A Quarter Century!

Pete turned 25 on January 8th. We celebrated with cake, ice cream, and (best of all) friends and family!

Since I was given strict instructions by Pete not to get him any presents for his birthday, I of course got him some--but just a few fun little things.

First, I made 2 journals for me and Pete to each have one and write letters to each other in when I go to Africa this Spring (and since I'm not actually going to Africa anymore, I'm open to creative ideas about how to use these now).

Second, I bought him a BYU Basketball T-shirt that costed a whopping $5.

And finally, I went to Raj's 7/11 store on University and 5th North and bought a HUGE plastic "double gulp" cup.

Yes, there is a story behind this: Once, when Pete was a single man, he was overjoyed to discover in the cupboard of his new apartment a very LARGE plastic 7/11 cup. Because Pete can consume an incredible amount of water, the LARGE 7/11 cup became his regular glass--he drank out of it everyday and it became fondly known as "the man cup." When Pete got married, "the man cup" of course came with him. Sadly, his wife thought it too ugly to sit on the counter by the sink day after day as the focal point of the kitchen. She was overjoyed when, by necessity, it got demoted to catching the leaking water underneath the sink. When the leak was fixed, one look inside the man cup was enough to know it would never be useful for drinking again--no amount of bleach would have been able to kill the who-knows-what that was growing within. And so, after all its years of life and great legacy, it was thrown away--not even recycled. The wife was ecstatic, but Pete felt a great void in his life.

I basically realized how silly of me it was to hate the man cup so much. The new "man cup" is at this very moment sitting on the counter by the sink, in all it's red and white, double-gulp plastic glory. It makes me smile when I accidentally forget to avoid looking at it.



The best present of all was probably a signed copy of Eric's award-winning New Era article "Forgiveness and Football." It doesn't get much better than that :)

A couple days ago I was a yoga-doing, herbal tea-sipping woman reading in bed about Rembrandt.

What happened to the stressed out Nursing Student?

Well, she re-surfaced the next day. Don't worry.

I just wanted the world and myself to know that I am capable of doing cool things like Yoga and reading for Humanities.

This semester seems as though it will be intense, but it really hasn't picked up yet (hence the reason I have time to post). I am loving my D&C class, Humanities 202 class, and surprisingly...my Psychiatric Nursing Class! Acute Care (ICU) class is okay so far--after all, any class that is three hours long is hard to love. Back to Psych: I am doing my clinicals at the University of Utah Neuropsychiatric Institute (UNI) in Salt Lake. Each week I dread waking up at 5 am and am less than happy to be going, but then I go to clinical and LOVE it!

This past week for an assignment we did a video-taped role play. I acted out the role of a psychiatric nurse counseling with another student playing the role of patient with a mental disorder. The point of the assignment was to work on communication skills. Sounds easy enough, huh? Well, that's what I thought too so I didn't study or prepare beyond glancing at a sheet of "therapeutic communication skills."

It turns out that watching and evaluating the recording with my teacher was the longest, most drawn-out 8 minutes I've had in a while.

Painful.
Embarrassing.

I remember vividly the TWO times my teacher made a positive comment (I'm proud to say that I'm somewhat capable of doing a suicide assessment and asking an open-ended question. yay.)

As my teacher talked to me and gave examples of how to communicate with psych patients--how to dig deeper and get to the root of their problems, I realized that communication is an art...one that I need to practice.

To demonstrate, my teacher asked me questions and I pretended to be the patient, I was amazed at how AWESOME she was at communicating. By the end of the little demonstration I almost believed that I WAS depressed and thinking about OD'ing on Ibuprofen (really just kidding).

So communication has been on my mind a lot lately. Maybe there'll be more on that later. And maybe I'll start reading for Psych class.