Sick Day.

I hadn't been really, properly good and sick in a couple of years now, so I knew I was in for it. A couple of colds here and there, some irritating body aches, but nothing incredible. Wednesday afternoon I woke up (after working a night the night before) with a scratchy throat, and by 9:00 that evening it had hit me nearly full force. I slept that night in the way that only someone with a fever can sleep: deeply obilvious to the world and yet absolutely devoid of rest or comfort. And then all of the next day. Around 5pm I awoke freezing, despite my layers of clothing and blankets, and needed, needed a hot bath.

I lay in the bath, still covered in goosebumps. I rested my head against the side of the tub. I very nearly fell asleep again right there, but some measure of common sense told me I would probably drown. Get out of the bath. Dress myself. God, I'm freezing again. Man, bathing is exhausting!

So, back to bed until Friday morning. Actually, noon on friday, at which point the fever mercifully went away and I was able to leave my bed in favour of the couch, to watch crappy TV and read Harry Potter. Kyle force-fed me chicken broth, Tylenol, and orange juice at regular intervals despite the fact that I winced and moaned after every swallow. He is a chivalrous fellow.

Today, I feel almost myself. I tried to go into work, but was deemed too pale by a coworker and let off the hook. I still can't eat much (I suspect Strep Throat as the culprit of my illness), but I'm beginning to feel human again.

Now, because I am shallow and have a short attention span and dislike blog posts without photos in them, I leave you with something pretty.

Turquoise tent ring @ Old Gold Boutique, via Eat Drink Chic.

a particularly long post about a particularly bad day (also to be known as St. John's, day one)

We get out of our cab from the airport with only our suitcases and dogface with us. Everything else is on a moving truck which will arrive the following week. We arrive at the house we'd taken a risk on over the internet, and we are in awe.

The house is not more than twelve feet wide from the outside. The steps are rotting. It's detached, but within five inches from the house on the left.

There to greet us is Cecila. She lives next door. She has an unlit, half-smoked cigarette stuck to her bottom lip. She has our keys in one hand and a distinct wiry white beard.

"Landlord ain't here to meet ya yet, she'll be along. She's after picking up the kids from school" She says as she hands the keys over. She is very chatty. We try to make polite conversation with her, but are really anxious to get inside and assess the situation we've gotten ourselves into. Finally, she lets us go, with a warning to keep the back gate padlocked. "Them kids here, y'know, they'll be after stealing your plants if you don't".

Great. We enter our house, and it's as bad from the inside as it is from the outside. It's immediately clear that any furniture designed to accomodate an adult human will not fit here.

Next to come by is Cecelia's husband Danny. He posesses not one, not two, but three! of his own teeth! And has the thickest Newfoundland accent you could possibly imagine. He talks for a good five minutes, pausing to laugh at his own jokes, but the only thing I can understand is something about mowing the grass in the back garden. He finally leaves, and Kyle and I exchange a what-the-fuck look. We continue to tour the house, noticing a distinct bow in the kitchen ceiling where the bathtub resides upstairs and a spongy area in the floor beside the toilet. We are both under five foot-eight, and we can touch the ceilings on two of the three floors in this house. Three of four, if you count the basement, where we both hit our heads and the air is thick with mold spores. Kyle can (and has) hit his head on the main stairway if he's not careful.

The landlady shows up. She is young and pretty and nice, and her two young boys are very cute. She refers to them with maddening affection, usually saying 'yes my love' or 'no my darling'. When they begin to swing on the stair banisters, exposing to us the instability due to rot at the base, she looks at us nervously. She tells us she is willing to tear up our lease, knowing it must have been hard to come from so far without being able to properly pick something. We jump on that shit almost immediately.

When she leaves, we sit down on the floor in the eight-by-ten living room, defeated. I may or may not have started to sob and whimper about how I want to go home. Kyle holds me, and agrees.

Later, we trek out to Canadian Tire to buy an air mattress to sleep on and a shower curtain. The directions we're given makes it sound like a ten to fifteen minute walk, but it's really more like an hour. And literally uphill both ways. On the way back, my sandal breaks and I finish the walk one-shoed and teary again.

While Kyle sets up the air mattress, I let the dog out into the backyard. She has a pee, and then starts to roll in the grass in cat shit. It takes all my personal strength not to kill her on the spot.

Things have gotten better since then, but that first day was one of the worst of my life. And our mattress doesn't fit up the stairs here, so we are still sleeping on the fucking air mattress.

Disengaged, unenthralled, bored.

Doodle, the only productive thing I've done all week.

olks, I have something to admit. I am so, so, SO bored.

I have the last-semester-EVER at a university itch, and I absolutely cannot stay engaged. At all. I have never cared less about my education than I do right now. And I should care, since I am paying an arm and a leg for it. I should be wringing every last drop out of it, learning as much as I possibly can.

But here's the thing. And I have never, EVER complained about this before.

My program is teaching me too much in the way of critical thinking and theory. And yet I am in the final year of a baccalaureate degree in SCIENCE, for pete's sake, and I can barely describe the anatomy of the human body in scientific terms, let alone normal physiology. You want to know about disease processes? Forget about it. I feel like I don't remember a darn thing.

I can tell you a great deal about establishing therapeutic relationships, phenomenology, Nursing theory. But it has been two years now since I have learned anything about pharmacology, or nursing process.

Since I now possess excellent critical thinking skills, I know exactly where to find all the information I lack, of course. But I am about to enter into the working world, and here's the thing:

I know exactly what nursing as a profession needs, and I have learned enough that I could probably change the world if I wanted to. But I haven't learned enough about the actual job I will be performing when I graduate to be confident doing it. I never thought I'd say this, but I wish my schooling had involved just a wee bit more memorization work. Especially if it meant writing fewer papers.

I am so, so frustrated. And did you know, internet, that I am taking a class on critiquing research IN MY FINAL YEAR OF EDUCATION? Not, oh, I don't know, in first year, where I could then have used that knowledge every time I chose scientific references for my papers.

I see the value of what I have learned. I am prepared to enter into nursing practice.

But I'm not so sure I feel ready to enter into a nursing JOB.