Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Blogging Along


Alright, so I never find any comments and I don't update my blog often. I'm not going to let that deter me from keeping a blog and adding to it whenever I get around to it. I still like to write and feel that I have good observations ever once in a while.

Right now I'm practicing psychiatric nursing which gives me endless things to think about, figure out, discuss... The thinking part is easy, it happens as easily as breathing. I think, and think, and think about all of my clients (we don't really call them patients in the outpatient setting) during the day. The figuring out part is a little more difficult; lots of different problems arise and usually I am part of finding the solution. It feels nice to be able to say that!

The discussion-ah, the art of talking to other people.

Discussing mental illness is a trick, a skill, an art. Among other mental health professionals who understand the jargon (hallucination, delusion, extrapyramidal, internal stimuli, anticholinergic) there is the richness of a special language we share. It's just as special to me, even more so actually, than the terminology that gets thrown around on any old, med-surg unit in a hospital. It makes everything I see in clients, everything I'm trying to solve, so damn real. We have our methods of qualifying and quanitifying most every complaint, every symptom, from the voices to the tremors to the lateral jaw shifts and the like.

Try to discuss it with an open-minded lay person and it feels pretty good to know that there are people out there who doubt the stigma. It gives me hope. It makes me feel like someone beyond my tiny professional circle appreciates what we are doing.

Talk to someone who doesn't get it and it just makes you want to cry. Everything you know damn well is real, as in a real illness just like diabetes, hypertension, coronary artery disease, is instantly reduced to having no self-control and in need of incarceration. It's scary to think that some of our policy-makers are part of the people who don't get it. The less fortunate are at their mercy and they haven't even begun to understand the needs of these people, much less gotten over their fear and hatred of them.

Consider that more people die by their own hand than by homicide and you might catch the gravity of the situation.

On another note I wanted to say that my husband is kicking ASS at this Xbox game Oblivion! I don't know how many of you (are there ANY of you?) are gamers, but it's a really great, old-school RPG set in a fantasty-medieval world. So if anyone has Xbox out there and you like RPG, this is some cool gaming. You can toggle between 1st and 3rd person very easily, which is a nice feature if either style is your cup of tea. The world you play in is huge and quite a bit of it can be manipulated. You can jog out into the woods, pick herbs, and brew potions. You can play a totally honorable, benign character, you can be a total murderous bastard, or you can do it all. Even when you create your character, so many choices are available. Aside from selecting male or female, you can pick different races, some that look like animals more than humans. My husband is a dark elf, with blue hair, and a fairly handsome appearance. His name is Roibeard. Check it out, that's Irish for Robert :-)

I only know this because one Christmas I got him his name cup from some Irish store in the mall. Robert=Roiberd.

I have been a chick in love with video games for as long as I remember. I used to play Intellivision for God's sake. Then came Atari. Sega, Playstation, PS2, now the damn Xbox. And a bunch of PC games in between.

Alright, so there is no doubt that I am not only a nerd, but also a geek. It's documented in this blog. And I'm going to just keep blogging along until I can blog no more.

Anyone out there like William Carlos Williams? I re-stumbled upon him Friday for reasons I can't really post here, but they don't matter anyway. He is GOOD. Anyone like "This is Just to Say?" He was from Rutherford, NJ dammit! That's right around the corner. He was also a doctor, he delivered some 2000 babies in his career. Kind of cool...