-to-the-top with medical information to understand and apply to real-life patients – so a few moments of breathing seemed like a lucky break.

I sat cross-legged with my fingers in that super zen crab-pinch position on my knees and started breathing. One breath, two breaths, wow my breaths are really shallow, three breaths, okay I need to sit up straighter, four breaths, has it been three minutes yet? I looked at my watch.

In the mindfulness and meditation blogs, podcasts, books I’ve referenced so far, the overwhelming advice is that when those little thoughts come into your head, acknowledge them, and let them go. Give them credit for being, and then release them out of your space. Such a beautiful frame of how I want to practice living more moments of my life, yet an incredibly difficult practice to adhere to.

As I said, I sometimes have to reference the Allie who was before the Allie who is struggling now. In one of my blogs from a while back, I loosely quoted someone who said “if it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you.”

Putting your own heart and mind before others is challenging. If I can just – one breath at a time – give my lungs and heart and body the stillness it deserves and yearns for, I know that she will give it right back by way of increased awareness, a fuller ability to love, and a peace that answers the questions around me.

cancer is weird

I feel like I never talk about how hard it is to be a nursing student with a thyroid disorder because of how common it is.

But how common is it? For a nursing student in my position to be fighting this battle with time management, learning, emotions of clinical days, personal life maintenance, and the added stress of knowing your body cannot regulate itself… I guess I never tried to find solace in camaraderie so I’m not really sure if it’s out there. I mean I know many women and some men have thyroid problems, but what’s their journey like? Do they feel the same incessant mental struggle between “Is it my hormones being off?” and “Am I actually just really heckin’ tired this month?”

Another reason I think I keep it to myself is because I can’t bring myself to identify as a survivor – it sounds cheesy to me. When I was going through my cancer process (honestly what do you even call it without sounding dramatic and saying my “battle”) I didn’t want to define myself as a victim, I never viewed it as a struggle or a battle or a fight – it was simply my life and a line of hurdles I was jumping over for like six months. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I was pretty numb to it all in the thick of it. But is that how I got through?

Is that how I’m getting through now? Refusing to acknowledge that I have a deficit that makes nursing school a little harder? I’ve always been up for a challenge.

I don’t think that’s what I’m doing because I’ve never viewed it as such – it’s just me. Maybe I don’t give myself enough credit… but what’s the point in feeling sorry for yourself? Isn’t it just a blessing that you have the opportunity to excel, despite?

This is how I want to live my life – seeing all my trials and hurdles as gifts that push me to try harder, live better, and heal faster. I don’t know why I have such a hard time admitting that I am a cancer “survivor” – maybe it’s because I don’t feel that I had it “as bad” as many others who are diagnosed with other types of self-destructive illness. Maybe it’s because I don’t remember fighting. Or maybe it’s because I chose to not let it define me… it was a season of my life, much like every other one, with a big bad wolf and a determination to power through and come out better. I’m still on the other side, 6 years this month, and that’s good enough for me.

I’m getting my COVID vaccine this week and I am a big jolly mess. So excited, a little nervous, but nonetheless stoked that I am strong and able to be a part of the solution, despite the risk. Wear your masks.

waiting for snow

On Christmas Eve, it snowed. An unlikely story here in East Tennessee, we received almost four inches of perfect powder that afternoon. Little did I know that snowfall would be the cause of a lot of pain and angst over the succeeding seven days, but in the moment it was pure, naive bliss.

Those big snowflakes are so awesome to watch – almost countable as they sink slowly toward the ground, at which point we all watch even more closely to ensure a good stick. What’s the point if it doesn’t stick around, right? So as we watch, the ground becomes colder, the flakes fall faster, the grass begins to disappear behind an ever-increasing opacity of whiteness, and a brief step away from the window is rewarded with the same phenomenon that happens when watching a flower bloom – suddenly a thick blanket of white lays covers a now contiguous landscape of purity.

I find the anticipation of a forecasted snowfall to be underwhelming, as meteorologists are often overzealous in their predictions… but once it actually begins before my very eyes, my attitude changes.

“Wow! Look at it. How beautiful and unblemished and pure.”

This is also how I thought 2021 looked once the clock struck Twelve on the 31st.

“Wow! A new year. Full of opportunity, unblemished and pure.”

This isn’t entirely untrue, as we still have 51 weeks left to explore, but many of the attitudes I’ve witnessed in these few days seem to have forgotten that we are still a day ahead of yesterday. The progress we made in 2020 was not meaningless or revoked just because we are still facing new trials in this calendar. As the stock exchange shows us year after year, we are always moving up and forward. If my up and forward is one small step away from a bad habit I’ve chosen to leave behind, that is noteworthy. If you made a stride toward being more woke and using your voice to support your fellow humans, don’t discredit that because other things aren’t yet how you expected.

This year, 2021, is new. We are creatures of habit and the tradition of a new January for some reason gives many folks the idea that a complete 180 from our old vices is necessary in the first week, or else the year is poisoned. The gift of a new season is that we have the choice to stay where we are, which is okay depending on your level of functioning after 2020, or pursue and embrace newness. The pure, unblemished opportunities for growth ahead. Will the snow be any less beautiful if we don’t go out and play in it? No. But will the joy you received from watching it through a window be abundantly higher if you strap on those boots and go out and feel the fresh flakes falling on your face? I believe so.

“But what if someone throws a snowball at my face?”

Honey. Throw one right the hell back.

So here’s my ode to a new January – for myself and any others who are feeling discouraged by unknown hurdles awaiting us in the new year – at the end of every obstacle course is a finish line. Mine is graduation from nursing school – the absolute end of 2021 to which my eyes are laser-focused. All of my goals from now until then are simply attempts to build me into a better me. One that is more fit, stronger, more confident, and willing to take a step into the unsullied carpet of snow to discover a deeper level of jubilance.

Thanks for reading, cheers to your new season!

sunset

I saw a pretty sky

and I wanted to paint her,

but how can she be captured by a brush.

Pink,

a color somehow glued to defining something feminine

yet there are so many different pinks

depending on how the light comes through them.

Blue, Grey, Purple,

to some they look fraternal or even identical up there;

how sad.

Blue – the absence of cloud,

Grey – the promise of evening,

Purple – the perfection of all of them mixed.

I saw a pretty sky,

then I realized how it came to be –

pollutants and dirt and smog and all of our earthly exhales

scattered across light.

Should we be mad for the sunset?

What would it look like if our mistakes hadn’t created that pretty sky?

Italian woman on the bench

In an attempt to regress to memories much fonder than my current state of affairs, I’ve found myself re-reading my stories from years ago in Salerno, Italy. In a post detailing the transition between States and spaghetti, I found that I left a story open-ended that I’d like to recall.

When I arrived at the Salerno train station, I was in awe. What a beautiful little sea-town. So many questions, a row of buses, and a dumbfounded me struggled to follow the broken directions I had transcribed in my notebook from Michele’s email a few days prior.

I walked out, then in, then out again, of the train station desperately searching for someone to notice my confusion. I walked up to the most attractive Italian bus driver in the circle and stepped up, expecting (and receiving) a jumbled greeting in Italiano to which I would attempt to reply.

“Dove stai andando?”

Calvanico?… I questioned back.

He immediately got up from his oversized steering wheel and took my hand, leading me off the bus. I assumed he was taking me to the bus I should’ve been on, but instead he just stopped and stood in my bubble (non-existent in Italy) and with all of his strength and knowledge of English, said, “you come this bus.”

“But this is the 10,” I said, quickly realizing I could’ve tried to say it in Italian, but not caring as much as I was determined to get to my destination before the dark that was quickly approaching.

“You come THIS bus, you go another bus later.” he insisted.

Something about that handsome Mediterranean had me believe in his words. I looked around, glanced at my Timex, and hopped on.

A bumpy 40-minute ride and some miles of beautiful mountainous scenery later, the doors opened again.

“You stay here, another bus coming!”

Again, with sure hesitancy, I trusted my friend and stepped off into what looked like an abandoned mountain town. It was fully beautiful, as all the provinces we’d busted our shoddy 8-seater bus through that evening were, but empty. I assume it was dinner time. I sat down on the singular bench marked for public transport and laid my backpack under my feet. Just then I looked to my right and saw the world’s most adorably small woman hobbling toward me.

She nodded hello, and sat next to me. I looked at her, she looked at me. She didn’t smile. I smiled.

“Buonasera,” I said.

“Buonasera!” she replied, surprised.

It was then that I decided I should call my parents. It had been over 6 hours at that point that I’d been out of cell service and I realized that my delay may have presented a small level of concern Stateside.

When I got off the phone, I pulled out my Italian dictionary. The woman seemed intrigued, as I opened it to “persa” (sono persa, I am lost) she laughed as if to tell me, “fugetaboutit!” She then said, “Americana?” and grabbed my dictionary. We went back and forth, word or phrase at a time, handing off my book and speaking as if neither of us had never had the chance to exchange dialect with the opposite’s language before. Actually, technically, I hadn’t, and maybe neither had she. We had a lovely, laughable 35 minutes on that bench and suddenly I forgot that I wasn’t sure if I’d be sleeping in the house I’d planned to that night.

Time passed and I heard a loud rumbling coming from down the hill – it was the 25! I stood up and looked at my friend, told her grazie mille for her beautiful company, and boarded the vehicle to my final destination. She yelled something that I still don’t know how to translate, but I’d like to think it was something along the lines of, “you are lucky that bus is still running at this hour!” That delicate, wonderful woman erased my fears with some hand-picked nouns and verbs from Merriam-Webster, and I found another reason to thank God for the beauty of universal language.

Navigating Nursing School During a Pandemic

How very little can be done under the spirit of fear.

Florence Nightingale

Life as we know it has been a complete paradox lately. It’s been almost a month of what we’re all commonly referring to as our “quarantine.” (Though most of us aren’t actually under quarantine order; it’s just easier and more dramatic to refer to it as such.)

I’ll state the obvious for effect: everything is closed, we can’t go out with friends, everyone is spending more time outside, most of us are unemployed or juggling a makeshift workspace and distractions that come with it as we maintain our jobs from home. We’re all learning how to cook and bake new things, our dogs are stoked out of their minds for all the quality time, and we’re venturing out for essentials with the awareness of a virulent threat lingering in the atmosphere.

I’ve been “unemployed” for a month. When everything started to get bad, I told my employer I felt it was my duty to refrain from coming to the office for a while – not only to protect myself, but to diminish – only by one – the number of people in our office and provide a small percentage of prevention for everyone who decided to stay. I was only working about 12-16 hours a week before COVID.

When my college announced they, like every other school in the state, was closing for the rest of the semester, I wasn’t sure what it would look like. We had just began clinical at a nursing home North of Knoxville – actually, we only had our orientation before everything shut down. We spent the day watching safety videos, learning about what was expected, meeting the residents and staff; full of excitement for the opportunity to finally put our learned skills to use with real humans. My instructor asked the eight of us to make a “Top Ten Desires for First Semester Clinical” to turn in the following week. All of my goals are irrelevant now.

Finishing this semester online is weird and hard. On top of the excessive work load that our instructors seem to think we can handle, I miss my friends. I miss Kim and Rachel who sat on either side of me in skills lab, and would’ve let me stick them with a needle if our professors allowed it. I miss the face-to-face interaction of a lecture hall – nobody in my class even turns on their camera when we have clinical meeting on Fridays. I miss the stress of taking an exam with a chair between each student and a shiny #2 pencil behind my ear. Things I always took for granted I will never wink at again.

Another aspect of the challenge we nursing students are presented with is the feeling of helplessness. We may think we’re ready and God strike me if I ever think I’ve learned it all, but we’re not equipped to be a part of this fight against a pandemic just yet. Though my heart aches to be benched for this season of war, I know I am exactly where I need to be. We are learning, growing, gaining experience in an unconventional but still significant way. We are the next generation of soldiers being trained to protect and care for those who will need us when this ends. To all my fellow students feeling fruitless: you’re paramount. Don’t turn your eyes from the fire, instead, let’s watch it, study it, and learn from it so that the challenges of today cannot again threaten the people we’ve vowed to heal when it’s our turn to fight.

Stay strong, nursing students. Healthcare workers. Teachers. Bartenders. Grocery workers. Friends and family, stay healthy.

Week One

I am thankful I have time to sit down for a few minutes and put these thoughts on paper. Since my last check-in, I’ve attained clarity over confusion and have been consistently waking up several hours before light. I have now been Allie Stoehr, SN (Student Nurse), for a full week.

I wanted to somehow turn this blog into a narrative of my nursing school journey, but there are some tricky boundaries to maintain per the decree of HIPAA. Nevertheless, I will do my best to share the expedition with you as it pertains to me, my struggles, and my victories! I hope to be able to provide support and encouragement to any other future nurses who come across these pages and share with vulnerability the highs and lows of what will surely become a long career in healthcare. Everyone talks about how difficult nursing school is, and they’re not wrong. But something I’ve heard a few times in one phrasing or another is that if it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you. The schooling for becoming a nurse is hard because it takes a special kind of person to succeed and provide notable care.

And so, to not mince words any longer, last week was great! I’m taking Pharmacology and Fundamentals this semester – Pharm is one lecture a week and Fundamentals consists of lecture on Monday and eight hours of skills lab on Thursday, that is, until clinicals begin in Week Six. I’m going to be a busy girl these next couple of years, but if you know me, you know I loath having nothing to do, so this will be an excellent adventure.

To paint a picture via trusty mathematics, my week looks like this:

(Number of hours in a week: 168)

~6, sometimes 8 hours of driving to and from Morristown,
~16 hours of in-class time,
~56 hours asleep (I’m kidding. 8 hours a night would be a dream though.)

My instructors say for every 1 hour in class, you’re to study 2 hours at home, so:

~32 hours studying, but more like 40 because I write in all caps.
~12 hours at work (yes I’m going to be broke),
and 38 left divided by 7 equals 5 hours per day to eat, dream, and play. My favorite things.

It may sound icky to some, but really this is my jam. I’m driven to learn everything I can about infection, disease, humans, our bodies, pathogens, treatments, and the unending world of questions and research that is medicine. I look forward to the special value I’ll learn to place on time with friends, whatever that looks like, and am focusing on intentionality in all areas of my nursing student life.

That being said: please reach out to me. I have always been a pursuer with my friends – I’ve been the one to call and make plans with the majority of my people – but now I ask that you let me rest that part of me and hear from you. I love the people in my life so much and am incredibly blessed by the various connections I have with each. My focus in this season is on learning and being the most knowledgable nurse as possible so that I can provide stellar care to my patients and exceptional medical vigilance.

I look forward to the next opportunity to update you on all the disgusting and intriguing learning experiences I’ve had in my first few weeks of school. Stay tuned – and subscribe!

me this weekend trying to figure out how to read my fundamentals textbook

Clear as Dishwater

I wish I read more books. I don’t mean my Lifespan Psychology textbook or my Microbiology lab manual… I mean books that satisfy my heart and soul, that calm my nerves with the initial page turn. Books like White Fang and Harry Potter, books that draw me out of my messy chaotic reality and open windows to creative wonderlands. Unfortunately, I’m to blame for not having a recent visit to these magical bound adventures.

I’ve been so obsessed with organizing my future that I’ve abandoned my November 10, 2019, self. Today is all we’re promised, and I’m shoving beaucoup energy into the worries and unanswered questions of next month. When I came to this sad awareness, I did what any typical subjective person would do: blog about it.

I think a really special thing happens when you allow yourself to be present. It sounds so easy, so commonplace and silly, but cliches are such for a reason. I’ve been trying to organize my next few months basically because nothing is set in stone, and I’m losing my shit that it will all just fall apart if a single Jenga piece is slipped out. Thus, attempt after attempt to predict outcomes and prevent implosion clouds my present. If I could just let go, live a day, and trust the next one will be just fine, I’m positive I’d be better-off (and probably less grey). Let’s be honest – 28 is too young to have frown lines.

So here’s my solution to my self-inflicted emotional calamity: read a few chapters of a book today. Wake up earlier today. Stop trying to dissect how to live on the income of only 1 day/week. Give up the worry of what-ifs. Keep wondering, but don’t be consumed. Tomorrow is not promised, nursing school acceptance letters aren’t promised, a livable wage is not promised, but one thing I know surely is: the faith that it will all occur just as the stars intend, and that astronomical plan is real good.

I almost hit Publish there, but realized something else I want to address. I regretfully admit that it’s been pretty characteristic to find myself here, talking about my downfalls and coming up with the same solution every time. Problem: worrying about things out of my control. Solution: stop worrying because God is good. Why, pray tell, is this such an easy concept to acknowledge but an equally difficult one to practice?

I suppose my circular travels around this theory will continue until I cease to require these upsets and low points to guide me back on track. That’s okay, because I’m learning with each rotation around the sun.

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.” Albert Einstein

All the Spices

When you identify as a nomad and circumstances have you grounded, how do you deal?

Here’s my current explosion of thought, for those who think it’s entertaining enough to keep coming back to read up. I’ve been balancing work, school, and play for the last eight months, speculating how to work hard and study long enough so that I can get through it to have some fun. But when I daydream, I’m not on Kingston Pike or the Strip. Every free moment I have with my thoughts is spent on a side street of Bali. With a dog in Maui. On a moto in Paris. Anywhere but here…

My search history would make anyone assume that I’m having second thoughts about nursing school:

“how to survive your first year of nursing school”

“how to know you want to be a nurse”

“cheap flights to Hawaii” 

“how to move to Hawaii”

“does Hawaii have Home Depot”

“minimum wage in Honolulu”

I’m not having second thoughts about being a nurse. I want to be a nurse because I love medicine, I love people and I want to use my intuitive mind and young body to serve and heal and comfort; but, I am getting antsy being stuck in the ole K-town once again. I don’t really want to work minimum wage at Home Depot in Hawaii, but I maybe wouldn’t turn an orange apron down.

I love my friends so much; the community I’ve been so blessed to develop here is unmatched. I never want to abandon my people, and I will always fight to keep these relationships strong and unyielding. There is just a piece of me that still, and probably will eternally, long for the unknown. I crave the danger of mystery. This is not a bad thing by the way, for those who are with me and have that confused-emoji-look on their face (like I often do when recalling my busted face from that one time in Cambodia).

If I had a husband and a career I was happy with, also an eventual family, the craving would be worked out in whatever way we could make it, because love comes first. But being a single student with no prospects makes me feel like I have to figure this shit out now; get my degree, start my new career, buy a house, have a mid-life crisis… only then will I be “ready” to “settle down” into my life that will be fudged together once I find the human that is willing to put up with me and uproot our family every time I get the urge to learn to surf in San Diego or visit friends in the Midwest.

Alas, I realized all of this was incredibly wrong as I wrote it.

I really don’t want to figure anything out. Really, the only thing my brain is responsible for at the moment is figuring out the pressure gradient in the O2-CO2 exchange occurring inside our pulmonary capillaries during respiration so I can get it right on my test next week.  I am LOVING (cannot write it big enough without messing up the formatting here) school. I love what I’m learning. The human body’s complexity is blowing my mind out of the back of my head and I’ve never felt so mentally healthy and sharp. My classmates are wonderful and the next couple of years of nursing school are going to be insane in the best and worst way.

But, still – I’ll be stuck here until I’m done and signed up for my NCLEX. And it’s okay!

I hate to say it’s a means to an end because this journey is oh-so-fun and important. But it helps me cope with the inevitability that my travel plans will be extremely limited come August. There will be a season where I’m in the books hardcore, probably not seeing my friends so much, working my tail off to get a C and wondering why the FRICK I can’t just take off to New York for a weekend and a slice.

It’s all good. Life is just a drawer of seasons. There will be a season where I’m working 13- to 14-hour night shifts and haven’t seen my mom in a month. There will be a season when I have a little bit of something figured out, and it’ll be really nice. There are sure to be seasons where I’m exhausted, lonely, and utterly lost. But a kitchen wouldn’t be complete without variety. I love how different a dish is when you season it with paprika verses oregano. You can’t make curry without cumin. What would pasta sauce be without parsley? Embrace your flavors and let your seasons do their thing. Sometimes when an unplanned zest gets tossed in the pot it makes the outcome that much more exceptional.