This week has been a tough one for me. On Monday on the way to the train I fell, and I knew it was bad when I realized I was going to need help to get up. Instead of going to lab that morning I spent it in the ER. I remember sitting on the ice thinking, “is this the moment that takes me out of the GEP program.” What I was excited about was that thought was but a 30second flash through my mind, and I tossed it out as an option. I had just been feeling like this was all beginning to really feel manageable.
Kind strangers trudging through the ice to the Loyola El practically carried me into a bookstore (after having banged on the door begging them to let us in before opening hours) to wait for my husband. Then I sat on a chair, with my foot elevated just sat watching my foot expand. Thinking, I am a student nurse and yet I am completely stumped by what I should do (I did have it elevated and I did ask for some ice, but it’s the “extras” I felt I should know).
I have to admit it was kind of exciting to be in the hospital after having learned even the smallest amount I have about nursing – feeling that much closer to being on the “inside”. Of course I was catching all the discrepancies about practice versus evidence-based practice that we have been learning; and it was a busy morning there with all sorts of patients with similar complaints like mine. I was hoping for the "you win free healthcare today for being the 100th person to fall on the ice" award.
The other thing to come of this experience has been my support network emerging from the woodwork. I had friends bringing my family dinner, a friend who drove me to school everyday, people who came to watch my kids, tidy my house, and pitching in to make my daughter’s birthday party still happen this weekend. It was through this unfortunate series of events that I became aware of just how I am getting through this program in the first place, all of these people who believe in me and are there in the background ready to come around me in the moment I need them.
It has been so real for me how much of a person’s life is spun out of control when things like this happen, not to even compare a simple sprain that has laid me up for a while to anything chronic. I have been amazed at how many other tiny things in my life began to unravel from the simple injury. The perpetuating impacts of small inconvenient hiccups that life sends ones way, that can have larger repercussions. I am so grateful for the amazing support of family, friends and other students, but it makes me consider even more how many go through these things without those support networks and how quickly various parts of life would fall apart.
It has been a very difficult week and staying positive, motivated and upbeat has been a struggle, but I thankfully made a decision moments after that fall that I would fight inconvenience the whole way down, and that I would be on top. And although I am somewhat fatigued and battle torn I feel that I have done just that. Now if a three-year-old birthday party doesn’t do me in I will be ready to sail into next week better than ever!
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