Wow, the last several days in St Louis where quite busy and exhausting. I have been training for this position for 37 days and I have worked 5 cases, helped save 9 lives and I have no idea how many lives I will have helped improve. One person can improve the lives of 100s of people through tissue, bone, valve, cartilage and eye donation. It’s a pretty great feeling and there is so much more to come.
All of my cases have been hard, nothing is easy emotionally about what I do. One of my first full cases I helped save the lives of a 7 month old who needed a heart and an 11 month old who needed a liver. You can imagine how small the donor was. It was a very emotionally trying case. I had to be able to separate myself from the reality of the situation in order to get done what was needed. The loss of a life can bring life to others who may have eventually lost theirs.
Another case was one that I had mentioned in a previous post. A women who died of Broken Heart Syndr
ome. She left this world saving several others but leaving 4 small children and a husband dying of cancer. Those children are going to loose both of their parents in a very small period of time and I hurt for them. These families, in the time of great loss, are making wonderful decisions without having had the time to process everything that has happened. Sometimes in our society it is hard to believe that their are so many giving people in this world and yet so many others that are not willing to give.
What is it about organ donation that turns people away? Why would someone not want to help save others? Our society is lacking a tremendous amount of education on organ donation and I would love to help change that.
Find your state donor registry and sign-up to be an organ donor.
Well, life for the general public is good due to the fact that no one is dieing. Unfortunately, as sad as this may be, that makes life for me in St Louis kind of boring. I literally have the life of waiting around for someone to be declared brain dead in order to go to work. As depressing as that may sound when brain death happens that means I get to save lives.
Anywhere from 1-8 individual lives as well as aiding to improve 100s of lives through tissue, bone, eyes and cartilage.
I am on call for the next 3 days and I am constantly checking my phone to make sure I’m not missing something and it is working. We have had one referral, a person that has the potential of going brain dead, in 2 days. Very strange and also kind of scary, at some point this is going to have to stop. When that happens, it could be insanity.
So what have I been doing? Yesterday I had a couple of meetings but I had taken the day off. One was regarding the conference we are putting together for Springfield in May about The Power of Donation. This will be the first conference that Springfield has ever had to educate clinical people in the region on their role in the process of organ donation. Isn’t that sad? I am mostly in charge of putting this together. I am very excited for this but kind of dumb to what it means to set-up, plan or create a lay-out for a conference. I can’t begin to fathom what this is going to entail. So far we are ordering 1000 save the date cards and 200 invitations. I just hope it is a success.
Oh, I wish I would have taken a picture of myself yesterday morning. I thought it would be a brilliant idea to put the hotel coffee cup under the spout to my coffee maker and be able to make my coffee a cup at a time. What I didn’t think about was the burner on the coffee pot and the fact that the Stryofoam cup would have melted. Good thing I didn’t have a blond moment and was able to realize that fact before I started brewing my coffee. So I sat and ate my breakfast with one hand and held the coffee cup under the spicket with the other hand while it brewed. I know, I am quite pitiful, but it was awful good coffee. 
After my meetings I went to replace my coffee maker. I bet you would never believe that I went to Target and found the perfect, non glass, $25 coffee maker and of course they had none in stock. Just my luck this week.
Then I headed to lunch with my aunt at Olive Garden. Gotta love unlimited soup, salad and breadsticks. I then had to find another Target store and was able to get the coffee maker I had my eyes on earlier. I also went ahead and got some freshly ground Starbucks Espresso coffee. It was so good this morning.
So 7am this morning started my on-call days and I was seriously getting bored. I went to the Magic House Museum in Kirkwood with my siblings and step-mom for a couple hours. I decided at one point to slide down a three story swirly slide with both hands full of stuff. I’m not 10 anymore, I know, but I sure thought it would be fun. I couldn’t control myself however when sliding and ended up flipping over and hitting my head as I went down on my back head first about half way through. Then my 23 year old sister was coming down on top of me. It was quite humorous, but my head sure has a bump on it. Now I am sitting in the hotel room typing this. I have dinner plans tonight with some coworkers. Rough life. Trust me I know.
My third week of training in St Louis began on Monday and it has been an interesting couple of d
ays.
My journey started with a rather productive session of reflection on my 3 hour drive to the hotel. There has been a lot going on in life around me and my personal life that time to reflect was nice. I’ve never had so many different songs on my I-pod open a whole new meaning to me before. It was enlightening.
I got a handicapped double queen room in place of a king suite. I had checked in too late and they didn’t have any suites available. I guess I couldn’t complain because it was going to be more living space for the week, or could I. My room is right next to the elevators, hopefully this will continue not to be an issue. I guess I shall see come Friday night. Hopefully there aren’t any party people staying on my floor.
You never know what all you will need when living in a hotel for a week; well, I do now. First is my suitcase with my clothes (obviously) but most importantly my DVD player. This is not a portable DVD player, this is a real hook to the back of your TV kind of player. I am now an expert at hotel TV and DVD player hook-up. 
But that’s not all, I also have my duffel bag with my misc goodies in it. I am a coffee snob. I have to bring my own coffee maker, filters and creamer so I can make what I like. I don’t drink folgers and I like dark roast. That is only part of my goodie bag. Other luggage includes a cooler with different snacks, a bag full of munchies, toiletry bag and two laptops with bags. I have my personal laptop and my work laptop. So in other words I look like a high maintenance geek of a woman when I am lugging everything to my room.
So Tuesday morning I get up at 730 to start getting ready for my day full of meetings and my handicapped shower isn’t playing very nice. The regular shower head won’t work and the other one is so low I either have to take it off and try to rinse my hair with one hand or get on my knees to get under the water. Oh yeah, and all the hot water was gone. Can you picture it…cold water with a shower head that is barely hitting you and on your knees to rinse. Quite humorous. Made my special coffee and headed to the office.
We started a case on Tuesday afternoon. Made it to the hospital at about 330pm. A women had died of a broken heart. Truly, look it up, it is a true diagnosis. Very sad situation, young women with children and a husband who has only a few months to live. Good came out of it, she will save several people’s lives today and I helped with that. This was the best part of the last couple of days. The more and more I do this, I just learn more about life. You can’t put stuff off until tomorrow or the next day, you have to deal with it today. Tomorrow you may literally drop dead after living a very healthy life and leave everything unresolved because you thought it could wait. Serious posts are not for today.
I got back to my hotel room to inhale the smell of burned coffee. I had left my coffee pot on all night. OMG!!! So I left it to soak in the bathroom; I was really too tired to mess with it. After about 3 hours of sleep I was rudely awakened by a screaming stomping child above me. He was out of control screaming at his mom; I had to put another pillow over my head in order to go back to sleep. When I woke up later I decided to go clean out my coffee pot. I stuck my hand in the pot and scrubbed with my finger. You would never believe that my finger went through the glass, started bleeding and the pot busted. Are you freakin’ kidding me!!?? I am so going to have to go buy a new one tomorrow.
I have spent a glorious week with my husband, at home… on our computers…working. Pitiful right? I don’t even feel like I was home an entire week. My days were go, go, go. I was either running around meeting important people at the local hospitals and checking on referrals with one of my supervisors (yes I said one of), or I was at home on the computer researching. Who would have thought that researching volunteer opportunities with local charities was so time consuming? And could someone please tell me why you wouldn’t post volunteer information on your website? Why do people put a link that specifically says “Volunteer” and then have nothing useful? This is the 21st century people, no one wants to talk on the phone. I want a direct link to whatever application I need to fill out and check boxes for the volunteer jobs I want to take. Good grief.
So, in case you haven’t noticed, I had to email several people to get more information. The coordinator at the Make-a-Wish foundation was nice enough to email me and attach the application and all the information I needed. I sent those off in the mail today. Now I have to wait up to 4 weeks for my background check to be approved. I guess my word isn’t good enough .
Then I received an email from the lady at the United Way. “Please call me for more information on volunteering.” Really? So not only did I go to the site and find nothing except an email address but that wasn’t the right means of communication. I just want to get through this application process so I can get started on what is important in all of this.
So, what did I get accomplished with this? Killing trees. I printed off every bit of information I could find from each organization that I felt was important and organized it into a binder. So far this is my adventure into becoming a Philanthropist.
My first 4 weeks at this new position have been quite the transition from my norm. I am now carrying around two phones. One is the phone that keeps me connected to friends and family, this I am used to. The other is one that is connected to my hip at all times, especially if I am on-call. I am constantly connected to the people I work with at Mid-America (MTS). This is not a bad thing by any means, well to some it is I guess, it’s just something I have never experienced before.
Something else is the fact that I am no longer getting up at the crack of dawn to go work a 12 hour shift in scrubs. I have to change my mentality because I now work from home and could just sit in my pjs all day long if I wasn’t careful. This would be ok on the days that I am, again, not on-call but on those days I am…staying in my pjs is a bad move. See, once I get a call, I have 90 min from the time the hospital called MTS to get to the location of the patient who is potentially brain dead or dying. So I must get out of bed and get ready for the day. I had to go on a shopping spree, I know horrible huh, to get a new wardrobe for this position. That’s right, I am a professional woman now. I have to wear pantyhose, heels, and nice clothes all the time. Again, a huge transition.
Now on to the biggest change, I work with dead people. I was working in an ICU with the ultimate goal of saving people’s lives. Now I’m being called in after someone has died to save people’s lives that I have never laid eyes on. It is a huge separation I have to have mentally in order to maintain sanity. Everyone I am working with has already left this world. I don’t even have contact with people’s families now, this is a huge part of ICU nursing. That used to be one of my talents, working with the most difficult families. These people where dealing with very hard situations, traumatic and unexpected. On top of that some families were just really hard to deal with. Living in the Ozarks makes for some very interesting family dynamics and situations, but that is another entry.
With these changes, I am still learning, still in training. I am driving back and forth to St Louis every other week. I get to be home with Chris for a week and have certain days I am on-call. Then I travel back to St Louis for a week to be on-call 24 hours a day the whole time I am there. It is pretty exhausting, this training thing. I’m hoping for it to be over by mid to late March so that I can get back to some kind of normal schedule at home. Normal, I don’t think that is going to be possible again. I like not knowing what is coming next but I hate not being constantly busy with my adrenaline pumping.
More changes for me. Three 12 hour shifts a week with constant adrenaline and movement, wondering when the next time will come that you have time to go to the bathroom or eat something. You are moving so much that you forget that you even need to pee or eat. However, I do not miss the unit as of right now. All the drama, attitudes, backstabbing and stress; it is nice to not have to bring all that home all the time, I can breathe. I still work with a bunch of women so I am sure it is not totally gone from my life. The atmosphere of MTS though is different, they don’t keep anyone around very long that brings those things into the mix. We spend a lot of hours together, sleep deprived, and I don’t think those characteristics would fit into that scenario very well.
I have closed one door in my life as a working nurse and opened another. I am excited for this change and look forward to what is to come.