Dreaming of Pink Mountains

I made it through my marathon, my first long run in over a year. I haven’t done anything this long since February 06. I was more concerned about my hamstring, and that was okay. I felt tired. I haven’t been doing enough long runs. I had a great first three hours and was strong on the climb, holding back for the hamstring. The last two hours were tough, I struggled on the flats through the muddy sections from 17 to 23 miles. I managed to get through my long bad patch and hauled ass the last 2 miles or so back to Salida.

It could have been a two-plus hour sufferfest at the end, but about 4 hours into it I came up on another runner who turned out to be from the same town as me, she is a medical social worker, and we had a great conversation about health care and the hospital setting. I was describing the personalities I’ve been dealing with. The control freaks, the passive aggression, and the backstabbing. I told her how I can’t understand the nastiness, why it seems that a disproportionate number of nasty people go into nursing and stay in it.

Nurses are strong headed and worse, she said. She agreed that it’s hard to be a paid slave when you get treated so poorly and there’s so little comfort. We were over 4 hours into the marathon and slogging through the shoe-sucking mud and it made the pain and suffering melt away. It also turned out that we have some common acquaintances back in Desert Hills. It looks like we will be able to hook up for training runs in the near future. Finding a new running partner was worth every minute I suffered. Seeing Mt. Shavano and the Collegiate Peaks shining bright pink in the morning sun Saturday when I woke up before the race was worth all I went through to get back here.

I need to see a lot more pink mountain sunrises.

Here I am five months into my orientation, about to take a deep breath and go back tomorrow for the beginning of the end. I have class all this week, which will be a good break from patient care. I have one more month and then I get to enjoy being overwhelmed all on my own. I don’t look forward to it too much. Maybe it does get easier. I’m committed to ICU for at least two years before I will allow myself to consider other options. I need to see how it goes, learn enough to be more comfortable, and see how things change at work. I’ll give it a chance. There are lots of other nice people at work, I don’t seem to share the same schedule with them. I wish I had more people to talk to. So many are negative or insensitive or rushed or tired or…

What I like about the few people I can talk to is that they are real. I know what they want, to go to work, do their jobs, feel good about what they do, and go home and not think about it, and have their lives. I completely understand. That is what I want too. I don’t want to be consumed by this. I don’t want to become one of those negative nasty bitter insensitive self-hating miserable control freaks stuffing my face all afternoon with greasy junk food and sugar to make it through the day.

Am I crazy to be dreaming that work could be different from that?