The Sixth Sense

So those ST depressions found on 12 lead? My ST depressions. Well, I'm having an echocardiogram next week. Probably only because my doctor is thorough, but, I don't know. I think of people with actual heart disease as needing echos. And also, I'm not that stoked about it, because I know it means lying really still for about a half hour with your left chest covered with goop and probed with a probity-probe.

I'm. having. chest. pain. (Remember that Life Alert commercial? It's actually pretty funny/cheesy, but then you have a patient with real chest pain and suddenly it's not so funny, except every once in awhile the I-must-distance-myself-from-the-horror-of-mortality function in my brain goes haywire and I think of Life Alert, whilst I sprint to the pyxis for the sublingual nitro.)

Meanwhile, work-stuff again has me half way toward some kind of psychotic break. I was up last night at two a.m. walking the dog and smoking a cigarette. (Great, add lung cancer, COPD and emphysema to my future diagnoses). Then I went and sat on the kitchen floor, ate half an apple, drank a bottle of Ensure (because I'm ninetfy five pounds and can't seem to eat a full meal any more). I didn't feel worthy enough to sit at the table, so I sat on the floor. Then I curled into a fetal ball in bed and tried to wake up my husband to torture him with my angst (because a relationship is all about sharing, isn't it?) but he wasn't having any of it, so I got to lie awake with my own demons for several hours before drifting off into a weird dream about water slides like they have at Orlando theme parks.

There are days (okay, weeks) when I just don't feel cut out for the job, and wish I was cloistered somewhere, maybe in academe, teaching undergrads all Dead Poet's Society style by jumping up on desks--or feebly climbing up on them giving the state of my back--and making them rip up their textbooks (which kids probably do now any way, at least in public schools, without teachers actually encouraging them to do so). There's no possible way to screw up teaching kids about Dickens, Poe, or Emerson, is there? I mean, I'd never have to get to class, survey my charges, and develop this ominous feeling I'm privy to now, that nurse's sixth sense of, 'Oh boy. This patient's gonna crump, and crump soon. I hope s/he doesn't do it on my time.' And I'd never have to go home and feel like, "Shit, if I could have just done that one extra magical task which would eliminate all his/her medical problems in one fell swoop and s/he could go back to living life and enjoying a beer every now or then."

And never, ever would I have to feel the agonizing, neurotic feeling of maybe I could have done more. I don't know what it's called, but I think it's something akin to survivor's guilt. It's obviously not, but it feels similar.

The cliche about having to find distance between yourself and your patients in the nursing profession is true, but it's devilishly hard to attain. There are days when I wish I was not so new to the profession, and could take it all in stride, the good and the bad and the ugly, and attain the desired goal of leaving work at work. Goddamn that type A, Catholic guilt, inferiorty-complex, pre-installed personality of mine, I can't.

I should have known a long time ago, when I was in highschool, and spent an average of four to five hours a night studying to classical music, that I was doomed as a grown up, because what the hell kind of a kid takes stupid highschool homework that seriously? I was a geek then, and I am a geek now (although I'm more comfortable with the geek aspect of my personality) and still somewhat socially awkward, but, well, I don't know if astrology plays into it, but I'm a Cancer (crab) and my little pincers want to hold. on. for. dear. life. no matter what the issue.

It's ironic, this feeling of being an over-achieving failure. It's sad to feel like the only thing you were good at was school, and turning in your homework on time, and having nice professors write nice comments on your lame essays about Middlemarch or Pelagius. And maybe at one time you were kind of good at playing the piano, and in highschool you won some stupid first place district award for playing a movement of a Mozart concerto (No. 23 in A major, K. # I forget, but I think it was 488.) And you won a full scholarship to graduate school, and uh... it all still doesn't matter, because you feel you suck at your present job, and who the hell cares that you've read most of George Eliot's and Kant's major works? (Adam Bede, any one?)

I really wish this whole feeling of inferiority would let up, though, because there's only so many martinis I can consume without also adding end-stage liver disease to my future diagnoses list, too.

Okay, so on a more positive note, here are things I'd love to be able to do or achieve but probably won't happen in this lifetime (in no particular order):

1) Understand Kant's philosophy. And Hegel's. And maybe Schleiermacher's. And Tillich's.
2) Speak, read and write Latin fluently.
3) Play the piano like Rudolf Serkin (or even his son Peter). Or Vladmir Horowitz. Or V. Ashkenazy.
4.) Learn how to play the violin and cello.
5.) Understand Chemistry, Math, and Physics (this will definitely be in another lifetime).
6.) Be photographed by Annie Leibowitz. With my dog.
7.) Meet Anne Frank (obviously, never going to happen, but I still wish I could.)
8.) Ask the pope why the hell he wants to abolish limbo. I mean where are all the unbaptized babies going to go?
9.) Write a book. Maybe a kid's book. About my dog.
10.) Have perfect pitch (unfortunately, you have to be born with it, but whatever).
11.) Think up scathing witty repartees when people piss me off. Also not going to happen.
12.) Figure out why I seem to be presently breaking out in a rash on my forearms and trunk. Seriously.