You Don't Understand!

My wonderful twelve year old son was trying to train our two rambunctious labs earlier in the week. It was entertaining to be a silent observer in his quest to educate these cuties at the same time to "down".  He has seen me train them one at a time, indoors, after being fed. However this is his time with them and I am only here to support his efforts and not to criticize. :) The dogs have very different temperaments and both are attention hogs! My son worked with them about five minutes and started getting frustrated. I suggested he stop training and resume after feeding them. My intelligent child blurted, "....You Don't Understand...." huh?

This reminded me of all the times my nuthouse patients have told me I don't understand.


Let me explain something about people who go into the psych field. This includes psychiatrists, therapists, counselors, nurses, psychologists. We go into it because we have experienced it. Personally or with family, we have been there. As in up close and personal. We have seen dysfunction. We have seen drug abuse. We want to study it to heal ourselves first. There are exceptions, few and far between.
Many of us are broken. Maybe most of us are. I may have a badge and a chart but it does not mean I have all the answers. It means at this moment I am functioning at a level where I can help you get out of your funk.

Patients teach me every day. How good I have it. How much better I truly have gotten. How stable I am. I am grateful not to be afflicted with a terminal illness. I am only bipolar. I am a stable bipolar person.

I understand how dark the darkness gets and my heart aches when I see the depressed patient lays in their room and doesn’t even open their curtains to let the sunshine in. I have been there, got the T-shirt to prove it.

Yes, I understand. I won't tell you my story if I'm your nurse someday. Feel confident that when I, any of us are caring for you, you are in good hands.

Starting from scratch

I'm standing outside having my coffee. This is becoming my daily routine. As I feel the fresh morning breeze on my face I wonder how I let it get to this point. I often wonder this. They say men think about sex every sixty seconds. Well I think about it, meaning my life, just as much. There was a plan, a schedule, a time line. Then my plan shattered and everything went so wrong. A few months ago, I was rushing to get the kids ready for school, myself ready for work, packing my lunch, stopping at the coffee shop, don't forget the laptop because homework needs to be turned in by five! I looked forward to talking to the boss, showing her how well I was doing, I wanted the director's position.

I'm suddenly paralyzed when I remember: Summer of 2006. July 19 to be exact. My life changed forever.

Currently, I am almost unemployed. Technically I have a job, I mean I work for a staffing firm that places nurses at facilities where they are needed. However I have this issue see, I declared my craziness "illness" after my diagnosis was made and after I was already a licenced nurse. Now I have to pay the consequence for a period of time. The punishment consequence is that anyone in the field will know I am crazy nuts bipolar.

 No one wants to hire crazy. It's a liability to have crazy taking care of people. Crazy shouldn't pass meds. Crazy cannot be stable. Regardless of how stable Crazy is. I see myself becoming bitter about this.

This Crazy has been stable enough to pass for strange or maybe even weird.

Regardless of how unstable I am, I have always known this; I have never and will never cause harm to another person or animal, ever. Crazy or sane. Ever.

A facility took a chance on hiring me for a shift not so long ago. Wouldn't you know it. The receptionist was the receptionist at the nut house where I was two years ago and she remembered me. It wasn't long before the rest of the staff knew about my stay at the funny farm.

What are my options? Move to another town maybe no one will recognize me? I still have to take my stained license with me. Drop my Nurse title and become something else...maybe a...a...ummm I have no idea!

According to my plan, I should be done with grad school by now opening up a practice. Instead I'm starting from scratch. It is REFRESHING. How many people get a do over?