Another day, another post!

Day 2 here we come~

Nursing? 

I have been thinking a bit over the past few days about the stress that this job brings and ways that I can show that I still am enthusiastic about my job. It has been a little hard when I am tired all the time. It also doesn't help that waking up in the mornings is quite a struggle for me. Not quite sure what to do with that at them moment other than keep showing up to work.

I am also in a mood where I am trying to think of where I want to go do with my degree. Travel is something I would love to do but not for a holiday, to work and live. America always sticks in my mind, lord knows why. I dislike a lot of what I have heard to do with their healthcare system and it makes me wonder if I would be able to work within it. Not to mention the issues that would come from trying to get a work visa. England on the other hand, much more feasible. A lot of Australia's health care is based off of England's structure (and viscera), getting a work visa will be a lot simpler for me and they are also apparently on a call out for nurses from Australia.

Here is the problem, silly heart has given me this somewhat reoccurring dream that I will be able to make the America idea work then magically find myself in California with a nursing job also doing something to do with video games on the side. What video games stuff has depended on the night, some nights it is game development and others it is shout casting. The destination however is eerily consistent. Practical sense though, England has a lot more support for me, I am more familiar with it, relatives live there, work is available, and it has the stuff that I am after anyway. So why America?

The more I type this the more I realize that I want to make moving to another country work, figuring out when is the fun part.

What video games are you playing?

I am still on the Splatoon and Dota 2 train, not much else to report from those. I did however buy the game Life is Strange yesterday, it is downloading at the moment. My friend said he enjoyed it from a storytelling perspective saying that it hit the right notes. I haven't read that much into it so I will report my first impressions when I play it.

Art?

I have been trying to do a bit of art but I feel I have not gotten that far. During the 3am phase I came up with this while listening to Little Person by Jon Brion.

Issue now is I don't really know what else to do with it. I will come back to it when I get a chance.

Watching/Reading anything?

Still watching some AGDQ speedruns! Youtube has provided for those that I missed watching live.

Reading however, I started that search I sometimes do for Shojou manga. I have read about 5 different series in the past day, favorite one being Moe Kare drawn by Ikeyamada Go. Part of what I liked about this one was that is filled all the general things I expect from a shoujo.

It also gave me this amazing page:

The other one that I kinda enjoyed, drawing by the same artist is called Kobayashi ga kawai sugite Tsurai. Now this one is fantastic because it revolves around twins that switch gender roles then fall in love. Big bonus for the male side of it making out with our heroine before they knew that she was cross dressing.

It also had an interesting pairing where the hero was falling in love with a girl who was deaf and was thus learning sign language to communicate better. Was interesting to see how that was drawn. They don't really touch on it often enough but I like it being there.

I should really create a checklist of things I expect these manga's to have then grade them based off of that.


Be warned, I have found some Yaoi to read and I will be talking about that later on.

What song have you got stuck in your head?

Till next time~

Havra

Another year, another Blaugust...

Oh, hello, I didn't see you there.

It sure has been a while since the last time I posted so let start things off with a picture of a happy dog

 Dawwww

I have decided that the best way to approach this years Blaugust is to create a quick formula with subjects that I will try to discuss everyday. Here are some headings to go by:

Nursing?

What video games are you playing?

Art? 

Watching anything? 

What song have you got stuck in your head?

Firstly, looking back on last years entries it has made me feel a bit better as it has made me realize how much I have actually achieved. There is a large part of me though that feels like I am still not doing enough with everything I want to get done, perhaps I am just too inpatient. 

Nursing?  

Nursing has become a lot more stressful than I prepared for. I knew that it wasn't going to be an easy feat but as it turns out, being an adult really really sucks. A true skill that I feel I have learnt from this experience is to be able to smile and enjoy talking to people about the simple, mundane little things while knowing full well what the grim reality of the situation is. Keeping up those conversations everyday is what makes me tired. 

There have been many nights where I have cried myself to sleep because of the cruelty that life brings to people. When you see genuinely nice and loving people suffer for no other reason than fate. While a lot of people have told me that they follow this career path because it gives them a sense of control, I will admit that I feel the exact opposite, everything I do merely fits into place, While it is comforting, and necessary, to have someone care for you, it doesn't mean that those actions will effect the control that one has over bad situations. Again, maybe I am too impatient. 

My work in aged care continues to remind me how scared I am of death, when those I care about leaving me. This may not be helping with my struggle. I can say though that it has gotten easier. Traditionally I have found that when someone dies around me I cry and the closer they are to me, the more I cry. Fairly recently there was someone who left us that I didn't cry for, and I loved them. During my first few shifts as a RN they were supportive and understanding to the difficulties that I was facing, and reminded me that no matter how much I stress, I am still able to show people that I care. Perhaps I didn't cry because for how peacefully they left and how it seemed that everyone had had a chance to be able to say goodbye. Maybe it was because that unlike others that I have seen die they weren't afraid.

Overall though, I am still employed. I can't be doing as badly as I sometimes feel I am.

What video games are you playing?

I invested in a WiiU last week! I now have Splatoon and Yoshi's woolly world for that console.

Splatoon is a pretty fun game, it has been really satisfying to be able to play online with my friends. I have only slight regret for one playing-till-3am session, only because I was unable to rest that well enough for work the days following. Got to level 20 and I have just started to branch out into playing with other weapons. Or at least, learning a bit more on how to approach other players to murder without getting murdered myself.

Yoshi's wolly world I actually played on my boyfriends console while I was on holiday at his house, it was pretty fun. It has a similar difficulty to Yoshi's Island, and that is a good thing. I learnt from this experience that my boyfriend, god bless his cotton socks, is one hell of a back seat gamer. I would be jumpin, you know, being a Yoshi and that when he tells me that I have missed something. Trust him to be a completionist..,

I have also been playing a lot of Dota 2. It has turned into one of those social things that I can do now that I live far from the civilization that I once knew. A group of us gather on mumble, stack as a 5, feed, play badly but above all, have fun. I recently noticed that while I have opened up to some of these wonderful nerds, I haven't met some of them in real life. I might have to actually do that at some point. 

Art? 

Developments in art have been fantastic! I put some of my art on an art table at AVCon this year. I made more money than the cost of the table so I call that a success! I will try and post some more art this blaugust! My art page (www.facebook.com/havrac) has a few more likes and I might have some commissions coming up, how amazing is that?!

Watching anything? 

At the moment I have been following Awesome Games Done Quick (www.twitch.tv/gamesdonequick), it finishes tomorrow but it has been amazing to watch when I have not been at work. I donated at one point as well and it got read out, internet famous.

What song have you got stuck in your head? 

Till next time~

Havra

Laughter? The best Medicine?

We've all heard it, the whole "laughter is the best medicine" thing.

Wrong.

Laughter hurts.

I hurt myself today because I was laughing too hard. 30 minutes of constant giggles. At what? you may be asking. I remembered that this existed:

Summing up your first sexual experience in GIFs:

Thank you Reddit.

Okay so some degree I do believe in the laughter thing. It certainly makes the day go by quicker and the patients a little more cheery but do not forget. There is always a time and a place. I know you want to make a pun that I, as a student nurse giving IV medications for the first time was going to give it my best shot (Kill me).
One of the first rules I have learnt: You can state that you are a student but never tell a patient it is your first time doing something. It ruins the faith and makes your job a lot harder. If you screw up then sure, tell them then and run away fast.

Laughing is an important thing to do though. Makes your forget about things that might not be going well for you or just the world in general. I certainly had fun looking through these images after a hard days work even if I injured myself doing so.

Uploading these I found some strange pictures in my images folder that I should really be careful of

I am not even sorry. 

Learning and learning lots

Yesterdays attempt at a blog post had me listing all the things I had learnt from placement. Good news is that I have learnt so much that I spent 2-3 hours and I still wasn't done explaining. Bad news is that it still isn't finished and after amazing cake tonight I am a little too brain dead for the task.  So again, ranting.

... okay I am not sure what I am meant to be ranting about. Maybe if I start it will just come to me. Hmmm.

Placement is good. Over the weeks I have been in to assist (where I can) with Tilt Table Tests, Angiograms, Pacemaker placements, Biventricular Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator placements and Loop recorder implants. I have only just begun to work in the operating part of the day surgery so I am still learning a lot of what goes on in there. I know what to explain to the patients and what the rationale behind the intervention is but as far as the details, I didn't follow the flow of conversation. I somehow seem to be talking to the right people though. I started a conversation with a radiographer today asking about his role and how you interpretate the results given, for him to print out a worksheet he gives to his students that detailed all the major arteries around the heart. He then talked me through what was happening during each step of the operation. I have then been mistaken a few times by doctors and radiographers as being a medical student for asking these questions. Rarely in this area have I come across a person who said: "You don't need to know that in that much detail" and leave the conversation there.

Oh that struck a nerve, prepare for the rant.

This is an issue I have had throughout my education, people not explaining because I don't "need" to know. In all likely hood I will forget most of what I have learnt here on placement if I never end up working in a heart specialty area. That is fine. It doesn't mean I shouldn't know or shouldn't be told these details. In my mind it helps to solidify the important bits because without the overall rules the details and exceptions don't fit. It is also now a part of my job. I don't want to give something to a patient or treat a patient the way I was told to by the doctor without having at least some idea of what the reasons are behind it.

This "you don't need to learn that" issue happened with my older brother in primary school where the teacher refused to tell the little 6-year-old how to spell a really long word because it wasn't a part of what he was set to learn at that age. The school agreed as well and wouldn't do anything about it. What did my parents do? Pulled him out of that school and found a new one.

The issues that I had, were teachers in high school not understanding how I connected information. I have a pace, and often I find you don't need to go over information again if you meet that pace. Going too fast isn't an issue with me unless I have no prior knowledge of the subject area. What is worse for me, is people being too slow.

So in high school, I had a lot of teachers willing to explain or teach me things inside or outside of class. However, they felt that because I needed to ask again or request for them to sit down and run it through with me, that they had to be slooooooooooooooow and take me through each baby step and have me repeat it before I could get to the next bit. I also found this annoying because running through things from the beginning helps me to remember the broader details before I get to the smaller ones. Often when I sat with a teacher, I would have to slowly go through things I already remembered for an hour before I got to the things I wanted to learn from them, only then for the lesson to be over. Useful.

Maybe though, this is something I have gotten better at through nursing. People only try to say things once. If you don't catch what the doctor is saying has he runs away it is a hassle to find out what they said and becomes a waste of time. Forcing yourself to quickly understand information and commands to allow for the next spurt is natural for the type of work I have found myself in. It also makes the hours pass by quicker, so you have to pay attention. It is hard at first when you have spent 8+ weeks playing video games until 4am only to start working again and find that your brain is not as sharp as you thought it was.

I find it also infuriating when people wont accept that they don't know. Don't send me the wrong way, don't look so unsure because if you don't know you don't know

Having someone say that they don't know isn't a reflection on how bad they are, no one is expected to know all the details and if someone is good at their job they will know where their span of knowledge is and work to increase it. What I have done for people I have taught stuff to is look it up with them. see if it makes sense to me and hopefully this will help me to remember as well.

This happens in my video game life too as a younger person often finding myself talking to a slightly older crowds at conventions. "Oh yeah, that was the best game, remember?" No... I don't. I didn't play that game. I didn't grow up in the loving arms of Nintendo. The first 'new' game I got for myself and myself only was Final Fantasy X, in 2005. You can't fake that you played that game or know all about it when you simply didn't. You can't magically add loved childhood games to your list when you didn't play them. An old friend of mine used to do that and it drove me up the wall. Younger than I, kept on going on about the Atari generation and how great that was. Come on man, you can't bullshit like that, you weren't even a part of that generation nor did you own an Atari console until you were 17. Lord.

I guess the take away message from this is that learning isn't easy but it makes life easier in ways. Through weeks of focusing on knowing as much as I can from this area in such a short time I have found the general nursing practices a lot easier. Mixing medications becomes easier because you know where it is going and why we want it to be there. Talking to worried patients becomes easier because you know what their care is. I will be sad to leave this learning experience but happy to be able to sleep and play more video games.

It all begins with Blagust - A wonderful Friendship

So here I am. Sitting in my cold room typing about something, anything that will let me start this month off for "Blagust". After about 30 minutes of me twiddling my thumbs and watching everyone's "Top 10 Favorite/Saddest/Best Scrubs moments" on Youtube I finally came to figure out what I wanted to ramble about: Why I am doing this.

For one, it's something I haven't really done before. Sure I told a few people that I wanted to write a blog so that the random things that I feel are funny can be seen by the world however, I never really find what I have to say to be terribly interesting, merely honest. 

I was told today by a patient that it was reassuring to have someone honest, open and easy to talk to. That was nice. I wanted to say more than the "Awww thank you" followed by the "It's easy when there are wonderful people like you" or, if they can take a joke, you follow with something like: "It's hard to keep this face on" *insert laughter*. Lord nurses talk a lot of crap. I may have actually picked the right profession for me to study. Not that I don't mean what I say. I want people to be happy and comfortable and in a hospital people take life too seriously or not seriously enough. Gotta have a middle man somewhere. 

Anyway, truth is I am not usually one to read blogs. It was never a thing I really did. Maybe because when I was old enough to write them with minimal spelling errors and somewhat coherent thought, mediums like Facebook were around to give you opinions in small bite-sized chunks without having to search too hard for them. 

Second contributor (and possibly the bigger reason) to my Blagust is my friends. I have found that it is often understated about how important the "Right friends" are. You remember when your mum told you not to hang out with Billy because he was a bad influence right? Okay maybe not, but surely you have come across people that you don't want to hang out with or have no alike interests whatsoever. Those are not the people you should be friends with, no matter what way you cut it. 

During my high school years, as a future nurse in training I found it very important to try and be able to talk to anybody. Especially as my underlying reasons for everything I do stem from a love of video games that often people simply don't understand. It had it's major draw backs some days when my mind turned blank and I decided that "Yes, my Religious Education teacher really did need to know how Japanese video games portray Christianity." In essence though, I have made an effort to talk to people that I wouldn't usually approach. This does not mean I have to be friends with them, only friendly 

My point is that friends need to be people that compliment you. It is a delicate balance because you might find someone who is really into sewing and Gasp! oh my god you love to sew too. Then you find out that they only sew bondage outfits and that is not, in fact, something you love. You should not have to feel obliged to continue a friendship with this person just because you both sew. What I have learnt with my experience is that I can be a nurse/gamer/artist/standup comic//bongo drummer and still find people to be friends with. I guess the message is, there are people out there that will like what you do. 

The friends that I hang out with more often now are the "Right kind" as it were. Not because they are model children that my mum would be happy for me to hang out with after school but because they complement me and what I am. These people do things like Blagust. I quite like my friends, I find that what they have to say is intelligent or at least entertaining but I perhaps feel that if I don't contribute to the madness I am going to miss out on all the fun. Even if I did miss out though, it wouldn't really matter too much I suppose that is one of the most wonderful things about it all. 

I am sure I will have lots of fun! 

Havra