!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> Jen's Dirty Thirties

3 days to one week delay: courtesy of an alcoholic upbringing

2005-11-20 / 11:38 a.m.
jesus tapdancing christ...i can't believe this is the FIRST entry for november! wait, yes i can. i've been busier than a one legged man in an ass kicking contest. wait, make that no legged man.

as always EMT class is kicking my ass. two weeks ago i had a mini meltdown because i earned an 88% on a test. now, before you laugh you should know a couple things. 1) i have in the past, been the queen of all things half-ass. there are still things that i do today that 'pass' and that's good enough for me. one thing that i don't care to do half ass anymore is my school work. to me, 'passing' is just doing the bare minimum of getting by and showing absolutely no effort or care for craft. since this class is job related, i care very much, largely because i don't want anyone at work to think i'm a dipshit because that would hurt my ego, i guess.
2) the grading scale for this class is TOUGH. one must earn at least a 94% to get an "A", and 75% is FAILING. so, if you do the math 88% is a B-, and as far as i'm concerned not as good as i could do.

i'm over it. i realize that i am good enough, and have been exploring what that whole paradigm of 'enough' means. i think i mentioned it a few journal entries ago: that i never thought i would find any comfort in a character from saturday night live. i AM good ENOUGH. i AM smart ENOUGH, and as for the 'garsh done it, people like me' part, i'm working on that, and probably will for years to come.

i was doing my EMT clinicals at the county ER, and i saw my first person die. it was surreal. i think because i grew up in such a volatile home, i've been programmed to have this delay system on my emotions. gimme something traumatic one week, and it takes anywhere from 3 days to a week to actually recognize that i feel anything. can anyone relate to that?

so the fire department brings in this 63 year old woman who had a full cardiac arrest at her home. the EMTs gave her the 3 stacked shocks and artificially resuscitated her. in the ER, i saw the team give her 4 more shocks, and continue ventilations, and the doctor just said, "okay we're done". everything stopped and walked away. i kept feeling like i was watching a tv show being filmed or something. it wasn't until i looked into her eyes and saw nothing glimmering that i realized this was a corpse. i dressed her in a gown and prepared her for her family to see. her skin was cold, like she had been outdoors. her hands and feet were the first things i noticed changing color. by the time her family arrived, i noticed really dark wine colored patches under her eyes.

vin asked me a year or so ago if i had ever seen a dead body, and i said "do gentile funerals count?" and he said "no". i asked him what was his analysis, and he said that in his experience, seeing the dead was like finding a shell on the beach: the body is there but you know that the inside is empty by looking into their eyes. and i guess that makes sense. i've done a ton of shell collecting and combed the beaches to find the most beautiful shells intact, and know that at one time something was inside there and lived in the water. i've also seen weathered pieces of sand dollars and crab claws that are empty and it all seems so overwhelming that i'm doing much more than splashing in the water. i'm walking on a giant open graveyard. i keep body parts of crustaceans in jars because they're pretty to look at. i use a hot glue gun and decorate boxes with them. i guess when one thinks about it the ocean isn't tranquil at all, it's very goth.

and almost a week to the day, after getting that B- on the test, i melted down. i realize that the stress of the test juxtaposed with watching someone die, and mixed with all the other shit that goes on in day to day living-(including having PMS) would make anyone freak out, i guess. anyway, i'm doing much better now.

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