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Ever had one of those days where you just feel blank? Like nothing is going on inside your head, no thoughts, no feelings of any sort, just feeling blank? Or have those days where nothing tastes right? Yea, I am having one of those days. I tried to make it a good day but I just feel so blah, like everything is an effort.

I got my hair cut today and I thought I would feel better but I didn’t. I waited around for the bus to the Square to get my coffee and decided to get Mexican food instead of a pastrami sandwhich and it just didn’t taste right. I had half of it then threw it away. I then got my coffee, a pumpkin spice latte, iced and a pumpkin scone. The scone was edible. It was okay but the latte was terrible. I don’t know why but it just didn’t float my boat today. I drank half of it and tossed it. I just was not in the mood to finish it.

My therapist was able to fit me in her schedule today. I guess I should talk to her before the weekend. I hope that I can explain this blank feeling to her. She probably will just say ah ha. And that will be that. I hate it when she says that. I’m going to try and talk about the grief of not working. I think I am having a bout of it today. A friend of mine I used to work with is on twitter and still works in the lab. I miss working with her. She always made me happy when I was grumbling at work. It made the day go by faster because we would have a good laugh to ease to the tension of the work day. The job was stressful. We were responsible for people’s lives as we were the ones to order lab tests the doctors had ordered. If we ordered the wrong test, which happened occasionally, it would suck because it could delay treatment of the patient. I miss it, but I kind of don’t miss the stress of it, especially when it came to pediatric tests. I always felt bad when a little one was sick. Sometimes the nurses drew too much blood or not enough, mostly not enough, and expect us to perform miracles on a tiny drop of blood. I remember we had a newborn who needed a glucose and the nurse sent us the sample like three times and each time was the same amount of blood. She didn’t understand that we needed at least a half a tube of blood to get the test done. The worst part was that the parents were lawyers and were threatening to sue or cause something because she had to repeatedly stick the baby. I felt bad but we need more than a drop of blood to do our job.

We then had funny diagnoses from the ER. My favorite were the ones that came in because they were drunk and fell. Well no shit. Whoever drinks to the point of alcohol poisoning is going to tip over and get hurt. It really sucked when it was a young person. You just knew they could become alcoholics if they weren’t already there. But it was interesting working in the lab. Got to see some really cool specimens and others that were just beyond gross. We once had a sample that was supposed to be urine but because the patient was doubly incontinent, we got both stool and urine. And it stunk really bad. When I called to ask the nurse about it, she just said do the best we can. Yea, hold our breath as we analyzed it and hope we don’t pass out!

I wish I could remember the fun times in the lab. We used to have a lot of fun until a certain supervisor got jealous and made us stop. She really was a bitch though she would always play the injured party when caught. I always tried to keep my “good” side with her because she was such a backstabber, but toward the end of my days, it was getting harder and harder to do. She realized how much of an impact I had when I was there and soon laid off her phoniness with me. Not like that made things better, but it was a step up. I remember there was a time we played a joke on a friend. She had injured her foot in a car accident and took her sneaker off. Well, a coworker and I decided to hide it on her. When she came looking for it hours later, we made up some story that we used the pneumatic tube station and tubed it to blood gas. (it was still in the front office where we were but didn’t let her know that). She hobbled to blood gas looking for her sneaker while me and the other coworker who was in there just laughed our asses off. We actually forgot where we put it, until we went searching for it ourselves. The expression on her face was priceless. Those were the good days. We got the work done and still had a few laughs. Then the lab changed and so did the laughter. It was just work, work, work. Sure we would still have our breaks and such, but damn, it was hard keeping up with the patient’s samples coming in and not enough people to log them in. There were nights we had to leave the outpatient samples for night shift. We could only do so much in eight hours. And computer downtimes, scheduled or unscheduled were always a bitch. You always got that one not so understanding clinician who wanted his stuff above all the others just so his shift could come to a close. We would go out of the way to find it and then find out that there was another doctor covering him. So much for it being a priority!! I would get so pissed off.

There were days I would just get to work and be in a bad mood. Saturdays were the worst. If day shift left us outpatient bags, I was even in a worst mood. Plus they always seemed to wait for me to come in and hand off the problems that should have been dealt with hours ago. I had a rule of not talking to be until after six o’clock, because by then, things were caught up and day shift was really gone and all the problems have been dealt with. But never failed that a half hour or even fifteen minutes before my shift ended more problems would come in and I would have to stay on till exactly midnight or after to make sure they were dealt with and handled properly. I always made sure things were clearly documented so the supervisor would know what was going on. And in my line of work, you had to be clear otherwise mistakes would make the mistake worse.

I liked my job. It was routine. I was the one that was there the longest and knew the system better than anyone (other than the computer staff). I also helped where I was needed even if it wasn’t my “job” for the day. But things got more difficult the more my mobility slowed me down. When we had the big analyzer machine installed, I found I couldn’t run it and aliquot specimens in the same shift. I would be dead the next day and often it lead to me calling out on my next scheduled shift, which I rarely ever had to do. Once I stopped having a car, getting to work on Sunday was getting to be impossible. I was late and it took me over two hours to get to work, by public transportation. I just said the hell with it and worked during the week and Saturdays. Sometimes, I would work only half shifts and even those were painful. I sometimes had to leave my shift in a wheelchair or half way through, go down to the emergency room because the pain got to be so bad I could hardly stand. My leg would swell and hurt really bad. I never found out why it swelled and hurt so much. I just found that I needed a day in between working until finally I had to have restrictions in my day in order to work. Then lost my job because it couldn’t accommodate me. That was really painful, emotionally, because I worked my ass off even through the worst of my pain. I had no idea that it was so restrictive. But it was the only thing that I could think of so I wouldn’t have to take any more time off work and get off FMLA (family medical leave act). So I went from working two jobs to trying to work forty to none in four months. And it sucked! I really didn’t know what I was going to do. I tried to get another position in the hospital but little did I know the hospital had a hiring freeze on. I needed a job that I could work sedentary but couldn’t find one. Then when I lost access to my work email and such, I stopped looking and filed for disability. I already had two psych hospitalizations and was working on a third when I was out of work. I had to file for long term disability, which was a mountain of paperwork. I think it took more paper than social security! I got both within a month of each other. I was glad because finally I could pay off some bills that had piled up while I wasn’t collecting anything. But it still is tough living on a monthly check. I still have not learned the art of budget. I seem to pay the most important bills, my cell phone, Starbucks, health insurance, and cable bill. What I have left has to last me until the next month, which sometimes it doesn’t. I could have a dollar to my name until the next check. And I always make sure that I have transportation money or I am not going anywhere for the month. And that will suck!! I just got to figure out how to spread out at least two hundred dollars of spending money and make it last a month. And somewhere in there has to be food money. I can’t live on coffee alone.