Month: June 2014

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Media Used Educates

media

Me:

Jasmine, I’m so honored to collaborate with you on this important post juxtaposing the various ways media shapes stigma and your own testimony.

Guest Post from Jasmine:

I love old ads, Victorian, retro, apothecaries…  not only are they works of art, but are full of the funniest jokes.

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It would be a lot easier to laugh at the ad agencies if it wasn’t for the fact that we buy it.  These ads are proof that our health depends on our willingness to look at more than media.  Just because we read it on the internet, see a commercial on TV, it doesn’t mean it’s the right path.

I look at my bottles of pills.  “Of course it’s safe, otherwise they wouldn’t be aloud to sell it in the grocery store”, I think to myself.  Or, “they must be okay because my doctor said so.  Somebody would have gotten in trouble for it by now, if it was bad”.

That kind of thinking gives away our power.  We are no longer responsible when we make it everyone else’s fault if something bad happens to us.  Even if the doctors and companies get sued, it is Me who will suffer the most.  There is nothing more important than our health.  How can we deal with life when we are distracted with health issues?  How will we treat people the way they deserve, when we’re not feeling well?

The point is that what we see in popular culture isn’t there to educate us.  It is there to entertain. Or make a sale.  Or push its other entrepreneurial agenda.

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I’m trying to focus on smoking because there is no way anyone could deny they hurt you in some way.  Pills are different because there is a different mindset with that, and I’m saving that for another day…  But smoking clearly isn’t healthy.  My dad was one of those people who smoked 1-3 packs a day and said that it’s a myth that people are getting lung cancer from cigarettes.  He jogged everyday and worked out… with a cigarette in his mouth.  If he was alive, I would like to ask him if he thought he would be a better athlete with more stamina if he at least didn’t smoke while working out.  I know the times are different and we know more now than we did back then… But I smoked enough cigarettes in my day to know that I would hack up a lung every morning and had a regular cough, until I quit.

Questions:  How do we tell people what to listen to?  Not just listen to other dramatic people and what we want to hear… not kid ourselves and run away from the real solution, whatever it may be?

-Jasmine (I’m 39, a wife, a mother and I’m cRaZy!)

 http://lakeelsinorelife.com 

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Self-Care Tip:  Use media material for entertainment and look in better places for education and counsel.

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Twitter chat – PTSD

Please join twitter chat today. First one of our kind! Smile.

#yourMH chat on PTSD 12-1 pmET

Best Practices & Tools

Always use #YourMH in your tweets.

They keep track of all of our questions T1, T2, T3, etc. We recommend that you reply with T1, T2, T3 to follow Twitter chat.

If you are planning your responses to the questions from @drgabycora in advance, target your answers to 100 characters to allow room for #YourMH as well as room for retweets to mention your handle.

Use http://twubs.com/YourMH and sign in using your Twitter handle to participate. This tool has a lot of great features including:

a. Automatically adding the appropriate #hashtag(s) (#YourMH, #PTSD) to all of your tweets (so you don’t forget when replying and engaging with the audience).

b. It has a pause button that allows you to pause and slow down the Twitter stream.

c. It can also remove retweets so you aren’t seeing multiples of the same message.

Be sure to have your Twitter mentions page open in a separate window. Check it periodically throughout the chat. Many people don’t know how to participate and/or forget to use #YourMH, so you may receive some questions or comments there. Be sure to complete your reply with #YourMH, so that everyone can see the benefit of your comments/answers.

Have fun and remember you don’t have to reply to everyone!

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Love comes out of that?!

hope

Hello Friends.

I write to you so many times “in my mind,” which makes me a great writer! Wink.  But even there, I am grateful to have you to write to.

I just got done watching, Fault in Our Stars, with our local hospice team and, oh my word!  I had to breathe through it.  I was terrified I would lose it several times there.  Not being one of those damsels who cries pretty, I was seriously grateful to be sitting in darkness.

So where have I been?  Trying to figure out this friend to yourself thing.  Still.

I had one of my favorite discussions with a patient the other day on where and why good comes out of bad.  Do I love this conversation because it is about an epic force, an energy and a Truth that wins and kicks bad stuff, like, fungus armpits, dead children, divorce, broken friendships, finding yourself alone in a huge space, depression and a brain that you’d rather not be living?  Do I love this discussion because I feel so freaking right?  I do.  Do l love it because I need to participate in it one more time, now, and now?

Probably.

I’m hoping I’m not right though.  I’m pretty sure that even these eyes see dimly and the Truth is even better.  I’ve been told I don’t know it all.

The chat goes something like this,

(Context is status post some real, personal, bleak disclosure.  I’m facing them, and sometimes they look at me.  I sit in an erect chair with a lap desk and laptop computer between us.  Just enough.  Sometimes my service dog, Timothy is present.

One of us inevitably brings up a curving effort toward hope.  Maybe,)

…Love is stronger.

Yeah…

But I don’t know if there is a question mark or a period at the end.  It sits there in the room with us, like it is a squirrel scratching at its whiskers.  It can go in different directions.

Where would it go for you?

Does Love bring good out of bad as if it needs the bad, like dirt around its roots?  Does Love turn the bad into fertilizer, and grow into some apple tree?  We know Love is stronger than bad.  We know Love wins.  But we think, do I have to be loved like this?!  Rather not.

Tevye, the milkman in Fiddler on The Roof, said this view well,

  • [to God] I know, I know. We are Your chosen people. But, once in a while, can’t You choose someone else?

That is a pretty rough idea of Love.

Love is and Love brings good out of us in any context because where Love is, there it is. Think about presence.  Honest self-awareness.  When you found it was more important to still be able to walk than care if your t-shirt was inside out.  Love is more true than that.  It is more true than looking into her eyes, than hot water over skin.  Love is.

As Green says in the voice of Hazel Grace, “I hope this enough for you.  This is your life. And I love you.”

Question:  What is stronger in your life?  Why?  What happened to disclose such honesty?  Please tell us your story.

Self-Care Tip:  Love wins, even for you.  Keep on.

Sending a message to the hope out there, to the love I know exists, to the friend who knows me, the place I can always call part home, part critique, part play-fellow, counselor, walking stick.  Hello.

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Baby Nurse, Day One

The very first day I put on my scrubs I knew they were the right fit. I  look forward to connecting with patients. I find it to be a true honor and privilege to care for them at a difficult time in their life. I care for patients in pain. I advocate for the mentally ill. Most importantly, I make it my priority to make people feel like they matter. 

Below is a guest post…a small piece of my own blog at  theloshow.weebly.com

Keeping with ‘Friend To Yourself’ tips, remember to believe in yourself enough to make the smallest difference in someone’s day. The rewards are shared. 

 

It was orientation day. My family had taken a flight out ahead of me to attend wedding ceremonies. I stayed behind, pressed my clothes, prepared notebooks, and set out for a day I had been waiting for, for a long time.
Approximately 50 eager nursing students sat behind desks and quieted as the lights were lowered. The instructor played a film, introducing us to our chosen field and wanted to fill our bodies with motivation and inspiration.
‘You will have an opportunity to care for people that do not have the means or capacity to ever repay you.’
The film ended and my eyes were heavy with tears. I tried to open them wide, hoping the air conditioning would dry them up before my neighbors noticed.
I was so very grateful. I was excited and hopeful. I would live out my life being so very proud of my job. I couldn’t wait.
I was terrified. I barely slept the night before. I sat in my car watching the clock, hoping time would barely pass by if I watched every minute tic. It was my first patient interaction. I was at a skilled nursing facility and I was to interview an elderly patient, and gain experience obtaining a thorough health history.

What was I so afraid of?

I didn’t know what to expect.
I watched “Fried Green Tomatoes” one too many times, and had images of a mean old lady screaming at me, throwing me out of her room, and cursing my ill experience while throwing donuts.
I delayed no more and walked in with confidence. My name badge and clip board screamed target practice. The employed nurses love to watch you squirm.
My instructor gave me my patient’s chart and told me to go to her room and introduce myself after I gathered all the appropriate data. Her binder was thick with life’s journey. Medications, disease processes, and lab work now defined her within those walls.
“Where’s the tab in here that tells me who comes to visit her? Who takes her to the beauty parlor and church? Who tells her Happy Mothers Day?”
No such tab existed.
I walked in her room. She shared it with another lonely woman that mumbled something as I passed the curtain.
She looked old. She looked confused. She looked happy to have someone to talk to.

“Ms. Walker, may I ask you some questions about your health?”

I worked my way down the list that my instructor prepared for me.
Question 11: Do you have any STD’s?
Question 12: How many partners have you been with?
Are you kidding me? What kind of sick bastard wrote these questions for a nursing home? Can I let this lonely old woman have some secrets and dignity please?
Formalities get in the way the sometimes.
I put the clipboard down and just started to talk. I asked her questions like we were sipping tea by the shore.
We laughed. She told me stories about her life that I couldn’t possibly fit onto any sheet of paper.
I knew I’d have to make up some of my material to turn my paper in for a grade. I didn’t care, and knew my instructor wouldn’t care either.

The video your institution showed me on my first day didn’t say anything about caring more about a clip board than a person.
It was about how I made someone feel that day. She wanted to talk to a person that genuinely cared about her answers.
I left that day laughing at myself for being so nervous. I chose this profession because it allowed me to be free of clipboards and formalities. It’s about making people feel good.
In the spirit of Nurse’s Week…Remember how the profession began. It’s about being at a person’s bedside when their loved ones cannot. It’s about giving your attention when someone needs it most.
Be that person, and protect the integrity of the initials that follow your name.

{Nurse Leslie}

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Caregiving and Selfcare

Fallen_tree2Being a caregiver is, well, …giving!  There is a need.  We respond to the need.  We give.  There is taking from what we give.

When we talk about this, some of us hear the tap, tap of a bookkeeper balancing ins-and-outs.  Tap, tap, take, take.  We feel dangerously close to objectifying what is Magical.  Objectifying what we get from giving loses at this point in our thoughts the bigger circle of love that motivates us.  Let’s acknowledge and respect that.  The bigger reasons are so worth aspiring to and treasuring.  You who believe in what is more than the numbers of our motives and behaviors, please continue to nurture us with this wisdom.  Be patient as we wander in the corners and cracks and in the places we don’t understand so well.

The point of giving, others pursuing the caregiver’s story later respond, is what we receive.  The love, the satisfaction of observing what our efforts contributed to in another’s rescue.  Perhaps, knowing we participated in saving a life.

Am I a caregiver?  Are you?  Well, maybe we think we are excluded from this category because we don’t liaison between one suffering life-being with the world around.  But are!  We all are caregivers by the definition of what is means to be living.  Living is connection.  We, each of us, are connected to the Universe and the different points from there to here where we stand.  Connection is inherent to living.  To live is to be connected.  To disconnect is to die.

This is somewhere along the philosophical thought experiment of, “If a tree falls and no one hears it, does it exist?”  I am told by those who might be wiser that it does not.  I don’t get it and what does that say about me? 😉

Observation vs. reality.

Connection is like that.  It is not perceived sometimes, and sometimes it is perceived.  This is important to Me.  To the part of each of us that is more than our senses.  More than Time and the condition of our health.  More than brain illness.  This is important to caregiving because by increasing our self-awareness of our role in connection, and thereby caregiving, we have an opportunity to increase our ability to combine the Magic of it with the “accounting ins-and-outs.”  Thereafter, we are lead to increase our transparency to others, increase our connectivity and increase our experience in Life Quality.

Magic is compatible with that which is known.  More even, they are not divided, whether we know it or not.  Magic and that which is known, just are.  We are arrogant people any way we turn the talk, of course.  None of us without agenda.  None of us without projectile pride.  But despite this, we have Grace and whether we hear the tree or not, Magic and knowledge have made allowance for us.

Caregiving comes with connection.  We give, we receive, and we do it with agendas.  Increasing our self-awareness through the process, although it feels at times like ringing out a cash register, and feels soiled by the sound of that which taking brings, – self-awareness of our agendas brings more freedom.  We are more free to give by choice rather than martyrdom.  We give without perceiving ourselves the victim to those to whom we give.  We are more free to give to our other agendas.  We are more free to consider our own needs as needs-of-value from one who is also Loved and valued, Me.

Question:  Might increasing our consideration of our “Me” increase our giving well to others?

Do you consider yourself a caregiver?  How so?  Please tell us your story.

Self-Care Tip:  Give well to yourself to give well to others.  Keep on.