today is the and the theme is pumping. while i didn't chose to submit for the carnival, i am chosing today to write about pumping.
about my love hate relationship with the pump... well, mostly about the hate portion. its rhythmic sucking makes me sing little songs to its always irritating tempo. then they mix around with the gymboree songs already stuck in my head. then i realize how badly i really do need the prozac and ativan.
i don't know for sure how long it's going to last. i'm trying to be realistic about the prospect of having cancer, undergoing chemo and pumping for (hopefully only) six months. it's kind of like starting out nursing. i tried to limit my expectations of myself. i said i'd aim for six months and then see if i could go for a year. that seemed ridiculously long to me at the time, much like pumping for six months does now. but a year came and went and well, here we are.
nugget daddy stayed down at my parents last night so nugget and i have been left to fend for ourselves for the majority of the past two days, save for a playdate and lasagna drop off yesterday afternoon.
i didn't get to pump at all yesterday. i can't pump in front of nugget. that would be like asking your pregnant best friend to take you to happy hour. i meant to pump last night once she went to sleep, but i fell asleep, too. my boobs had been angry ever since.
nugget likes to have her naps with me in , but this limits my options for the duration of naptime as to what i can actually accomplish with twenty pounds of sleeping toddler strapped to my chest, lovely though as she feels snuggled against me. her grandmamie puts her to sleep in the stroller and i bribed her into it with chocolate chips this afternoon so i could pump, finally, and subsequently blog about it. lucky you!
i was so angry the first few times i pumped after starting chemo. it was like rubbing salt in the wounds. i couldn't nurse nugget and i had to stand uncomfortably in the bathroom watching my milk fill up plastic bottles instead of a happy baby. and then as i would dump the ounces of hearthache down the sink a new wound would appear like a gaping mouth to catch my salty tears and sting my aching soul. what a waste.
you won't find much if you google "cancer" and "breastfeeding" except for articles about nursing after breast cancer. "chemo" and "breastfeeding" yields the same contraindication tagline over and over, and "cancer" and "breastmilk" mostly just points you to article after article about who drank breastmilk to fight his prostate cancer. those, mostly sensational and local news, articles mention when they have excess available to sell. it costs $3 an ounce.
i've had plenty of time to think about that guy and those $3 ounces while making up songs to the pump's rhythm and calculating how much i'd just poured down the drain. warning! here comes the crunchy freaky part. squee! maybe you want to stop reading, uptight next door neighbor guy or old school grandpa, maybe there's a golf game you'd rather be watching. okay, so seriously, why the fuck would i want to keep dumping my milk down the drain when other cancer patients are paying good money to get their hands on it? i don't know what exactly it might do for me, but it sure won't be doing anything at the bottom of the sink that's for sure. so i sucked it up and sucked it down.
it was sort of gross at first, though why exactly i'm not sure. i think it was the temperature. i can't think of any beverage i regularly consume at body temperature. but now i'm used to it and pleased by thought that .
so, now i have a new goal. i want to pump twice a day for the whole six months, or however long it might be. i know i might get sick. i know i might have to stop if i do. but if i approach it the way i did breastfeeding, then maybe i can make it through. maybe if i tell all of you about my plan then i'll be hell bent on reaching my goal. maybe some mother out there trolling the interwebs for a will find my blog now, instead of all the other useless crap i found.
NCLEX. Boards suck. The review class that I took said that from now til the time you take the boards (for you non-nurses, this is our licensure board) you need to answer AT LEAST 5,000 questions! OMG! Depending on your date, that could be 150-300 questions A DAY! Oh, and they tell you the longer you wait, the statistics for passing lower. Great. There are so many topics, diseases, fields, approaches, and so on. I have 4 NCLEX books, each with a disk of 1,000-4,000 questions on the CD, plus the questions in the book. And there is an on-line one I use, that has another 3,500 questions. HOLY CRAP! Choosing how and what to study is so hard!
Anyways, I won't say when my test is, but it is in the first two weeks of July. I don't want the pressure of having to give y'all an pass or fail. If I fail (WHICH I WON'T), I want to take it in, does that make sense? But when I PASS, I'll be yelling, texting, emailing, myspacing, hitting up every blog telling everyone! HA!
My kids have been pure evil. Pure evil. I worked the other night, and came home to Michael sleeping on the couch, where he had fallen asleep while watching a movie (reviews to come later). I went in our bed. I woke up about 10 am to yelling and screaming. Apparently my wonderful children decided that they needed to open their window, kick out the screen, climb out, and go to the shed. From there they brought multiple things in. This includes the motor/steering column from their water boats, a box of sewing stuff, a box of paint for model cars, and so on. Stuff they did NOT need, hence it being in the shed. Further than that, they decided that the spools of thread needed to be made into spider webs around their room, so I lost about 10 spools of thread. "Oh, that's not bad", you say? Well how about this:
Yes, that's paint. All over the carpet, all around the room. All on the walls. All on the dresser. All over them. Not a happy mother. However, my MIL (mother in law), who is your typical grandmother, letting them have whatever, saying maybe as opposed to flat out saying NO, told them to go in their room for being naughty boys when she came over that day. I was very pleased at her for standing up to them. :)
Michael is doing well. Did I mention he dislocated his knee a few weeks ago? It still bothers him. He's had a third interview with a company, so we are waiting on an answer from them! Cross your fingers! Meanwhile, he's working at a jewelry store and had me come look at rings (since mine is gone). OMG, he had picked out the hugest most beautiful rings! How sweet of him!
Anyways, I hope y'all find your summer going well, as ours is off to a rough start!
After a couple of months away from everything I know, I was back. Back from doing whatever I wanted. Back from thinking you had no responsibilities.
Back to reality.
I'll start my series here, in the most recent episode in my life – it's really not as if there was something majorly exciting about my life before this, so you're not really missing anything. As I said before, I was back. I recently took a vacation away from work (I'm pretty sure even workaholics have heard of this word before, though I don't consider my self as such) for a couple of months. I honestly thought it would be longer, but fate, it seemed, was not on my side.
I work in a local government hospital (no point in pin-pointing what hospital exactly). I used to be a volunteer over there (which basically means you work for the sheer satisfaction of caring for the sick and the wounded; Need more translation? You work and work and work and you get no compensation for it) and now, after a year of doing all the work, they get to pay me a small amount for my services. It isn’t much to celebrate over, but hey, it’s better than nothing, right?
I immediately had to start my week in the night shift which starts at ten in the evening until six in the morning the following day. Good thing, I had someone with me to help as I was supposed to handle twice the number of patients that you can count in one hand. I didn’t find it hard to find my game up and running. I was only out for a couple of months, so nobody really thought that I had to be oriented to the area once more.
I knew what was coming since I still had to work in the same department as I had before (in my case, I work at the Surgery Department), so I knew that it wasn’t going to be a particularly easy-going or pleasant shift (when you work in the government hospital of a third world country, it’s never easy-going – ok, maybe once in a while it is). More often than not, you have someone under your watch dying on you. Trust me, after a fair few deaths under your shift, you cease to feel this ache in your chest whenever you hear the cries of sorrow of those who were left behind. I’m not an unfeeling human being, but this is the nature of our work. We see sick and dying people eight hours a day, five days a week. As the saying goes, “Life goes on…” It might sound harsh, but that’s life for us.
I don’t mean to introduce you to the gloomy reality of my world, but despite the morose feeling, I was pleasantly surprised.
Life has given me a fair few pleasantries to give me hope that, in the future, I will be happy, not that I intend to not be.
I found out that I missed people. I missed how I was with them. When I’m with my colleagues, I am an easy-going person, not particularly hard to please. And as hard as I tried to deny it, I also missed doing my job. I missed doing my responsibilities that are entailed in my title – I’m talking about the R.N. title.
I was even more pleasantly surprised to know that people missed me, too. I didn’t realize that. I thought I was insignificant enough for people to forget after a couple of months away.
At the end of my first shift back, I was happy. I didn’t expect to be. I was excited even, to go back to work again.
As I look back, I ask myself why I felt that way. Working in a hospital with more patients than one person could ever handle would normally translate to stress, frustration and disappointment to myself.
But then, I figured, at the end of the day, all you really need to think about is the people you have around you. If they’re almost just like you, usually calm, collected with enough sense of humor to keep you up all night. Then there’s really no need to worry.
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| By N2H | ||||