fish are jumping and the cotton is high

Just when I thought the tunnel couldn't get any darker, some higher being decided to pity me and slingshot me into this big, bright, wonderful world again. In other words: school's out for summer (yeah!) This last quarter--hold up--this entire year has been the biggest challenge of personal strength and looking back on it I feel like I can get through anything! Maybe it sounds a bit melodramatic to put so much self worth behind school and classes, but I feel like my life has been eventful in so many ways this year. 1. School was damn hard. I survived, for better or for worse, with spirits intact...so I consider that a success. 2. Health problems? That came out of nowhere...with a hospital stay due to meningitis and a miracle quick recovery that allowed me to finish out my quarter on time. 3. Allowing myself to be wholly vulnerable--with myself and others, through community (Autoclaves, Ecuammunity), through learning to ask for help of friends and realizing that I don't always have to fulfill the self imposed role as the "strong one." Also, in finding unexpected love that challenges me daily to look for the beauty in every situation encourages me to channel that beauty and make it the forefront of my life experience. I'm realizing that life is a journey that doesn't require me to always take the lead and am realizing how easy it is to let down my guard and share my soul with someone who approaches life with similar passion and earnestness. It's safe to say I'm in a happy place right now.

MY NEW JOB IS BOMB.COM. I'm a nurse tech on the oncology [cancer] floor at UW Medical center. I clean up a lot of pee, have gotten pretty tight with the blood pressure cuff (ha), and can make a mean bed in 100 seconds. But, the heart of why I'm there lies in the incredible population of people I work with. It's such a different experience of oncology with adults vs. children. Connections are more powerful with adults and a wisdom is brought to that relationship where I feel a sense of honor and pride in being able to share in their lives. They are some of the most beautifully spirited people I have met in my life. Yesterday was thought provoking. I finished my first 40 hour week. All of my patients have been great but one couple stands out to me because theirs was the first room I walked into on my first day. I've worked with this particular patient everyday. She is a very sweet, middle aged lady and her husband is equally gentle and good humored. He never leaves her side and is very active in her care. She recently received a bone marrow transplant and I answered a call light to a startled and bewildered face as she held up a fistful of her beautifully black, full, waist length hair. She had begun the road of chemo treatment that would inevitably result in complete hair loss. The nurse and I offered to cut it so we put it in a ponytail and cut maybe 14 inches off. I asked her husband if he'd like to keep it and he just laughed. But, when he looked at his wife once regal with her mane of sleek black hair, now chopped up and short--pillows black with what had falled out on its own, the mixture of worry, compassion, love, and realization painted his face with an expression that wrenched my heart into a knot. He quietly and calmly asked me for a bag because he decided that he wanted to keep it. She had on a brave face and smiled at her new "light" look, but I witnessed an exchange of a glance between the two of them that made me retreat into her bathroom on the pretense of recording Is and Os when really I let out a few shaky sobs and tried to regain composure. I've seen a lot of bald patients undergoing terrible things to their bodies, yet today was the first time the gravity of a cancer diagnosis hit me like a brick. The love between the two of them was so tried and true that I felt like if any couple could withstand an obstacle like cancer, these two could. With impeccable timing, Jimmy texted me to remind me of a quote from Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning that says, "love goes far beyond the physical person of the beloved; it finds its deepest meaning in the spiritual being--the inner self." What a beautiful reminder of the consistency and depth of real love. We're lucky that there's a lot of love on 7NE.

R-