The First Meeting of Many

Tonight I went to my very first writer-y type meeting through the Canadian Authors Association with my good friend, Christa Davidson. It wasn't a workshop, but one of those monthly meetings where all of the members and wannabe members show up. It was held in a side room of Brewery Bay, and I honestly had no idea what to expect when we walked in the door. I brought my ever present stainless steel water bottle, and noticed immediately that all the tables had jugs of water with floating lemon slices, and glasses set beside them. Right away I wondered if anyone noticed I had brought my own water bottle, and thought I had brought in the booze with me. And, as my ever reasonable friend Christa pointed out, you would have thought that being held at a restaurant, I might have deduced there would already be water there. We found a table and got comfy in  our new surroundings. Actually we happened upon the wobbliest table in the room, the water in the jug actually spilled out onto said table when it wobbled, and got cautiously comfortable. As we were waiting for the meeting to start, a lady introduced herself as Karleen Bradford, and she sat down at our table with us. Once again, my ever trusty friend had the woman googled and the information to me before the introductions were even over. Karlene is quite an accomplished writer of children's books, and she's really kind of a big deal. I thought it was pretty cool that she came to sit with the newbies!

The presenting author was Farzana Doctor, who has written two books and is currently working on her third. The nice thing was, I liked the author as a person. She spoke well and was really warm and down to earth. Plus, she smiled a lot, which I always love. I was totally mesmerized as she read excerpts from her book Six Meters of Pavement, and I put a hold on it at the library as soon as I got home. I'm not generally very adventurous with my reading, and I tend to get into a lot of Eckhart Tolle, Dan Millman, and Wayne Dyer. In other words, it's a lot of self help reading and not a lot of reading for pleasure, so I'm really looking forward to this book.  Faranza answered a ton of writing type questions as well, anything from, "How does an author find an agent?" to  "How often do you write?"

Farzana and Christa

All in all it was a great first meeting with a lot of useful information, and I'll definitely be doing it again! 

 

Who's Sicker, the Nurse or the Patient?

 

I recently went for an ambulance ride. I was accompanying a paediatric patient to Sick Kids hospital in Toronto from Orillia Soldiers Memorial hospital in Orillia, which is approximately 90 minutes away, depending on how fast you want to drive. Now, I hadn’t been on such a trip in five years, the reason being that I get sick in the ambulances. I can usually convince other nurses to take my patient transfers for me, but this day I had no such luck. I had avoided it for five long years, so I figured I really couldn’t be too upset about it, but I really wasn’t looking forward to it either. When I’m in an ambulance I can’t sit facing backward and I can’t sit facing sideways, I have to face straight ahead. The first time I went on an ambulance run I was just finishing up my consolidation, which is the last semester of nursing school where you have a preceptor and actually work their shifts with them. I had never been on an ambulance run before so it was a great opportunity for me to see how this process worked. The patient was a baby who was being transported down to Sick Kids hospital for an appointment with a specialist and then was being brought back to the Orillia hospital again. I was fine while we were on the highway, but once we got into the city I started feeling queasy. Also, I must have gone a terrible colour because that was when the paramedic told me I didn’t look well and tried to put the oxygen mask on me. I had never experienced anything like that before, had never been carsick before, and I was incredibly embarrassed of all the fuss being made over me by the (really, REALLY cute) paramedic.

 

Fast forward to the next year and I have another patient that needs to go to Sick Kids. But first, I have to explain a bit about the whole transfer thing. If the child is so sick that it is beyond our scope of practice at our hospital, they go to the city. If they are REALLY sick the paediatric transport team comes to get them. If they are marginally sick a nurse from our hospital hops into the ambulance with the child and takes them down. The part that bothers most nurses is that you could take a patient to Toronto, but that doesn’t guarantee you a ride back home again. Ambulances are for urgent and emergent issues, and taking a nurse back to her home hospital just doesn’t qualify. You could get left at the hospital you dropped the patient off at, or you could get dropped off at the Tim Horton’s on the side of the highway with all of your equipment. My biggest peeve isn’t getting ditched, it’s the possibility of barfing because really, who likes barfing? So this time I came slightly prepared with a vomit bag, although the situation itself was probably made worse because I was so dreading the experience. Yaay! I actually got down there without the paramedics trying to put oxygen on me! I took the patient into the hospital and to her floor where a nurse was waiting to admit her. As the nurse took the patient’s paperwork out of my hands I snatched the (unused) vomit bag back from the top of the pile of papers and scolded, “That’s mine!!” She just gave me a really weird look and walked away with my patient. You’d think a nurse would be more understanding.

So back to this last ambulance run. Again I went prepared, with two vomit bags and an emergency Gravol pill. I say an emergency pill because I couldn’t very well take it when I had a patient, as it puts me right to sleep. And I couldn’t take it when I didn’t have a patient because if I ended up getting dropped off somewhere I would, once again, be asleep. It was more like a little security blanket. (I’ve since found out that there are non drowsy Gravol tablets made with ginger!) Of course, we had to go to Toronto on a holiday Monday. For anyone not familiar with this, Toronto is south of Orillia and with a holiday Monday all of the cottagers from up north are travelling back south at this point, trying to get back to their homes in the city. The highway is usually bumper to bumper traffic for a great many kilometers. So here I am prepared with my emergency sickness kit, and I tell the paramedics I have to sit facing forward or there will be a problem. The captain’s chair in the back of the ambulance only has the capacity to face front in some ambulances, and this wasn’t one of them. Fortunately I had a really wonderful crew who somehow made the chair swing around to face front because they felt pity upon me and my story of woe. So as we are driving  down the highway all lights and sirens….the bumper to bumper highway that is, where the ambulance is speeding up and slowing down rapidly, continuously shaking up my insides……I have to assess my patient. To do this requires me to stand up and take a few shuffling steps. Inside the jerkily moving ambulance. Facing backward. As I was standing up, facing toward the back of the ambulance, leaning over the head of the stretcher to listen to my patient's chest, I felt nausea overcome me. My first thought: “Oh fuck, I’m gonna barf!!” My second thought: “Oh fuck, I wonder if this kid will wake up from his really peaceful looking sleep if I barf on him??” My third thought: “Oh fuck, I wonder if I’ll get fired for barfing on a patient??” I quickly assessed that my patient was just fine and quickly got back to my seat so that I could stick my face in the trusty vomit bag. I held my lunch of pizza and Diet Dr. Pepper down….barely. I wasn’t sure if I was nauseated from the motion of the ambulance itself, or from the fact that my body was revolting from the terrible lunch I had consumed before embarking on the trip. I was able to get the child to their destination without any medical intervention, however the child’s mother did ask me (several times) if I was okay. I was very lucky that the crew didn’t have to ditch me at the destination hospital, however we did have a slight hiccup in our plans. When we were about one kilometer away from the Orillia hospital, they were diverted to a call. It turned out to be very minor and I eventually got back to my hospital without mishap.

Next time I’m sent out, I plan to be fully prepared. My sickness kit, or perhaps it should be coined as an anti-sickness kit, will be equipped with vomit bags, and ginger Gravol. Hopefully I won’t have to put my plan into effect for another five years!

Are You Busy Living or Busy Trying Not to Die?

The death of a friend this week had me receiving several messages and texts from well meaning friends wondering what happened to him. I reflected on this and noticed that when someone dies, one of the first things people always ask is, “What happened? How did they die?” It’s like this mandatory question we have to ask to define our own mortality, as if simply knowing how another person died somehow protects us from succumbing to that same fate. We need reassurance that that won’t happen to us. Until it does. And by then, we won’t know it actually happened to us anyway. It seems more people are consumed with not dying than they are with actually living and building the life they've dreamed of.

 

 

A year or so ago a good friend introduced me to a tool that made me incredibly more aware of how I spend my time. It’s called a Memento Mori, which translated means "remember your mortality" or "remember that you will die". It's basically a chart of small boxes, 52 across and 80 or so down. Each block on the chart represents a week of life. The 52 boxes across are the weeks in one year, and the 80 or so down are the years. I think I put 95 years on mine! I have it hanging on my bedroom wall, staring at me. Sometimes I am able to ignore it for periods of time but I always come back to it. When I was first introduced to this concept I absolutely balked. I think my exact words were, "Are you kidding me, Johnny?? That is absolutely fucking morbid!" But it stayed on my mind, and the more I thought about it throughout the day, the more I became enamored with the idea. I realized it's not supposed to be a solemn gloom and doom look at what little time you have left, but a celebration and awareness of what you've done, and continue to do, in the time you've lived. Of course, by the end of that day I had made my own Memento Mori.

As the weeks pass I look at the little blocks that I've coloured in black and think to myself, "Was this week a good representation of how I want to live my life? Did I do things that made me happy? Was I kind? Did I love? Did the people I care about know I cared? Was that time spent in front of the TV doing nothing worth that box of my life? Were the feelings of fear and self doubt worth wasting one single iota of that precious time on? Was worrying about whether I would be judged for my decisions or actions concerning my own life worth one second of my thoughts?" Sometimes the answers to these questions are not what I had hoped. Some weeks I have spent time in a heap of self pity, some weeks I have spent time feeling bitter and lonely instead of grateful for all of the wonder in my life. Each week I learn something about myself and I become more aware of the direction I'd like to steer myself in to make my best life possible. Looking at that chart makes the sometimes all-consuming fixations seem really trivial, and completely puts things back in perspective. I look at those little blocks and think of all the time I spent fretting about my hair, my weight, my clothes. I look to where I was 14 years old and I felt like my world was ending, and I truly wanted it to end, and now I can't remember why I felt so hopeless. I can guarantee it was about things that weren't going my way, people that didn't act/react the way I wanted them to, and things I didn't have in my life. Some of those things I could control and some I couldn't. Back then it was everything but 26 years later I see that it wasn't all I made it out to be. It’s so obvious now that my mind was stuck on what I wanted and not on the wonderful things I already had.

Not long after being introduced to the memento mori, I watched the movie Finding Joe, about The Hero's Journey as explained by Joseph Campbell. One line in the movie really caught my attention: "One day we will all be dust and the janitor will be buried beside the CEO." That was the most truth I had ever heard about death in my life. It wasn't sugar coated. We are all going to die, not one of us will be spared, and isn't death a great equalizer among us? In death we're all the same, but what are you doing in your life that sets you apart? Are you following your bliss, or do you come home from a job you hate and watch TV until it's time to go to sleep, get up, and go back to that same job again? Are you concentrating on everything that's right in your life or everything that's wrong? What actions/thoughts/vibrations are you putting out into the Universe right now? Are they positive or negative? If they are negative, think about a little black box on the chart of your life and ask yourself, is this the way I want to spend this moment? Is this what I feel my life is worth?

Here's the link to make your own Memento Mori:

http://www.thenategreenexperience.com/downloads/memento-mori.pdf

If you choose to make one, take a good hard look at your life as you do it. Are you creating the life you really want? Is there something you've always wanted to do that you’ve been putting off because you’re afraid? Don't waste another minute on the trivial shit, wishing to do things instead of taking action. The old adage is true, there's no time like the present. The present is all you really have; we're not guaranteed the rest of those little boxes, so go out now my friends, and do everything you've dreamed. This isn’t idealism; this is your life in motion.

P.S. My friend Johnny Waite introduced me to the Memento Mori. Here is his blog post with his perspective of it. Truly inspiring!

http://livingmyselftodeath.blogspot.ca/2012/02/memento-mori-latin-phrase-meaning.html

Whadda Ya Mean I'm Not the Centre of the Universe??

I had a discussion with a friend the other day regarding our inability, or rather our lack of wanting to, let go of people when relationships end and it is our time to exit from each other's lives. We've all heard the theory that people come into our lives to teach us something, and perhaps they're only meant to be a temporary character in the whole of our existance. Well sometimes that can be a hard philosophy to swallow, especially when you thought that person had a forever role in your life. Sometimes we want to hold on to a relationship because it made us feel good, and we just can't bring ourselves to believe that anything will ever feel that good again. Maybe we don't want to let go because we know if we do the other person won't want to make the effort to maintain the connection. This hanging on to things long after it's really over inevitably ends up making us miserable and resentful that the person we love so much isn't working into our plans the way we so very much want them to.

"When you fight to cling to people who are no longer meant to be in your life, you delay your destiny. Let them go."

~Mandy Hale

Shortly after the aforementioned conversation, I read something that really challenged my way of thinking. Within the article there was a sentence that basically said, "Do not hate them for leaving, for they are on a journey too". Ummmm....pardon?? This was an entirely new concept to me. I, the one who considered myself to be moving in the direction of self actualization did not think of this? You mean I'm NOT the centre of the Universe, and everyone that comes and goes through my life isn't just here to serve my own life's purpose? They have life paths of their own? Now that's some crazy shit being thrown at me right there. Huh. So I'm also coming and going in other people's lives for their purposes as well. Imagine that....there's a way bigger picture outside of my singular view of the world!

Mulling this new view over in my mind edged my thoughts toward my father. My dad was absent for most of my life, and as a result I spent most of my life being angry at him for not being the dad I had envisioned, or the dad I needed him to be. In my mind it was always about my needs and wants. I eventually came to terms, after he died, with the fact that even if he did a less than stellar job by my standards, he literally did the best job as a dad that he could. Just realizing that was huge for me. Imagine, he was LITERALLY the best dad he could be with what he possessed within him. He wasn't the terrible, evil person I made him out to be in my mind, he was a human being with his own challenges and his own hurts to heal. He simply wasn't a person who knew how to maintain our relationship or effectively show that he cared. And by effectively show he cared, I mean show his love in the way that I wanted him to.

"Just because someone doesn't love you the way you want them to doesn't mean they don't love you with all they have"

~ Unknown

Delving a bit deeper using my new found knowledge, I realized if I had (as an adult) taken the time to ask the hard questions and have the difficult conversations with my dad, I might have caught a glimpse at the real soul he was inside his human form of existence. I may have discovered the tough experiences in his past that made him into that person who couldn't connect with me. Instead I took all of it in on a deeply personal level as a public announcement that he didn't love me. Maybe, in having those difficult conversations, I would have discovered nothing more than the fact that we were unable to make the connection I had always longed for. But now I have learned the ultimate lesson that I was as much in his life to help him on his journey of self discovery as he was in my life to help me with mine. And therein lies our connection as much as I can make it clear in my mind right now, our mutual entwining, however sporadically, in life.

Now as I proceed through my existance, I will try not only to see how others are the catalysts for my own essential life lessons, but I will take the time to consider the role I am playing in their lives as well. Will that change in my mindset make it easier to let go of those relationships that are so hard to pry myself away from that it almost feels like a damn addiction? Will it help in the knowing that not only is it time for them to move on, but it is also time for me to move on? Will it make it easier by reframing the situation to realize that I am teaching as many lessons as I am receiving? Will all this help me to depart from those relationships gracefully in love and light rather than with bitterness and pain? I think it will. I really think it will.

My Journey into Tattooed Awesomeness

The first tattoo I got was when I was 19 years old. I wanted one SO badly, but really never put much thought into what I would get. I was watching some sort of TV talk show and got the idea from one of the guests to get an angel right smack on my chest. This angel didn’t mean anything, it had no significance to me at all, but I just HAD to have a tattoo and that was what I decided on. I got it done at the only tattoo place in my small city of Orillia at the time, which happened to be in a sketchy corner house in the downtown area where the guy did all of the tattooing at his kitchen table. I wanted something small, and he convinced me that if it was small it would lose the detail so I ended up with a tattoo that was quite large, and quite difficult to cover completely. He did an ok job on some parts of it, but somehow the face of this angel looked pure evil. So after I got the tattoo that I had to have, I basically concentrated on covering it up.

Fast forward 20 years to May 2012, and I’m a different person than I was even the year before. I’ve made some real and honest life changes, and I felt positive and hopeful for the future. And I was finally going to do something about this tattoo that I despised that reminded me of my past mistakes and failures, and the person I no longer wanted to be. I explored it (Google is a great resource) and designed something myself that I absolutely LOVED and it was going to go right on top of Little Miss Evil Angel Face. I also researched and visited several tattooists. The girl I chose was Holly Beemer (shameless plug: check her out on Facebook….you can see samples of her work) and she turned out to be fabulous, and very much on my wavelength. She could totally dig what I was envisioning and added to it nicely with her own style. The symbolic cover up of the old tattoo with the new one was just overwhelming, and it made me feel better about myself than I had in a very long time.

After: Awesome peace sign



Before: Evil Angel

                                                         
 After that incredibly successful cover up was done, I started concentrating on a cover up of a different kind. When I was 14 years old I felt like the world was totally against me, like I could never make it and everything was utterly hopeless. I thought the only way out was suicide, and one night when everyone else was sleeping I took a razor blade and I sliced into my wrists. At the time, I was horribly disappointed to wake up the next morning. Now, of course, I feel it a blessing that I did. Back to the here and now: the scars remained, and I was very self conscious of them. As a paediatric nurse, each time I went into a room to examine a patient, I knew that the parents watched step by step what my hands were doing to help heal their child. Each time I turned my hands a certain way, I knew they could see my scars. I wanted to get those scars covered up, like covering up another piece of my unhappy past, but I was unsure of having tattoos that could be seen all the time. I finally decided I would rather see the tattoos all the time than the scars, so in July 2012 I went back to my girl Holly once again, and once again she did a fabulous job. I had positive words of encouragement permanently inked on me to cover the wounds of long ago. I wondered if I was the only client she had that hugged her with absolute joy and teary eyes when they left her.

                                            "Dare to be remarkable" and "Live your truth"

In December 2012 I took a great friend of mine, Christa Davidson, to get a tattoo with my Holly. Christa got the word “Run” tattooed on her leg. It was a great symbol to her, as running is how she maintains her sobriety. Another part of it was the upcoming occasion of her 40^th birthday, which I think at one time neither one of us thought we would make it to. I decided while I was there I would get two more tattoos that were meaningful to me. The reason for two was simply because I loved them both so much that I couldn’t possibly choose between them. The best part about Holly is that she has a keen eye and she isn't afraid to say what's on her mind. With the design on my ribcage, she said, "Let's put it on a bit of a diagonal. That way if you ever gain weight it won't totally ruin it if stretches." I love her candidness, and I've found that she's usually right with her suggestions.  

                                                           Christa and her "Run"

In January 2013 I had a fresh tattoo put on me for my fresh outlook. Again, I left a perfectly happy customer, although my mother told me I was going to end up being a book with all of the script I have on my body.

 

Yesterday I went back to Holly for the largest tattoo I’ve gotten yet. It covers the outside of my upper arm, and was designed entirely by Holly with only a few suggestions by me. Ever since I was a teenager I’ve felt kind of….out of place. I’ve listened to '60s music and read about the '60s culture, and somehow felt very lost here in the present times. No longer having a care or concern of having a tattoo that shows all the time, I sent Holly a picture of a bird, a flower, a turtle and a paisley, all in '60s style. What she sent back for my approval can only be described as a work of art. I made my appointment and showed up on tattoo day with my lunch, my phone (for sharing pictures on my Facebook as it progressed), and a blanket to which she said, “I’m glad to see you came prepared like a seasoned tattoo collector”. When she put the stencil on my arm I fell more in love with it than I had been just seeing it on paper. After four hours of working to complete the outline, I was still ok. It obviously hurt, but Holly is a great conversationalist and when we weren’t talking I was amusing myself with my phone or listening to the kickass music she’s always playing as she works. At one point I was browsing Pinterest, and showed her a few pictures of other tattoos I was interested in. “You know you’re looking at pictures of tattoos WHILE you’re getting a tattoo, right?” was her amused response. At the five hour mark I was starting to curl my toes and deep breathe to get through the pain. She kept using an instrument she referred to as The Tickler. I think that was sarcasm because that thing hurt like a SOB. Right when I decided I might pass out, Holly suggested we finish up for that session to which I wholeheartedly agreed. “Finishing up” actually meant going for about 45 more minutes so that she could wrap up the part she was working on, but at least I knew there was an end in sight for that day. I never thought a tattoo would be such an amazingly positive reinforcement in my life, but they are my symbols of joy!

 

 My new work of art isn’t completed yet, but I’m super happy with how it’s turned out so far. Can’t wait to go back to finish up the torture in the next session!

                                                    Holly Beemer hard at work :)