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Lydy's Anarchist Revival Meeting  Two bad things happened to me on Thursday. The first was a car crash. I tried to take a left hand turn against oncoming traffic that I did not see. I smushed the car kinda good, and the airbags popped out. I may have totalled the car. I did a really bad number on the other guy's car. His entire front end got shattered, and there were fluids leaking. No one got hurt, which is a blessing. This is bad on a number of fronts. Just killing the car is bad enough, but David had gone to a certain amount of trouble so that we would be a two car family so that I could get to clinicals next semester. They're unlikely to be busable. Now we may be a one car family again. This also affects Pamela and Eric, who use the car for errands and to go on hikes and so on. It's a really big deal. I've never wanted to take something back so much in my life. The second bad thing was that I flunked clinicals. I've been misplacing electrodes. I am no good at talking to the patient. I really question whether I can do this job or not. I'm to stay on evenings, instead of going to nights, and try harder. I've been having trouble finding the inion, which is where the skull bumps out, not the notch where the spinal cord goes in. I've also had a certain amount of trouble marking my measurements correctly. I used to be good at this. I don't know what's wrong. So, I'm pretty disconsolate. Well, it didn't go as well tonight as it did last night. I'm not sure why. I felt more unsure. It didn't help that the second patient was a claustrophobe with a thing about being touched. Just using the China marker hard enough to leave a mark made her wince. Kris talked the whole time, distracting her. I was impressed. I need to learn to do that. The first patient wasn't bad, but it didn't feel as smooth. I guess this is just to be expected. Win some, lose some, lose less as the time goes on. So, I survived my first clinical. A clinical is a class that happens in the clinic. What it means in practice for me is that I put real electrodes on real patients, and it has to be done right and there are machines that measure this. Also the preceptor checks my measurements before I put the electrodes on. So I did two patients tonight. I was very nervous. I am less nervous now. The first patient was a woman with medium length hair. Short hair is much easier. But I got my measurements right on, and even found them again when looking for them. This can be trickier than it sounds. The hair will hide the marks on the scalp. Yes, I make red marks on the scalp with a China marker. I don't know why it's called a China marker. After I get done making marks at required intervals based on measuring the head, then I put on electrodes where I made the marks. I forgot to prep one electrode, but it turned out ok, anyway. I didn't have trouble with the impedences, either. Impedence is what you think it is, the resistance of the electricity. It has to be at 5 ohms or less. They have this fancy box with lights on it. After you apply an electrode, if it is at the maximum impedence or less, the light goes out. So you can check your impedences as you go along. I even got the chins to go on. There are three wires for the chin, and I have a dreadful time getting them to stick on the face, never mind get good impedences. The second patient was a black man, very pleasant, with very short hair. Unfortunately, it is more difficult to get impedences down with dark skin. And his hair was tightly curly, and it was difficult to get the electrodes against the skin instead of just on the hair. My preceptor had to help me out. We never did get the O2 site impedence down to where it was supposed to be, but it was just a hair high, so we left it. One of the chest wires (which I didn't do, the preceptor does the "lowers", everything below the chin) was bad, and had to be replaced. And one of the chin wires was bad, as well. And the right eye would not come down in impedence, Kris tried over and over. All of this is unnecessary detail. Sorry. What I meant to say was that it went ok, even the difficult patient. Now I have to do this again tomorrow. Hopefully, that will go smoothly as well. I need to learn how to talk to the patients, I'm distinctly lacking in that skill. I feel better about maybe being a polysomnographic technician. I was feeling pretty hopeless there for a while. I'm not stupid. I'm a 4.0 student. But I totally whited out today in lab. We were introduced to the 10-20 system of marking where electrodes go on the head to do an EEG. This is a vital part of the whole polysomnography thing. It's like, 50% of the work. There are a number of points that you need to measure on the head. 10-20 stands for 10% - 20%. You measure from the bridge of the nose, for instance, to the inion, which is where the back of the head starts to bump out from the base of the skull. Very difficult to describe. Then you measure 10% and 20% from those landmarks. You also measure from the intrauricular (is that right?) which is the space between the tragus of the ear (the cartilege that sticks out) and the shell of the ear, to the intrauricular spot on the other side. And take 10% of that, and 20% from the center of the head, and oh why am I trying to describe this? I totally whited out and couldn't remember from where to where to measure. There's lots of 10 and 20% marks, plus some 50% and 25% marks. Hell, my arithmetic isn't up to this. Basic arithmetic has always been my downfall. And I can't remember what point to measure. There's the FPZ and the FP1 and the FP2 and I actually know where they are (although you have to measure 5% to get to the FP1 and the FP2), and then there's the T points, which numbers I don't remember, and the O1 and O2 points, which I do remember, and several C points, which I don't remember, and that might be all, but I totally don't know. Do I sound confused? I'm dreadfully, terribly confused. As far as I can tell, I'm the only one of my class to be this confused. My teacher wiped my fake "head" clean and we started over. All of this was made more difficult by the fact that the fake "heads" have the ears in the wrong place, so the measurements don't work out very well. This is something I can study. This is something I must study. I cannot describe how stressed out I am about this. I can't even remember what points to measure for, much less how you measure them. Like I said, this is like 50% of the job. Getting the damn electrodes in place for the EEG. Encephelogram to you. And me. You're supposed to be able to do this while conversing pleasantly with the patient. And in a minimal time frame. I am so doomed. I begin to wonder if this is what I want to do. I'm that thrown by the whole thing. So, I must study this weekend. I'm not even sure how to start. With a list of the things that need to be measured, perhaps. I can't even keep track of this. Upset. And slightly (now) drunk, since it seemed to help the situation. I'm a 4.0 student. This should not be beyond me. But this is exactly the sort of thing I do badly at. And boy am I doing badly. I've read about half. I don't like it and I'm not going to continue. The words are very nice, and the magic realism doesn't bother me, but I don't like the people in the book at all. I don't like the distance everything seems to be at. Some of the people are actually repugnant. Have you read it and liked it? Why? Have you read it and disliked it? Why? I took the final in the Pathology class last night. (It was on the Web.) I got 84% right, which misses a B by one point. Frustrating. Bad grade. Not sure what the grade I get out of the course will be. Probably a C, although all my homework was A level. Today, I took the final in Fundamentals. This class has been much easier for me than the Patho class. I got 64 out of 65 right, 98.something% Much better. I might get an A out of this course, although it could be only a B. I screwed up some quizzes. The teacher told me, however, that I got a 97% on my presentation -- that'd be the speech that put me in such a tizzy. So it went over better than I thought. Now I need to find a class in CPR for the Health Professional. It's an eight hour course. I'm told that the college I go to, MCTC, has classes. Must look into that. I also need to get a health certificate that says that I'm physically capable of being a polysomnographic technician. I haven't looked at the form yet. I'm not sure what that entails. And I need to get a bazillion vaccinations. I have clinicals this fall, which is why I need all this. I also need to find some work for the summer. I am impoverished. I fear that it will be worse than last summer, which was very not good. And I can't take a temp to hire position, because I will be going back to school in the fall. Arghh. So, that's the Lydy update. Good, bad, and indifferent. The speech went well today. I was too wedded to my script, and didn't look up enough, but I got through it without any disasters. I didn't lose track of the slides, or lose my place on the page. I sent my slides to the teacher yesterday, and got an email this morning that said that the slides looked to be well thought out and well organized. That was a nice boost. It could have been a better written speech, but not by me. I just barely made it through. I did get to practice my speech. Yesterday, eileenlufkin took me out to lunch, and then came back to the house and let me practice my speech on her. Let is the wrong word, here. She suggested it. While I was doing that, marsgov called to buck me up. It's good to have friends.I'm back on Trazadone. A day or two before the panic hit, I had stopped taking it. It was prescribed to me as a sleeping aid. I didn't think it was doing anything, so when I ran out of it, I just didn't refill it. My basis for thinking it wasn't doing anything was that I had run out of Lunesta, a proper sleeping pill, the month before. For the couple of days before I got the prescription refilled I tried taking just the Trazadone. It didn't help me sleep at all. So I had a reason to stop the Trazadone. I called my doctor the day before yesterday to ask if stopping the Trazadone could be the reason for the anxiety attack. The nurse said that she didn't think so, but talked to my doctor. My doctor said that if that's the thing that you changed, then you should go back to taking the Trazadone and see if it helps. So, I took my first dose again last night. I've been feeling incrementally better since last Thursday, but today I felt nearly normal. So maybe it is the Trazadone, for all that it's not supposed to cause reactions like that. I'm not inclined at the moment to experiment and see if it happens again. It was downright uncomfortable. So now I just have to study for two finals. Just. I have this trick of learning things for the test, but forgetting them afterwards. So I have to relearn an entire semester's worth of stuff in order to take the finals and succeed. Not possible. Hopefully as I review things will come back to me. I'm really quite nervous about the tests, for all that I test well. I haven't been testing well in these classes. So both of the finals are next week on Thursday. I have a week to prepare. Plus I have one homework assignment that I'm finding tough that I have to do by Saturday. I guess that means I do it tomorrow. Life could be worse. And has been, quite recently. Wish me luck on the finals. I've written a bit about my nephew who is in jail. My assumption, incorrect, was that his fammily largely abaondoned him. This is not the case. They visit and write to him and are aware of his religious position. It is much more positive than I assumed. I should not have taken silence to mean disinterest. My sister has never been willing to discuss her kids with me, partly because I've always assumed the worst. I've been written a very sharp note by my sister, as you might guess. So to set the record straight, my nephew is getting lots of support from home. I shot off my mouth. In other news, I'm having a panic attack about school. It started with a speech I still have to give. I thought I had to give it last Thursday, and was not ready for it. I was so nervous on Thursday that I threw up -- a new thing for me. I've never been that nervous before. As it turned out, I was able to delay it to this coming Thursday. But I've been in a state of raw panic since then. I don't feel like I can manage the rest of this course. I don't think I'll be able to pass the finals in the two courses. I have a knot in my stomach all the time. I'm not doing well. Things will go better. They always do. But at the moment, things are not so good. Ok, I think this is one of those you-had-to-be-there sorts of shows. Kind of like Star Trek is for me. It looks and sounds horribly dated, and if you came to it after a bunch of other sf shows, it looks tawdry and kind of pointless. It's all been done before, and better. That's the thing about seeing tropes out of order. I've watched five episodes of I thought I'd like it. Hence, watching five shows instead of just one. But really, I could have stopped with just one. The first one has everything that it's going to ever have. And my god, could the plot move any slower? Sixties television is not speedy. McGoohan gets a couple of good lines now and then, but the reptartee is slow in comparison to say, West Wing. And psychiatry has moved on, now. The types of things that they show the blinky lights doing are simply not believable. Besides which, you can't condition someone to be left-handed in a month worth of shock therapy. All you can do is make him muddled. And the peel-off mole. I mean please, they can do all this kinky stuff with brains, but they can't manage minor plastic surgery? (As you can see, I most recently watched The Schizoid Man. Which is number five.) Ok, heretic here. Sorry about that. But I am not afraid of an oversized beach ball. And the special effects are terrible. If you loved the show, try telling me why. I'll listen. But I think I just hit it too far out of it's time. I got an A on my final for A & P of Sleep and Breathing. This means I should get a B in the course. Which is not, you understand, an A. There goes my 4.0 record. But it is definitely the right trend. I got a C on my first test, a B on the next two, and now an A on the final. I feel pretty good about that, especially since I felt so lost during the course. Anatomy and Physiology are just not things that I learn easily. I have so little visual capability. Keeping track of where the hypothalamus is, and the thalamus, and the various parts of the medulla is just tough. As for heart circulation, it's hopeless. I get lost on the bits where the blood vessel is moving anteriorly along the sulcus to the apex of the heart. I can kinda understand it a little, but it doesn't stick. Fortunately, the final had very little about that. A & P of Sleep and Breathing is really just half of a class. It only lasted 8 weeks. Now I'm in the other half of the class, Patho/Class of Sleep Disorders. I have no idea if it will be as tough as A & P. I need to start to worry about it almost instantly, since the first assignment is due Friday at midnight. At least, that's when I think it's due. I have to check that. I'm really bad at keeping track of the exact due dates of things. I've a little time, though, since the reading and the assignments only take me one day, two at the outside. I'll start to worry about them tomorrow. In bad news, I got a C on the last quizz in Fundamentals of Polysomnography. I didn't study for it, I was too busy studying for the final, and I thought it would be easy. I missed at least one easy question, thinking that the easy answer was too easy and couldn't be the right one. Out thought myself on that one. Other than school, nothing much goes on in my life. I accidentally registered for Minicon twice. Evidently, I had registered for Minicon at last Minicon, and had forgotten it. My cat is my study buddy. She tries to sit on the book to help me study. I have to chivvy her off it and onto my lap. She'll eventually sit on my lap and I put my book at my side to study. If she can get away with it, she'll rest her head on the book. It's very cute in a frustrating sort of way. But if we get sorted out so that I can read my book and she's in a comfortable position, she'll stay that way for hours. And then she wants to get fed. Usually about an hour before supper time. At which point she becomes amazingly obstreperous. Oh, one odd thing has happened. I got a letter from my nephew who is in prison. It was a nice letter, with the full story of how he happened to get busted. Two weeks without sleep, on meth, and a lot of guns that he's stolen from the father of a friend of his. He's lucky he is alive. He wanted to shoot it out with the cops, but his girlfriend shut the trunk before he could get one of the shotguns out. He got 9 to 15 years for stealing and selling the guns, and possession of drugs. Being on meth probably makes you stupid, but staying awake for two weeks will surely make you stupid. All in all it was a nice letter, but there was a little hint there that maybe I would send him $50 for a CD player. He's in segregation again. Call it solitary. I forget what for this time. Fighting, I think. He's also changing his name from Jonathan Thomas to Sinner Lawrence Bilskirnir. He's into worshipping the Norse gods. Which I guess is fine, but the Norse have never been my favorite pantheon. They're awfully warlike and grim. Maybe this religion will do him some good. Lord knows his strict Christian upbringing gave him nothing. I still haven't sent a response. I've written a bit, warning him that I have no money and no place for him to stay when he gets out. That should be the hard part, but it doesn't seem to be. I'm having trouble figuring out what else to say. The sad fact is that by all the numbers, Jonathan/Sinner is a lost cause. Recidivism is 80% overall, and he's not in the category of low recidivism, like murderers. Not that I want that he should have murdered some one. Good heavens, no. It's just that his chance of ending up back in prison is pretty high. He initially got caught up with the justice system for sexually abusing his siblings when he was 16. Then the thing with the meth and the guns. (Cops just hate guns. Even more guns and drugs.) The fact that he keeps ending up in segregation suggests that he's hopeless. He's got a terrible temper. He got kicked out of the rehab program he was in at 16 and sent to juvie because he threw a desk at a teacher, and other angry outbursts. He wonders sadly how he's going to make it on the outside. So do I. He's got facial tattoos, for heavens sake. And he's changing his name to Sinner. These just seem to be extremely non-world friendly. And so I don't have much encouragement to offer him. But he's probably being abandoned by his family, plus his family is one of the reasons why he's in this mess (home-schooled). I feel like I ought to offer emotional support. What's a letter? But I can't get involved in his life. I don't have the money or the trust that would need. I can't see inviting him as a guest, offering him a key to the house and the alarm code. I especially can't see my housemates accepting this idea. It's hard, though. I still think of him as the 8 year old who asked me how it was possible to live without God and all the rules. He didn't follow my advice, which was to keep his head down, hang on until he was 18, and book it. He also didn't follow my advice about not getting caught. I couldn't care less what drugs he takes, it's the stupid things you do on drugs that worry me. So that's everything that's going on. |
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