Sigh. Perhaps starting a blog along with this insane program was a bit ambitious. Well, clearly, but here I am, trying to catch up my sweet floating duck people.

I finished the first year-and-a-summer, though, and despite my certainty otherwise at the time, actually did pass my licensing exam to become an RN. The end of summer term was pretty much awful, though.

Thank goodness for summer break - over five weeks of stretching out in time and space and returning to a sense of my self. One week for decompressing, two weeks in Mexico with my sweetheart, a quick visit for the first time ever to San Francisco to visit beloved friends, and a scrambling return to Seattle for catching up before the school year began.

We saw ducks in Lago Chapultepec, in the huge park of the same name in Mexico City. The lake, as you can see, is very, very green, and the ducks are adept at avoiding the zillions of visitors in our bright plastic paddle boats.



One of those beloved friends in San Francisco told me that when she gets really sad and disillusioned, her partner likes to remind her that baby ducks exist in the world, and it tends to make things better. We really bonded over the ducks in the nearby park:



It does feel different, starting this final year, the midwifery year. I feel much more responsible for my own education all of a sudden, which is alternately awesome and terrifying. I'm determined to learn even more, to be an even better student (despite my waves of "imposter syndrome," I've had all A's & B's each quarter), and to grow as holistically as I can into the kind of provider I'd want to see, and want other people to have.

This quarter I've lucked out and my clinical rotation is at Swedish Ballard with the midwives there. I'm really excited, and hoping to integrate well and be a good advocate for my own learning there. Mommas and babies and midwives, oh my!

catching up

Wow - starting school has been even more intensely busy than I imagined. I apologize for the total abandonment of the blog - most of my life just got moved to the back burner.

That said, here's a wee bit of what I've been up to in the last month and a half:

More awesome Deep Tissue Massage classes from Brian Utting

One on QL (quadratus lumborum), psoas and the diaphragm and one on chest and shoulders (subscapularis, pec minor, and all manner of connective tissue around the sternum). Both were cozy little classes in his living room in Ballard and left me feeling relaxed and excited to be doing massage. It really was amazing to see how much easier it was to breathe afterward, especially with all the work around the sternum.

Needles, old folks and early mornings

Some of the things that have scared me most about this program - nasogastric tubes and catheters (yep, tubes going through nostrils and into stomachs or up ureters to bladders) we fortunately got to practice on eerily life-like mannequins instead of on each other. We did, however, get to poke each other with needles in several places. I was amazed to discover that the injections didn't hurt at all, but the pokes for a simple glucose test sure did! (At least to my massage-therapist fingertips - we ended up poking my earlobe, which was not bad at all.)

Perhaps the hardest part has been the idea of not just getting up, but actually being AT my clinical site at 6:15 am on Tuesdays. Yikes - I haven't been up before 8am on a regular basis in years! I've spent two days with my first resident, "B," and just briefly met my second - "A."
"B" is the sweetest little old lady, and still quite lucid and capable. She's made me think about how very little time I've spent with actually old people in my life, and how sad that is.

More updates to come!