A Delightful 48 Hours

Well I missed classes this week for the first time since I started graduate school. So much for perfect attendance, not that anyone was counting.

Lessee... it all began with a little bump between my knuckles that stuck around and began aching more and more until I got concerned. Thought at first it was a ganglion cyst, then wondered about arthritis, blood clots, bone cancer... you know how the mind can go south on these things. So I went to my orthopedic surgeon to get it checked out. Turned out to be a small calcification that showed on the X-ray and was causing tendinitis. This is getting to be my theme song. Tendinitis in her hips, tendinitis in her knees, tendinitis in her knuckle boooones. (sung to tune of Hyperactive) She prescribed an ANSAID called Sulindac twice per day to treat it. 5 days later I started coughing up blood. Somehow I thought maybe I should stop the meds, so back I went and she then prescribed Meloxicam, which she told me was essentially the same thing but in a different formulation so it wouldn't devour my stomach. Well little old overstressed me heard "the same thing" and somehow thought that meant the same dosage schedule, so I took the Meloxicam 2x per day as well.

Read? Oh hell, I'm a graduate student, I have too many other things to read to be wasting my precious time on medication labels.

Two hours after the second pill the room started going in circles. I went to bed and when the cats woke me up in the wee hours the world was spinning completely out of control and I threw up on my way to put the cats out. Read my drug sheet and spotted the 1x per day part. Oh fuck...

After poking AR violently into awareness and convincing him I was NOT the Bogey man, I managed to make him understand I was dying and he got Poison control on the phone. They said this is about as bad as it gets and "these side effects are well tolerated" so I should just sit tight and wait it out until the double dose wore off. Yeah, well tolerated by whomever is on the OTHER side of the lab rat. YOU try being stuck in a spinning Zipper car at the carnival for 30+ hours and throwing up every time you move your fucking eyeballs. Well tolerated my ass.

The call was at 3am, so at 3pm I called again since I wasn't much better and the double dose should have been over with at 9am. Same stuff, same spiel about being tolerable. Same thoughts in my head. Blah.

Tonight I am still woozy and can't turn my head suddenly or lean to either side without a swarm of bees buzzing angrily in the back of my brain and the world whirling madly. I mean with my eyes open the whole room actually shifts; chunk, chunk, chunk. That's better than with my eyes closed though, when it feels like I'm going to fly off the planet. I'm just shy of 48 hours since I took the second dose and they told me I should feel all better this morning. This is better, but a hell of a long way from ALL better. I'd call again, but if I hear 'well tolerated' one more time I'll puke right through the phone at them.

Where do they Go?

Why is it that whenever I need something answered in some critical time frame, everyone absents the planet? It seems like this always happens. Sigh. But nevermind, I am DONE with application #1 and it's sealed and waiting by the door to be mailed on my way to my therapy session this afternoon.

W00T!!!

Just 14 left now...

Forests of Graduate Work

I have everything done for my first application and only need to get some nice paper to print my CV and cover letter on. I have to go to town for that, then come home and print. I gotta tell you though, I think this whole process significantly contributes toward global deforestation!

The amount of work this process has been for my Training Director is nearly as much as my own. She wrote a letter stating that I was eligible for internship and also recommending me, which involved reviewing enormous numbers of academic and practicum records and including quotes from many of them. She then collated this into the university portion of the application and created 17 copies for me. She also provided 17 copies of my transcripts and a letter about our APA accreditation status. WOW!!! I was delighted, but then found two errors in her letter, one that I thought was really important, and lay awake all night wondering if I should let it go or ask for a change, which would mean she'd have to reprint, sign and collate all those copies! Eek!

In my agitation I managed to bungle my presentation of the problem to her and come off as unappreciative and demanding, had a small meltdown of self loathing in the bathroom that gained me a bunch of unwelcome attention (there is NO frigging privacy on our campus!), and then successfully repaired the damage a couple of hours later. Gah.

Had to make copies of all my signed practicum forms for the past 18 months for their files, too, so that ran to uncoupling, recoupling and stapling 154 packets, and along with reprinting the apps for my training director, pretty much ate my entire copy allotment for the term.

My first therapy session with a very difficult client yesterday went really well, which made up for a not so wonderful session with another client last Monday. So all in all the clinical week has been balanced. Besides which it was WONDERFUL to finally have a high point in all this misery.

Soon... any day now, my head is going to above water again. Sigh. I can't even remember what it looks like up there.

The Big Push

Well it took a full day, but my list is finally complete! Out of my original internship list of 34 sites I narrowed it down to 15. More than that and there is an extra charge for applying. Not sure if I'll actually apply to all 15, but if not certainly most. A few have some extra hoops to jump through that I simply may not have the energy for, but they have later deadlines, so we shall see!

Now to order 30 transcripts, one from my doctoral and one from my masters for each site. Ok, well 28 since one is done and goes out this week. :)

Today is for school. I haven't done anything at all except skim the reading for my classes so I need to get on top of things or I am gonna be one hurting unit in a couple of weeks when assignments start coming due.

I reviewed both books for my upcoming class and decided I'm not going to require either, rather I'm going to have electronic readings only and cherry pick chapters out of several books plus various articles I find useful. Several of my profs have been doing that the past couple of terms and it's wonderful! No buying a book where you only actually use 1/3 of it, all pertinent articles and it's FREE! The rule is you may not use more than 20% of a book this way to stay outside of copyright violation. Kewl! That's settled. Now if only I could find that damned HR packet they gave me...

Step AWAY From the Merry-Go-Round

Holy crap, what a week! I called tonight and gave notice I won't show for the mens' group tomorrow. I'd like to no-show for everything the rest of the month, frankly, but that's not an option. Seems I've topped out on the stress-o-meter and I'm beginning to drop brain cells.

I forgot to do the simple little exercise due for my first class this week, then after promising I'd e-mail it to the prof, managed to forget again and went home without getting it to her. Then my new boss in the masters program and her administrative assistant overwhelmed me with a barrage of questions about my HR paperwork, thoughts on the book they sent me, thoughts on a new book they waved at me, and wanting an updated syllabus. Um... yeah, I remember there was a packet from HR in my box two weeks ago and that I picked it up. That's it, I have no recollection of what it looked like or where I might have put it. I most certainly didn't fill it out... not even sure if it was the item in question to tell the truth. The book? Yeah, there was a shrink wrapped book in my mailbox which I cut open and set on the coffee table. Haven't looked inside though. Can I look at it this weekend along with this new book and please update my syllabus? Well...

NO! Absolutely, NO, I cannot do ANYTHING this weekend at all except, if everything goes well, manage to complete my FIFTH rewrite of the APPIC materials I thought I was done with a month ago and narrow my list of 30 sites down to 15 so that I can get my first app out the door by the end of next week. I cannot do homework. I cannot do group therapy. I cannot plan for my two therapy sessions on Monday. I cannot WIPE MY ASS!!! Do you get this? I am TAPPED OUT! (Ok, I didn't say it like that, but the tone must have come across in what I did say)

They stared for a moment, blinking, and then hurried to say that was fine, they totally understood this was APPIC crunch and backed away. So later I thought I found the HR application packet and proudly brought it up to them, only to discover that it was an old internship application package instead. Ok, so now I can't read. I shuffled out in embarrassment but one of them followed me down the hall waving my purse at me. Oh Lord... I then stopped by the office of a prof who had edited my CV for some feedback and managed to completely forget I'd told my dear friend I'd just be five minutes and then we could go to lunch. She gave up and ate on her own after 45 mins...

I was late for work at the Hall because I had to make three trips back and forth between my car and the library because I kept forgetting things. Then I forgot my office key in my car, went back for it and discovered I'd left my car keys in my supervisor's office and couldn't get back in the building because I left my electronic pass card to open the door in his office too. I had to call the front desk on my cell phone and have someone buzz me out of the parking lot so I could go through the front door instead. And of course I STILL didn't have my office key!

Stick a fork in me...

And please, nobody say I told you so. With my last two brain cells I can still do my ABCs and know perfectly well how I got here. Sniff. :(

Quick, Somebody Smack Me!

Why, oh WHY is it so hard for me to say no? I just totally suck at professional boundaries. A coworker at Juvie is moving and got two job interviews out of town next Monday, so I agreed to work for her Sunday and another person is covering for her Monday. I just WORKED two days at the hall this week to cover for my supervisor, so that was all day Thursday, all day Friday (we were out of school this week for Yom Kippur), men's group this morning for 2 hours and now tomorrow at the hall again. GAH, what the BLEEP am I doing???

The batterers group is still really hard for me between the participants pushing all my buttons and trying to suck me into power plays all the time and the group leader being so frustrating. I realized today though that I am learning a ton in there about managing myself. If I want to work in a prison setting then I need to have strong skills to deal with power struggles, manipulation and overt sexism. With this group I'm getting that in spades every weekend!

Gotten a bunch done on my CV today and some homework. Hopefully it will be slow tomorrow and I'll be able to study so I won't fall behind. The money is nice, but Psychgrad is right, I'm doing way too much.

SchizoDID

This is making me absolutely NUTS!!! I have lost count of the number of places I have read people making comments about schizophrenia in reference to someone who seems to have multiple personalities or something that seems contradictory. Just now I read it again on the Huffington Post and written by Ms. Arianna herself.

www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/does-mccain-still-agree-w_b_130417.html

The financial meltdown has put the Grand Old Party's schizophrenia on full display. But why are so many in the media, the Democratic Party, and the Obama campaign averting their eyes from the spectacle of a party that wants to drown government until they need it to bail out Wall Street or AIG -- that wants to vanquish government workers, unless they are listening in on our phone conversations or working hard rolling back government regulations?

...With the madness of this contradictory mindset exposed, voters will have a chance to decide ...

Gah! How is it that a "contradictory mindset" has come to represent Schizophrenia in the public mind?

A Blustery Autumn Day

What a wonderful sound to wake up to; rain rain and more rain. I lay there enjoying the smell and the gentle patter until I remembered AR's windows were down on his miata! He usually backs it under the front porch roof far enough that the cracked back window isn't a problem though, and he assured me he'd put the windows up while I was at school, so I slept another hour. He had put the side windows up. Unfortunately though he had put the back window down completely to ease the strain on the aging plastic and the car had rolled forward while he was trying to start the battery (another story) so when I walked by to load my car this morning I discovered his was flooding! Nothing like starting the morning bailing water and pushing a dead car around in the rain. Bought a wet vac on the way home and the car is now seatless and baking in the sun with a fan over it for good measure

The first week of school was good. I LOVE my classes, or at least I love two and the other two are ok. One teacher is a B. F. Skinner style behaviorist with a passion for debate, so I had fun engaging him. He claims that there is no such thing as a thought, only the behavior of thinking (what does one call the thing that you are thinking about then?) and there is no such thing as empathy, only functional behaviors etc. He's really sharp and quite aware of his biases, so his class on empirical treatment methods will be fun despite the outrageously long paper requirement and the big hairy exam at the end. The family forensics and family law class is going to rock too. Our prof is a PhD JD and very current on her stuff (she sat for the bar in July) and even better, she dropped half the reading from last year because the aforementioned prof refused to back off on his enormous paper. I'll do the full reading eventually, but this way I can fit it in at my convenience. For my adolescent therapy class I have to make a game as a delivery vehicle for my chosen method of therapy. In this case the disorder I must address is autism. This could be a really fun project if I didn't have so much to do, but I'll try hard to be upbeat about it anyway and see if I can't have some fun.

So then there is just all the cover letters to write and my dissertation proposal to finish and the IRB to impress, all by December. Oh... and that class to prep for in my spare time. La la la!!!

The best news is that my Friday class turned out to be only 2 credits, and thus 2 hours, so that means I can spend THREE hours on my dissertation every Friday before I go to work, and just enjoy the 1 hour lunch and 2 hour dinner periods as me time. It's not much, but it's something! One of my classmates has agreed to walk with me every Thursday, so that's nice.

It was great fun being somewhere with a TV this week so I could watch the VP debates. I saw a late rerun on MSNBC and enjoyed the show. I have to give Sarah Palin major kudos for managing by the end of the 90 minutes to come very close to pronouncing nuclear correctly. It was great improvement from the beginning of the debate! Good sign that she's a fast learner (too bad she didn't think to use that for an answer when asked for a policy she had rethought). She really did redeem herself as a good speaker and I was amazed at her appearance of smiling composure under the grinding stress that had to be going on for her. Of course she completely missed the concept of debating (or more likely strategically avoided it... in an interview about Couric she described it as "to pivot and go to another subject that you believe that Americans want to hear about"), but hey, there were bigger things at stake than actually answering the questions she was asked, right? Seriously, I was a little taken aback that she was allowed to continuously hijack the process like that, but on the other hand, I really wasn't interested in seeing any one publicly humiliated, so perhaps it was for the best. She's a forward looking maverick after all...