Deep breathing...

For the most part I love my job. 

I love my job a lot. 

Love the people I work with. 

However as with most things the shine kind of comes off after a year. 

There have been some little things.  The building I'm in they are planning on doing major construction. So as you'd imagine there are some snafus. One of the snafus is that the heating and cooling can be an issue.  In April we had a warm streak.  I asked what the plan was since things started to get hot.  And by hot I mean the humidity was high.  I don't tolerate heat well.  Especially when gowned up in an isolation gown, a face mask, and a N95 and goggles and shields.  

The site manager and building manager all essentially told me I was being ridiculous.  That I was the only one complaining.  In May things got worse.  We had opened up on Sundays and honest to goodness I went around and the building temperature was 82 degrees with a high humidity.  

And at that point they realized I wasn't crazy.  No apology was issued.  At one point I was told I was hte only one complaining about the heat.  I may have said sarcastically have you talked to the patients.  They also realized that the air had been turned off at 5 pm (we close at 7) and they hadn't programmed the heaters for the weekends or after 5 pm.  

Recently an incident at work occurred - no patients were harmed, but with workplace violence an issue the response was lack luster.  I mentioned it in a social setting that I felt was a safe place to talk about this... and I heard from my boss and the words that were used was that I should not have mentioned it to anyone that once I had I became "dramatic" and "drama" and that she's heard that a few times.  That "You're a leader in this organization" and that "You have to realize that we are handling things" I may have gotten mad... Okay I got a lot mad.  I'm currently debating how to send an email that makes everyone understand that I will tolerate a lot. Do not ever call me dramatic when I am being many things - dramatic is not one of them. 

Pissed off - yes that is one of them. 

Feeling as if I've been treated as a child rather than the professional that I am... also yes. 

Anger.

 Hi again... 

I told you I'm dusting off the cobwebs and I have lots to say. 

A year ago I left an organization that I had been with just shy of 20 years.  I left to work with a different organization.  A much smaller one and to work as a nurse practitioner.  Let me just say I love working as a nurse practitioner.  I love the patients.  It's great. 

What don't I love? 

I don't love that I came from a management philosophy of if you had a problem with someone the manager was supposed to give you guidance to talk to that person first and then if that didn't solve the problem then you brought it to them.  The new org philosophy seems to be if you have a problem you automatically go to whatever manager is available. 

1st it's childish.  

2nd it creates distrust among workers. 

3rd it pisses me off. 

I also don't love that when I've brought up issues such as a lack of air conditioning at one point where the facility temperature was 78 degrees plus that I was essentially told that I was being dramatic.  Turns out they hadn't programmed the air for weekends or after 5 pm.  But I was being "drama" and I was being overly dramatic.  

I work weekends and nights and I'm literally the person on site in charge. A situation occurred not involving patients. I mentioned in a social setting that it didn't go quite as smoothly as one would hope.  The supervisor called me to say that I was creating drama and that it should have been kept on the down low.  That it created unnecessary fear. It was a healthcare worker safety issue.  Any person that worked at that site should have been notified via email.  It's almost a week later - no email has gone out of how we're going to improve the response.  

This was a situation of don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining.  Because it's pee, not rain.  

It takes a lot to piss me off, but they finally managed to do it.  Apparently you hit the 1 year mark and people go from loving you to hating you.  

I spent 20 years in a job that I loved with people I didn't.  I won't do that to myself again.  I have a contract. The contract is until next August.  If things don't change then I'll do another year after that and leave.  I'm not going to be made to feel like I'm overreacting.  

I was forthright and honest with them about who I am and what I stand for. If I see something wrong I say something.  If I say something and weeks go by before anything is done then I'll say it again.  And if that makes me drama well so be it.  

I'm done being nice about things. 

You wanted to wake the beast... well here she is.  

So now I'm formulating my response.  Because I will finish out my contract.  I hoped this would be my retirement job.  You know the one you'll love for the rest of your career.  Right now I'm pissed, I'm hurt and well it's pretty bad when the cop goes - oh no you didn't just resign did you? 

*cough cough* Knocking off the cobwebs...

Knock knock... 

Cough cough - there's a lot of dust around here. 

So yeah hi! 

It's me Sami again... 

A lot may be wondering what I'm doing here again... 

Well life happens.  It's been almost 7 years since I last blogged.  Many may wonder why I chose to do it again. 

Primarily because I have a lot to say. 

I'm no longer in the trenches of trying to get pregnant. 

I'm firmly entrenched in my kids lives. 

I'm now a FNP and hubs is now my stay at home b*tch. 

Our original pups have been long gone.  

Ernie died about 5 years ago... 

Lola at the height of the COVID pandemic. 

Fred the geriatric cat died this year... 

We now have a cast of characters named... 

Winter - a white german shepherd poodle mix

Heidi - a Weimaraner from the same breeder who gave us Meg and the pups. 

Artax "Artie" - a black dachshund/stratfordshire terrier mix

and 

Wally the cat with his murder mittens... 

Nana is still around.  She has dementia.  I'll talk a lot about that. 

Squeaker is almost 15. 

Peanut just turned 11. 

Moose is 6 going on 7. 

Boy do I have stories.  

I realized I still have some anonymity and can post stuff on here that many in real life don't know about and I haven't figured out how to do that anonymously on the book of Face or twitter... 

So here I am.  

I'm working 40+ hours a week with a long commute... 

I miss the social aspect of all of you. 

I have lots to say... about life. About living with 3 kids, 3 dogs, a cat, a mom with dementia and a new stay at home husband... and getting it out is probably going to be the way I get through it all. 

Life is hard.  I don't say that lightly.  It is.  

So stay tuned.  I have charts to close, but I'm dabbling in jumping back in.  

He's Here

Sorry to have dropped off the face of the earth...  Things have gone well, other than gestational diabetes, NST's and my physician falling through a scaffolding which left him out of commission for 12 weeks during my pregnancy.  I did end up coming off work early due to contractions.  My c-section was scheduled for 11/23, but as with Squeaker the best laid plans have a way of going off the rails.  My water broke (again a trickle not a gush) on 11/20.  It took me a while to figure it out.  Fortunately I told D before he left for work and then had to explain everything to Squeaker and Peanut.  We left for the hospital only to get tied up in rush hour traffic.  Which was not a big deal as I was having contractions, but nothing awful at the time.  Once we arrived we were checked in, met with the nurse practitioner who confirmed my water had indeed broke and then slowly started the process to get everything ready.  We went from triage to labor and delivery and by that time I was dilated to a 2 with contractions every 3 minutes.  Go time was supposed to be 8 pm.  Unfortunately being me that was held up by a weird antibody in my bloodstream that made cross matching me difficult.  So we waited and I contracted and things were getting a bit more uncomfortable.  At 9:45 pm we went to the OR and magically my spinal was placed with 1 poke.  At 10:15 pm Finn Thomas arrived, with beautiful apgars and a healthy set of lungs.  7 lbs 4 oz and 19.5 inches long.

He is beautiful and my heart aches for him.  We still don't have a great nickname for him, but we'll get there.

Life is complete.

Whoops - Sorry to leave you hanging...

So we had the ultrasound and it showed appropriate growth and a heartbeat.  So I can breathe a bit easier.  Unfortunately I had to meet with a doc that I had never met before and who really didn't know me as my doc was on vacation - THE NERVE.  He proceeds to say while recurrent miscarriage is common after seeing the heartbeat the risk goes down.  I tried to nod at what he was saying, but I really wanted to say get out.  He was patronizing and condescending and since he said maybe he'd see me at my delivery I wanted to say "I hope not."  But refrained.  

On checking out I found that when I needed to schedule my nuchal scan that I also needed to meet with a geneticist and a maternal fetal medicine specialist due to advanced maternal age.  ACK.  Apparently I'm old and my eggs have expired.  This should prove interesting.  I staved off my panic at least for the moment.  So April 16 I get to hear a lecture from a nurse... really, I'll try to keep the eye rolling to a minimum.  Then May 13 I meet with my doctor and May 18 I meet with the MFM and geneticist and have my scan.  Fun times... in the meantime I'm shooting up progesterone and trying to stay mellow.  

We haven't decided when to tell the in laws and my mom.  Maybe in November?  My mom is just such a volatile combination and my in laws are currently visiting.  I'd rather keep the drama to a minimum.  

Unexpected news...

*Tap* *Tap* *Tap*

Anyone here?  

I know... it's been a long time.  I even forgot how to login to my account.  

Anyways... long time no chat, or blog or whatever.  The kids are great.  I'm a hot mess, but the kids are great.  Squeaker is 7.5 and Peanut is 3.5 and both kids are doing well.  Nana is still around though she's getting goofier and when I say goofier I mean her short term memory is iffy at times.  She's also hostile at times which makes what I'm going to tell you even more of a issue. 

So life at the 3 dog house was going well... then end of February to the beginning of March D started having issues at work.  When I say issues I mean that he has a hostile coworker who has managed to get herself named in 3 lawsuits including hostile work environment.  She apparently targeted him as her direct supervisor and well it was game on.  D was upset, I was trying to be supportive and well... lets just say all of my coworkers agreed the only way to make a man forget his problems is to well put it bluntly... put out.  So... that's what occurred.  

Flash forward 2 weeks and well... you get my drift.  In spite of our attempts to prevent a pregnancy we never took more permanent measures.  I have found myself not negative again.  Cue the anxiety.  And by anxiety - I mean a full blown panic attack.  Fortunately I have friends... Who could talk me off that particular ledge.  

The panicked phone call to the RE's office found me learning that my medical records were in storage and that they felt that my OB would be able to handle things in regards to PIO, betas, and early u/s.  The phone call to the OB office meant that I had to retell my story to the nurse because of course my doctor was not on call that day, but the NP was and well let me just say getting progesterone and labs out of that person was a goat rodeo.  It took 5 phone calls.  I was in tears.  For some reason it was an issue and rather than calling and talking to me about it I was having everything relayed to me through a phone nurse.  Which led to me sending an email asking if there were going to be issues with my care, that if there were and they were uncomfortable that I could still seek the RE's office.  I pointed out that my records indicate what was used in my previous successful pregnancies and that if it was an issue I'd like to know now.  

So now here we are a little bit later... the betas were good.  I have a rough estimate when I ovulated, however of course the OB's office goes by lmp and that's a fiasco.  We had the early u/s yesterday which showed a gestational sac, yolk sac, but too early for a heartbeat.  If they had listened to me the u/s would have been pushed a few days, if not a week.  However now I have another u/s on the 9th.  So we shall see.  In the meantime if we're facebook friends - don't post anything on my wall.  This is top secret.  Well at least as top secret as you can be when you're taking phone calls at work and dodging your mother so she doesn't know why you're going to the doctor or to an "Appt".  So we shall see... 

Write Up...

That's the words that were muttered to my mother when she picked up Squeaker at the bus stop by the bus driver.  Apparently my little heathen had hit the bus driver in the back of the head while the bus was driving and the day before he had spit on a girl.  He had progressively gotten worse on the bus with worse behavior.  He's 5... who wants their 5 year old kicked off the bus, but at the rate he's going that's probably what will happen before the end of the year.

We've instituted the 123 M*gic into our daily lives... my mother of course doesn't believe in it as she calls it it's bull*hit, but at least I have D on board with it.  S*anking was not working... (Good golly I have a lot of asterisks in my blog post)  I never bought into it and have tried until now to get D on board with other discipline efforts.  It's not perfect, but it has helped.

Squeaker is at school all day - he goes to the special education classroom in the morning and then to the kindergarten classroom in the afternoon.  We learned at his parent -teacher conferences that he was doing excellent, using his words to problem solve, asking for help with conflicts, etc.  Then we had to break the news to them of the bus problems... so now we have a book we're going to read to him about bus behaviors, etc.

I'm at a loss for words as to what to do to help him on the right path.  He has moments of greatness and moments of awfulness.  He's a strong willed child.  He's a smart mouth.  He's incredibly loveable at times...  He makes me crazy... he makes my mom crazy... Nana threatens to quit probably once every other week if not more frequently.  It's a good thing I'm on prilosec because otherwise I'd have an ulcer.

Thoughts are appreciated... I don't know if this behavior is only happening in the afternoon when he's tired, or if it's happening in the morning as well... In other news the poor kid is allergic to just about everything... dust mites, grass, weeds, mold, dog (mildly) and cat (which he loves) actually both animals he loves... so we're starting allergy drops in the hopes it will improve his symptoms. One can pray it does.  He was a trooper through the whole allergy testing thing and the multiple shots in his arms.