Stranger Still

No seriously, it’s a good thing!

So if you’ll recall, and if you’re new to my party, I’ll catch you up – from May 2006 through August 2007, I was a nanny.  In the beginning it was really, really hard.  And quite frankly?  Most all of 2005 and the beginning of 2006 kind of stunk.  Really bad.  Here’s the schedule:

January through May 2005 – waffled back and forth about quitting my drone desk job to become a nurse.

May 2005 – had interview for nursing assistant job at hospital, was offered job at interview, told it started in two weeks.  Quit job next day.  Cried.  Hate disappointing people.  Started new job, mostly liked it. 

June 2005 – working as nursing assistant, learning lots, whatever. 

July 1, 2005 – my dad has a stress test because of a suspicious EKG.  Cardiologist flips out because, upon first incline of treadmill, his heart tries to attack him.  Dad goes by ambulance, code 3 lights and sirens to Big Heart Hospital Downtown, has Emergency! cardiac catheterization, we find out two of the three arteries to his heart are 100 percent blocked, and he has to have bypass surgery.  Ironically, when arteries are 100 percent blocked, it becomes not an emergency to anyone (but the nice lady cardiologist), beacause they “can’t get any worse,” and yet he is forced to stay in the hospital until after the 4th of July holiday, because July 1, 2005 was a Friday.  His surgery is scheduled for July 5, 2005.

SO…we go through all this with my dad, fast forward to September 2005, my mom gets sick and is hospitalzed for four days.  (I love doctors.  But they still haven’t figured out what is wrong, three years later.)  In the meantime, I am in school, working at a hospital, going VERRRRRY deep in debt…it’s all spiraling downward.  I remember going to a poverty simulation one night and feeling even worse because I felt like I was so close to being in the situation of those people – if it weren’t for my parents and living with them, I would have been.

In mid-April 2006, I got my acceptance letter to nursing school.  I was due to start in mid-May.  I had an interview at, ironically enough, Big Heart Hospital Downtown, which would have provided me a scholarship to pay for school and a job when I graduated. In the second interview, I choked.  Bad.  I couldn’t provide them with any decent answer as to why I deserved their scholarship.  And the thing is – I am great in interviews.  I do really well at that.  (Not to brag, but to prove my point?  I won the student council president seat in the fouth grade because I said I was going to bring a cheerleading team to our school and that I’d start a school bank.  I did neither of those things…)  So it was just…weird that I messed up, and ultimately, I didn’t get the scholarship, or the job.  I had other resources, but I was just spent.  So I said no to school, and went to become a nanny for a year.

By November 2006, my brain was fried.  I was on my third job in 16 months.  I was raising someone else’s kids – a job I loved but that frustrated me to no end.  I was off medicine that helped my migraines because I had terrible health insurance and it was too expensive.  I had gone off of another medicine that had caused me to gain 60 pounds in two years and develop polycystic ovarian syndrome (which I didn’t know at the time).  I was crying constantly, miserable, frustrated…so I sought out medical help.  I went on medicine.  I am not ashamed of it, because the medicine helped me through one of the toughest times in my life.  I was not myself.  I just didn’t tell very many people, because the last thing I needed was the added responsibility of worry.

And I blogged.  I blogged my way through depression, I blogged my way through nannying.  I blogged my way through a summer in California with only two little girls to be my friends.  I kept on with the medicine even though I felt better, because I knew quitting it wouldn’t work.  I blogged and kept the meds when I moved to Chicago, and when I moved back home.  And then.

I got a job.  I got a job that pays well (all things considered – when you’re thisclose to the poverty line when you file taxes, anything is better!), where I don’t have to work nights and weekends, and I am not pretend mommy for someone else (which apparently isn’t good for me).  On January 1, my prescription ran out for my medicine.  I chose not to get it refilled, just to see.  Normally, when you quit taking this medicine, you have ridiculously awful side effects.  I did before, but not this time.  So I kept on, one day at a time, with the promise to myself that IF I needed it, I would get it filled.  Suddenly, it was two months later, I was sitting in a doctor’s office with new (good!) insurance for a physical, requesting my old headache medicine, knowing it would be covered, and realizing that I didn’t need my other medicine anymore.

So I say all that to say that sometimes I have nothing to say.  I am still blogging – don’t worry, you…two faithful readers!  In the thick of things, the blog was where I held on, where I worked out my thoughts and organized them, because I couldn’t without putting them into words.  But for now, I am okay.  And so sometimes, I feel like I should have something deep and meaningful to say and I just don’t, because there’s nothing deep and meaningful going on inside my head it’s working itself out on its own.  My car is almost paid off, nearly a year after I was days away from having it reposessed.  I am months away (days, maybe!) from getting my own place.  I am not so scared of life anymore. 

I am doing okay.  God is faithful. 

Now.  On with the fun stuff.  Tomorrow?  Why I want this woman to be my BFF, and not just because I AM going to win and she is going to let the moosh Whoorl my hair…