Life, clinicals, and almost done...

Two more days before I'm finished with one third of my nursing program. I'm almost one third of a nurse. That's a little scary.

Life outside of school has been going extremely well lately. First and foremost, the bat guys came today and did their work on the house. So, there should be no more bat invasions, and no unpleasant surprises for my incoming sublettor (sublessor? sublessee? I have no idea...)

Secondly, I had dinner with my soon-to-be housemates last night. They are wonderful! And they love to cook, and are very good at it. Jordan is a second year medical student and Jessica is a music teacher who is going back to school for a Master's in counseling. They invited me over for a "simple dinner" which included panini (on their shiny new panini maker!) salad, pasta, chips and hummus, wine, and peach cobbler. And it was all fabulous. I'm going to like living with these people. One of their friends was there too, a blind pianist from Eastman School of Music who had just returned from an international piano competition in Moscow. A really amazing guy, with a lot of good stories. The four of us got along great right from the start, lots of laughing and making plans for the house, and going on outings together, and all sorts of hilarity. I had a blast, and stayed way past my bed time on a clinical night, but it was completely worthwhile. I'll be moving into the house as soon as I can after I return from Portland.

The whole Paul thing is going rather well right now too. There was a day of canoing on the Genessee River, and some cuddling, and the purchase of a webcam for me so that we can chat to each other while gallivanting around the west coast. He's currently in San Diego at a conference, and won't get back until Friday, the day before I leave for Portland. Bad timing, but the webcam/Skype thing is pretty cool. Sarah seems to be incredibly proud of herself for managing to set us up.

Lastly, school stuff. Like I said, I'm almost done with this semester. I've determined through this clinical rotation that I have no interest in working on an ENT floor. I prefer patients that can talk to me, and so far I haven't had a single one of those on this floor. A lot of them have trachs and that makes talking very difficult unless they use a speaking valve, which can make breathing difficult. Usually they choose breathing. Also, I don't enjoy phlegm and sputum. I'd honestly rather deal with vomit and diarrhea. The whole suctioning out a trach thing is quite gross to see, but even worse to listen to. My next rotation will be Psych, on the Mentally Ill/Clinically Addicted floor. That will be very different and probably really cool. I bet I'll be longing for the patients that don't talk after five weeks of patients in withdrawal, though. And then I'm on the Cardiac Surgery floor, which I'm looking forward to a lot. Oh, and there will be a ton of classes mixed in with that stuff too. Fall is supposed to be the hardest semester of this course. Can't wait.

I think that's about it for now. I don't know how much I'll be posting from Portland, but I'll definitely be getting photos of my new place up here as soon as I can after moving in. So exciting!

Clearly Monday was too optimistic

This one is going to be another quick and dirty list.

1. The wedding was beautiful and I had a lot of fun with all my Oregon (and other) friends.
2. I made it back to Rochester without a problem and even got a 3 hour nap on the floor of the Philadelphia airport.
3. Sarah kidnapped me for hanging out on Monday and I fell asleep on her couch after dinner. Ronen was kind enough to drive me home.
4. I've started my Acute Care clinical. It's a lot more exciting than Long Term Care was. I'll elaborate more about clinicals when I'm less busy (read: after August 15th).
5. I emailed my landlord and there will be bat-proofers coming to check out the house either Saturday or Monday. Apparently after the initial bullying attempt he becomes a reasonable person.
6. I have an RIT student coming tomorrow night to check out my room and the house to see if he would like to sublet. Therefore the rest of the night will be spent cleaning and then collapsing in bed.

And finally, a plea for help. My suitcases were stored in the basement and apparently that was a poor choice, because they are now filled with bugs and spiders and various creatures that I don't want in my stuff (not sure about bats). Any ideas on how to rid said suitcases of said critters?

Righteous Anger

See the title? That's what's powering this post, since I certainly don't have any energy left. Here's the crux of the reply from my landlord:

You had no right to act on your own behalf without my consent. You had no right to go into my bedroom which is trespassing. And you had no right to make alterations to the house. There will be no refund granted. Had you contacted me first I would have had my bat person come out.

Seriously, he would rather I had called him at 3am? And trespassing? Next time I lock the bats in his bedroom and leave them there.

I'll post about clinicals and other stuff when I have energy again. Don't hold your breath.

Feeling better

I'm back home now, having spent a really nice day hanging out with Sarah and the little ones. I had gone over to her house to do that online exam, because if I went home I was pretty sure I would forget about it, and ended up staying until after dinner. She gave me lots of hugs, fed me, chatted with me, let me play with her adorable children, and generally did a fabulous job of cheering me up. I think Maya is starting to get to know me, and Yasmine will usually give me random flying hug attacks throughout the day and won't let me leave without saying goodbye. It's very sweet and cute and a perfect way to forget about stressful life stuff. We even went for a walk to the park after Ronen got home and I got to play with more adorable small children, including a set of 2 year old twins named Henry and Calvin who insisted on repeatedly filling my hands with woodchips.

Tomorrow is my first day of clinicals. I'm going to a long term care facility close-ish to the hospital, but far enough that I'll be carpooling with my friend Laura. I offered to buy the coffee if she'd drive, which I think is a good deal. We have to be there at 7:00am, so I'm meeting her at her house by 6:30, just to be sure that we're not late on our first day. I have a few final things to do before I'm ready to go, but otherwise I should be all set. I'm sure I will have a lot to talk about after this first day, but I may not get to blogging about it until later, depending on how long I need to recover.

Even more bats. No, I'm not joking.

Last night there were two bats in my room. This time, being about 3am, I woke up when I heard the fluttering sounds. I thought I had been dreaming about bats until I saw a dark shape fly across my ceiling. I turned on my light, and there was indeed a bat in my room. Again. So, I opened the screens in my windows, grabbed my pillow and blanket and made for the doorway. I paused in the doorway for a minute hoping that it would just fly out the window, but no luck. Just as I was trying to time my exit so that the bat wouldn't follow me out, a second bat appeared. It must have flown in through the window, but it seemed to come out of nowhere. Now I was really freaked out. For one, the chances of a bat following me downstairs had doubled. Secondly, if there were two bats, there were probably more. So, using my pillow to protect my head, I dashed back to my nightstand to grab my phone and then quickly ran out the door. I'm pretty sure I smacked one of the bats with the pillow on my way out, but oddly feel no remorse whatsoever. I also stuffed a towel under the doorway.

When I got out into the hallway the first thing I noticed was that there were no bats with me. Good. The second thing I noticed was that there was a light coming from under Robert's door. I knocked, loudly. He answered, I told him there were bats in my room, and we looked up animal control on his laptop. When I called them they said that bats are treated just like mice and rats, meaning that I had to call a pest control company and the county wasn't going to do anything about it. After some deliberation, I checked the phone book for a 24hr pest control. I found one, and the guy said he could be there in an hour and a half. Ugh.

At this point, Robert wanted to get to bed, but was kind enough to loan me his laptop so I could sit downstairs, with all the lights on, trying not to panic, and watch episodes of Family Guy until the official bat remover showed up. He showed up exactly on time, for which I was grateful, and when we opened the door to my room the bats were gone. No surprise, since the screens had been open the entire time. He did do a thorough check of the entire room making sure that there was no way bats could get in and that there were no remaining bats lurking anywhere.

At this point it was already becoming daylight so we went outside to see if he could spot how the bats were getting in. Turns out there's no cap on our chimney and there are cracks and holes all along the eaves of the house. Delightful. So, with this new knowledge, we went into the attic, which is also Jon's bedroom. Up there he found bat droppings around the chimney, a window that had a 1 inch opening, and lots of holes and cracks that bats could squeeze through. Luckily the only thing he didn't find was more bats.

He offered to do some temporary sealing up of the attic in order to keep bats out until I can contact Jon regarding bat-proofing the house. I jumped at the offer, and he filled in all the little holes and cracks with a foam stuff. He also duct-taped around the doors to the attic and duct-taped a plastic bag over the heating vent in my room, just in case. So now, if a bat does manage to get in, it should at least be contained in the attic. If Jon comes home to find that bats have trashed his room, I really couldn't care less.

So, the grand total for about one hour of work, done from 5-6am, was $160. He estimates the cost of a full bat-proofing at about $3000. There's no way Jon is going to pay that. Especially since he already paid $500 to a different company to supposedly bat-proof the house back in January (He left the receipt on the bookcase downstairs). The guy that I had called in said that Jon got completely ripped off. But there's a one year guarantee on that receipt, so maybe they'll come back and actually fix things. I'm mostly concerned about what will happen if the bat problem continues when I sublet this room. So I'm planning to call Jon this afternoon and at least get reimbursed for the cost of the one pest control visit and see what else he can do about the whole problem.

So, I had about another night of about 2-3 hours of sleep, managed to drag myself back out of bed to get to lab at 8am, and then found a flat tire on my bike. This was not a good morning. I changed the tire, and showed up for lab about 30 minutes late and started crying as soon as someone asked me if I was okay. I managed to get under control for the duration of lab, until a few friends came over to hug me and I lost it again. One of those friends insisted on buying me coffee and a muffin, which helped a lot. And now I have to go take an online exam. I'll update more as the situation progresses.

More battiness

This whole bat thing just keeps on going. I did some research online today and according to the CDC anyone that wakes up with a bat in their room (it doesn't even specify whether the bat lands on your head) should get vaccinated for rabies. This was not what I wanted to see, but I decided to go along with it since rabies is rather fatal.

So I called the university health services weekend number and the nice doctor on call told me that I should go immediately to the emergency room because they are the only ones sure to have the vaccine and be open on a Sunday. So I went, after I had finished watching today's stage of the Tour, and began my 4 hour journey through the Strong Memorial Emergency Department. Each time I told someone I was there for a rabies shot because a bat landed on my head the look they gave me was slightly more incredulous.

After being shuttled from waiting room to waiting room, listening to an elderly German couple reminisce about Heidelberg, and getting my scalp inspected for bite marks by a nice physician's assistant, I finally got into a real exam room. A pair of nurses came in looking incredibly apologetic and carrying a handful of syringes. They explained that I was going to be given a rabies vaccine, the first in a series spread over the next 15 days, and some immunoglobulin. Unfortunately, the immunoglobulin had to be split into 5 separate shots because you can only give a certain amount in each intramuscular injection. And because I was going to get so many shots, they wanted to put them into the largest muscle possible. That meant that I got a grand total of six shots in the butt today. They stood on either side of me doing simultaneous injections, so now I have two bruised areas with hard lumps of fluid under them. The lumps have been slowly going down over the course of the day, but it still feels pretty bruised.

Tomorrow I can expect a call from the Monroe County Health Department (they reported the whole bat incident to the health department) to schedule a time and place for my remaining injections. Luckily those ones will just be for rabies, no more immunoglobulin. I don't know how that will work with me going to the wedding next weekend, but I guess that will be figured out tomorrow.

I spent the rest of the day feeling sorry for myself and waiting out the rain so I could go grocery shopping. I managed to get to the store in dry weather, but on the way home was caught in a truly torrential downpour. My groceries survived mostly unscathed, but there was not a single dry spot on me. All my clothes are now hanging in the bathroom and I hope my backpack dries out before tomorrow.

Chiroptophobia

I didn't think I was afraid of bats before I went to bed last night. Then, around 2am, something with claws landed directly on my head and woke me up. I bolted straight upright in bed, which was a mistake, because there was now a very freaked out bat flying in eccentric circles around my room. I quickly lay back down so it wouldn't hit me in the face and, after the initial shock wore off, made a duck and cover run for the door, all the while thinking, "Bats are the main vector of rabies. I'm going to get bitten and go insane." Clearly I am not at my most lucid at 2am after being violently awoken.

Of course, when I made this run for the door, I didn't give any thought to the fact that there was no way for the bat to get out of the house. I paced in the hallway for what seemed like a very long time, and eventually the bat landed somewhere in the vicinity of my closet. There was no chance that I could get back to sleep knowing that there was a bat in the room, even if it stayed put all night, so I decided to make a dash back into the room, grab my phone, and do what any scared girl would do in my situation. Call my dad. Luckily, it was only 11:30ish Portland time.

He very kindly didn't laugh at me too much and suggested I open the screen of my windows, grab a blanket, close my bedroom door, and go sleep downstairs and the bat would make its own way out of my room. Well, I fell asleep on the couch, and about an hour later was woken up again by fluttering noises. Turns out the bat had made its way out of my room, by somehow crawling under the door, and was now flying around downstairs. It ended up doing loops around the kitchen, and I now had absolutely no clue what to do with it, since there is nowhere downstairs to trap it and the doors all have springy screen doors that I can't leave open. So what did I do? Called my dad again. By now it was 1:30ish Portland time, but I was too freaked out to care.

While talking to him trying to figure out what to do, the bat left the kitchen, and flew upstairs. After a few minutes I heard a lot of bursts of extra loud fluttering, and then silence. And then another burst, and more silence. So I slowly crept up the stairs, fully expecting the bat to come flying at my face in the narrow stairwell. It didn't, and when I reached the top of the stairs, I discovered that the bat had got itself caught in the shower and kept flying into the shower curtain. So the first thing I did was close the bathroom door. Now I had a bat trapped in the bathroom, with no means of escape. That wasn't something that I wanted to deal with when I woke up in the morning, or leave for one of my roommates to discover (they were all gone for the night). So, with paternal encouragement, I opened the bathroom door, darted inside, closed the door behind me, pulled the window screen open, and then ran out of the bathroom, closing the door behind me. Fortunately the bat stayed in the shower. I made sure there were no cracks around the door that the bat could squeeze through, and then, after much reassurance, finally got back into bed.

I think it was 5am at this point. I tossed and turned for a long time, listening to imagined fluttering sounds. My alarm went off at 7:30 because I had to be in lab this morning (I don't like Saturday classes). So my calculations give me about 2-3 hours of real sleep. Not enough. When I woke up I really had to pee, but I spent several minutes listening at the bathroom door for signs of the bat. I didn't hear anything, so I went in. I still didn't see or hear it, so I poked at the shower curtain, hoping to scare it into movement if it was still there. Nothing. So I peeked into the shower and it looked like the bat was gone. There was much exhausted rejoicing.

I was like a zombie in lab, barely responding to anything, and when I got home I just collapsed in bed for an hour but the heat eventually woke me up. Now I'm trying to stay cool, but failing miserably. I think I might go for a bike ride. If I'm going to be overheating and sweating anyway, I might as well be getting exercise.