Goodbye 2019

I battled a lot in 2019. I battled myself, I battled at work, I battled at home, I battle with health issues and I would say I even battled with the cats this year. As I happily bid ado to 2019, I am looking back on this year and wondering what I can take with me as I enter 2020.

1. My health – for most of 2019, I was battling a severe and persistent bacterial infection. From February through October, I was consistently on antibiotics to combat this infection. At one point, I had a surgical consult to look at having a partial mastectomy because this infection had spread to a point that was worrisome for sepsis. While trying to figure this all out, I contracted influenza A! In the nick of time, I started responding to a regimen of IV and oral antibiotics. Sadly, in the summer ,the infection then spread to my leg. Super, more antibiotics. I started undergoing test for immunodeficiency syndromes since the type of infection I had is not normally so cumbersome to treat. Fortunately, all were negative and most of the infection is now healed up. I will remain on a low dose of antibiotics for the near future to make sure I don’t develop something this severe again. After seeing 2 specialists and an infectious disease doctor, it was determined that stress was the culprit to these abscesses developing. Since putting in my notice, my blood pressure came down 20 points, I dropped 7 pounds and everything is finally healed.
2. My sanity – oh, 2019….not a great year for my mental health. In combination of persistent health issues, I started really going downhill with the amount of stress in my life. I used to see my therapist monthly, for the past year it has been weekly. Week after week, I sought counsel and insight into my patterns of stress and the behavioral responses that ensued. He pushed me to keep thinking about what my next steps were. Early in the year, I decided I wanted to stay and wanted him to help me figure out ways to deal with my stress so that I could continue forward. Unfortunately, my job changed 4 times in 2019. Each time, the next task was more than I could handle until I finally buckled under the pressure and resigned. I struggled with this decision for months. Therapy was the best thing for me as I needed the space and time to figure out the best path for myself. My therapist will never tell me what he thinks I should do. Some of the time I could tell that he was hoping “today might be the session where she tells me that she quit!” He supported and validated but only to a certain extent. When I would say things like “I am not meant for this field.” He would never agree. He would validate me feeling overwhelmed but never that I wasn’t good enough or not strong enough to be in this field. My mental health is happy to GOOD-BYE to 2019.
3. My future – In October, I really started think – what am I going to do? Is this field for me? Is this a job issue or a field issue? I miss nursing; however, there are nursing jobs I plainly don’t miss. I dug deep and realized, I don’t want to be a counselor. I feel powerless in that position. I was not able to find a good boundary between myself and my work. I took on people’s pain. So much so that I lost me in the process. I never did figure out how to separate myself. In October, I attended the annual competency meeting for transplant. As the other transplant coordinators and I were sitting at lunch, we were talking shop about all sorts of things, with my most favorite conversation – what is your nursing vice. (For the record – pee on me, I am fine. Blood gushing from you wound, all is well! You start making gagging sounds, move over because I am going to be right next to you. Vomit is my nursing vice.) We can ruin so many meals by talking shop. I just kept thinking all day long, “I so miss this. I miss medical. I miss nursing. I miss feeling like I know what the hell I am doing.” Yesterday, I celebrated by 16th anniversary of being an LPN. I want to be an RN. I still have a future in behavioral health, it will be in a different capacity than counseling. I want to teach eventually full time if I could. So, my future started last week as I started my first class towards my RN degree. Official classes start 01/06/2020. I hope to be done  by the fall of 2021.
4. My past – I started to relapse back into my old lifestyle (aka using lifestyle) to a certain degree. I never picked up a drink nor did I have the intention of doing so. However, addiction is sneaky and a relapse starts long before picking up a substance. I found myself dreaming about drinking, using cocaine and even shooting meth (which I have never done). I would wake up in a full blown sweat thinking I lost it all. I started to isolate and let my depression get the better of me. I stopped engaging in things that were so meaningful to me. I stopped enjoying a lot of things that brought me authentic happiness. I was so over-stressed that I could no longer handle getting to work on time or getting to work at all. Being late and having a lot of absenteeism is against my values. When I worked full time in transplant, I remember only calling in sick 3 times over a 3 year period and I was actually pretty ill those times. While I experienced illnesses this year, I feel like I could have pushed through some of those and really made it work. This red flag has been up for me for a while now. It’s just not a good sign. The most painful part of my using years was living and breathing outside of my value system. I know what is right and wrong for me. When I was using, I kept doing all the wrong things because that would feed my habit better than “doing the right thing”. I started getting away from the right things and started to get bitter and angry with myself.

I am in my 10th year of recovery right now. This year holds my 10th sober New Years, Christmas and Thanksgiving. I have a lot to be grateful for. I feel like I had lost touch with that gratitude in this past year. I was too tired to be grateful. I got struck in negative thinking patterns and couldn’t see anything to be grateful for. I became consumed with my job and the subsequent stress. I remember saying so many times in the past year, “if I knew what helped me get better, I would have done it by now!” Well, turned out, resigning my position is getting back on top again. I am seeing the happy “me” coming back out. I am still struggling with some lingering anxiety as I am making some rather large changes at the moment. I do not, however, feel like this is the same anxiety that I felt crippled by for the majority of 2019. This anxiety is a nervous “OMG, what am I doing” coupled with a “I actually know what I am doing….what’s best for me.”

In AA, we share our courage, strength and hope with each other with the idea that a person who is struggling with addiction can see something different from the hell they are living in. For 2020, I want to focus on courage, strength and hope. I got a jump start in late 2019 with the courage to say “I need to move on to protect my sobriety and my sanity.” I am finding strength to return to school for the 4th time to complete the goal I really wanted to achieve when I was 17 years old – being an RN. I have spent the last five years of my career, spreading hope wherever I could. I talked about hope to my clients in the jail. I spoke about hope to a person coming to me for money for residential services. I impressed hope upon those who were about to give up and give in. What I lost in 2019 was the feeling of hope for myself. I want my hope back. I can feel hope returning. I am willing to take these huge leaps of faith now because I have hope that is it all going to work out for the best.
Happy New Years Everyone!