It’s starting to come to life again
This has been a fast weekend. Things have definitely been coming to life and speeding up here at UBC. Part of it has had to do with medical emergencies. On Friday night two of our students were in the emergency room..and as it turns out, one of our girls ended up having an emergency operation to get her appendix taken out. I stayed up for 28 hours and spent the night at the hospital with her. She was soo brave and I am so proud of her!!! I wouldn’t say that the experience was fun, but it definitely was interesting for me to be there. Besides the comfort and support that I gave, I also built some friendly relationships with the nurses, and in the wee hours of the morning when everyone else was sleeping I basically had some neat conversations with the staff attending to us there. I learned the aspects of all of the heavy drugs that they gave to people for pain, the dosage limits, and the side effects. I learned all about every monitor in the room—how to read it and how it worked. And about the social services given to some pediatric patients. The nurse even gave me access to the break room, and the back kitchen where only the staff were allowed. I raided the pediatric unit of some of their food and dined on Ritz crackers, and although I explored the fridge filled with jello, pudding and assorted juices, I passed them up.
The neatest thing that I learned is that nurses can be in programs where they can travel around the globe and work at different hospitals. The nurse that first attended us in pediatrics only spend 13 weeks in each place. She stated in May in Fairbanks, and then at the end of her 13 weeks will move on to a hospital in London. She’s been all over the US in rural and urban places, and has traveled all over the world—Saudia Arabia, all over Africa, all over Europe. And to top it all off, she get free housing a car at each place that she goes (and I would assume free airfare too?). What a great deal! Seeing her do her thing, and talking to her about all her experiences makes me want to be a nurse. But then there’s that med school factor that’s looming large, and I tell myself that I’m crazy to try that.
Also, I was peeking out of the window for much of the night (we overlooked the emergency room parking lot) and spied on the patients and families coming in and out. At one point a teenage-looking guy got out of his truck, cradled a girl into his arms and ran with her towards the emergency room door. Right away I knew what it was going to be—alcohol poisoning. About two hours later she showed up in pediatrics and were forced to share our room with her (it held four and we were the only ones taking it up) because everything else was full. She sat there bickering with her mom. I found out from the nurses (who had informed me of her before she came up) and through the mother-daugher conversation that I couldn’t help overhearing because they were right next to me in a quiet room—the girl was in middle school—but had been kicked out. She has been pulled over by the troopers before for drugs, and this alcohol incident was certainly not the first. She had a super high blood alcohol level, so the nurses asked her what happened, but the girl just replied “I had a 40, and then I don’t remember”. In fact, she hadn’t even remembered puking all over in the emergency room only moments before (lucky for her, because of this she didn’t need to get her stomach pumped). Definitely a troubled youth, I really hope that she turns around soon and realizes the bad path that she’s on.
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Summertime Relationships
Relationships are forming between students and we’ve been busting a lot of PDAs recently, much to their anger. It’s funny because it’s been bringing back memories of my experiences at Upward Bound: the unity you feel between program participants, the extra intimate gestures, the crushes and major flirtations, and the should have been first kiss. Those half silly, but seriously emotional high school summer relationships. And I don’t regret them. I look back and smile. I still care for these people, I still call them my close friends and still keep in touch. Upward Bound is a lifelong experience for me—participating in UB programs has been one of the best opportunities that I’ve had in life and I strongly defend the program. Maybe it’s a bad thing to look back to my experiences five years ago, but I do and I compare the two. I know people snuck off and had sex in the woods, I know the arrests that were made of students, I know the late night secrets, and the rules that were secretly broken. Personally, I have no problems with people getting in relationships here at UBC. I don’t exactly encourage it or anything, but I also don’t feel like I can forbid them (opposed to other staff in this program that feel that everyone should be going home single) at all. They’re healthy, they’re fun, they’re controlled here (for the most part). The only thing is that definite boundaries need to be set, and there needs to be a huge sense of respect formed. This is the time in their life where they should have completely positive role models as they are involved in the program. The students need to be guided as to what appropriate behavior is in a relationship, and they need to feel comfortable asking the staff questions about relationships and other similar issues. They need to be comfortable telling us
everything, but I don’t feel like they are this year…yet. To me, part of this program is not only educational and fun, but it’s building character and social skills. And just growing up.
Concerns
I feel like I’m not connecting with some of the staff here. And that they have a semi-secret grudge against me. There’s that unspoken tension that just makes me cringe every day. I hate it. I hate this feeling. But I don’t know what to do about it. I’m just doing my job, and voicing my thoughts that I feel are valid and reasonable. But others have taken them the wrong way (I’m not referring to anything I’ve written above—it’s other stuff). I feel like with some people here they “like me”, but they’ve really put me to the side and have judged me negatively for one reason or another. I probably shouldn’t think of this as a slap in the face, since everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and maybe it is my fault for whatever I’ve done, but I still feel hurt and a little displaced. Or maybe I’m overreacting? Whatever, I’m just sad that things aren’t going as smoothly as I’d like them to go. But maybe it’s just murder to this summer if I try to compare it to last year.
