( Opening with some lame TMI )I finished my training yesterday, woooo! Now I have 6 hours down, and almost 10 more months to get the last 8, not to mention that it'll be cut even shorter if my class counts for hours too. I did a lot better in not getting incredibly anxious during the practice exerciese (how to escape from stirkes or grabs), and I talked a lot during the rest. I was singled out because I looked the youngest, and probably was the youngest, but Russ (the director) said he thought I looked 18 and used that in a de-escalation/empathy exercise. While I've miraculously never had my age negatively used in a mental health setting (same with my whiteness, don't know why), it came up a LOT when working in Nursing homes/assisted living.
Steve and I are going to try to start donating plasma. Pat is unemployed (and receives unemployment) and supplements his income with donating a couple times a week. Steve and I would be getting almost $200/week if we were each able to go twice a week. That would be amazingly helpful in paying off credit cards/loans/saving. When Dan and I desperately needed money in Grand Forks, I developed a complex and failed out because my heart rate kept speeding up. It didn't help that the machine only measure your pulse for 15 seconds and then multiplied it by 4, which is inaccurate. And they wouldn't manually measure my pulse. I start off faster when measuring my pulse than I end with. I promise you that my heart rate is not 120bpms. Promise. It's usually around 80-90. I just took it with my company's 15 second monitor and I came up with 122/81 with a pulse of 94. Bleh. Writing about it made me nervous again. As long as the pulse comes up under 100. Usually my blood pressure is about 110/70. I know because I've been to the doctor a lot >_< And I've NEVER been turned away when donating blood. My issue was always iron (interestingly, it's been both almost too low and almost too high), not my pulse. Q~! Wish me luck! Let's hope I don't freak out, because I'm terrified that I will. Which doesn't help. Never-ending cycle! (after a couple minutes I just retested and came up with 114/78, pulse 91. I can physically feel my body reacting when I get the cuff on. URGH. F U BODY). I'll probably request that I be sitting if they're testing while standing like the other place did, because first of all, that's the medically appropriate way to be taking it, and for two, it allows me to feel a little more relaxed.
All right, I really should get going on stuff I need to be doing!
Ending with a clip about responsibility from Hyperbole and a Half that completely and accurately describes me:
"What usually ends up happening is that I completely wear myself out. Thinking that I've earned it, I give myself permission to slack off for a while and recover. Since I've exceeded my capacity for responsibility in such a dramatic fashion, I end up needing to take more recovery time than usual. This is when the guilt-spiral starts.
The longer I procrastinate on returning phone calls and emails, the more guilty I feel about it. The guilt I feel causes me to avoid the issue further, which only leads to more guilt and more procrastination. It gets to the point where I don't email someone for fear of reminding them that they emailed me and thus giving them a reason to be disappointed in me.
Then the guilt from my ignored responsibilities grows so large that merely carrying it around with me feels like a huge responsibility. It takes up a sizable portion of my capacity, leaving me almost completely useless for anything other than consuming nachos and surfing the internet like an attention-deficient squirrel on PCP."
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