New Years Eve - 2009

I've been listening to BBC World Service on the radio. For the past few days the theme has been: What has your year been like?

What has my year been like?
In January I started further education to become a nurse anesthetist. It was exciting, stimulating and challenging. I feel that what I learn enriches my work and visa versa. At the same time it is exhausting to study full-time while working half-time and at the end of the first semester I wondered how I would get through the next.

Father died this year. I spent a month with mother and father in february/march which I really enjoyed. He was doing pretty well then, stacking firewood, pruning apple trees etc. I could concentrate on getting Mother back on her feet after her knee replacement surgery. In retrospect I am happy to have spent those weeks with them.

When I returned from America we picked up my 50th birthday present from the children: Lucy, a 4 month old belgian shephard puppy. She is a real sweety: a bit shy, quite smart and very active.

In May Father began experiencing increasing falls and weakness of the extremities and it was discovered that the myeloma had migrated to the brain. What a disappointment after the blood work had been getting better and better all through the winter! This new complication is very rare but has a bad prognosis: 3 months from what I could find out.

Summer vacation: we celebrated my birthday on Skibladner, the worlds oldest paddle steamer. Then came a week in Paris, my present from Husband. There we wandered the streets, visited churches, parks and museums. My favorite experiences were the Monet water lilies, the stained glass windows of Saint Chapelle, the Cluny museum and the Weleda massage. We also spent a weekend at the cabin in Valdres, and had a visit from Tante Christina. On August 1st we went to California for 3 weeks where we visited Ilian and Roland, drove up the coast, into the mountains and the desert.

When we went to Cortland on the way home to see Father, he was dying. Not knowing how long it would still take, I went back to Norway as planned. However, 5 days later I was back on a plane heading for New York. Adam called just as we were leaving to go to the airport to say that Father had died. They were all there when I arrived: Ilian had just come from California. Roland, Adam, Mother, Beren and Tormod were there, and Ann, the family friend who had held his hand when he died. We spent 2 weeks together, preparing the funeral and after that, just spending time together. I feel I have come closer to my family this year.

While I loved the weeks spent with family, I was missing school, and came back with a research project to make up and new projects to complete. This whole fall I seem to have spent catching up. Catching up on missed classes while I was in America, then after I had the swine flu, catching up on missed shifts of practice nursing. The fall semester ended with a home exam. Writing it was fun and I learned just how much I can pack into a day when I schedule properly. The results aren't in yet. I feel unsure as to how it went (update: I got a C. Dissapointing)

And so we come to Christmas vacation, where I am trying to force myself to take a break from studying, but am finding that it's all catching up with me - how exhausted I really am. Outside we have 2 feet of snow, and temperatures around zero Fahrenheit. When it is so cold I find myself holding my breath waiting for something to break down: the car, the electricity or the water. At least we have lots of firewood.

Right now, I'm still so exhausted that I am not even looking forward to college starting up again on Monday - I'm scared to death I won't make it, I guess. And also that overworking, like I have to for at least another 6 months, I might make some fatal mistake at work or in practice nursing: a mistake of judgement or of priority. Somehow in the I next 3 days I have to psych myself up to go into the new year with a positive attitude, to take hold of it and make the most of it. But now I am going to bed. Will try to write a forward looking post tomorrow.

Happy New Year!

Engagement

Ingvild and Christhian got engaged this Christmas. Christhian is a 24 year old elektronics major from Columbia. They have been dating for a year and 3 months. Christhian has relatives in Norway, which is how they met. He was visiting them during the summer break from college in Spain. They plan to move in together after Ingvild graduates from high school and get married in 2011.


This year Irene made the marsipan piggies for the prize to the one finds the almond in the rice pudding.


And here is my hansome husband in his Christmas tie.

A Dog's Christmas

I am Topsy. I am 9 years old and I used to be an only dog, back in the good old days. About 9 months ago Master and Mistress brought home another dog, Lucy, who is a Real Pest. I have to let Master and Mistress pet her. She belongs to Mistress, and that is Okay, but why do I have to let Master pet her too? I can't have anything to myself anymore. They let her go on walks with us and she is always showing off how fast she can run. She gets to lie in my bed when they go away, and she gets to eat at the same time as me. They don't seem to understand that as younger dog she should be getting my leftovers only.

Christmas is fun. Master and Mistress always put up a tree in the living room. It has lot's of stuff hanging on it, and underneath are boxes and parcels wrapped in colored paper and string, and there is always one parcel hidden among the others with a yummy pigs ear inside. This year there were two. I went straight to the pile and picked one out, but they took it away and put it back. Said I had to wait. Well, I parked myself in front of the tree. I was at least going to make sure Lucy didn't get one of those pig-ear parcels. Later on in the evening they let us each have one. Lucy took hers and hid behind Master's chair with it. It's too bad she's so sneaky 'cause I would have taken it away from her otherwise. It's fun tearing up the paper before getting to the pigs ear. Pigs ears are my favorite goodie!



Believe it or not, next morning they put these delicious smelling kibbles in gravy out in bowls. Why they put them on a counter where only the cats could get at them I can't understand. I tried to stand on my hind leggs to eat from the bowls but Mistress wouldn't let me. Imagine wasting such yummy food on cats!

The cats tried to palm a mouse off on me. I didn't want the mouse, I wanted the catfood in gravy! Of course the mouse might have been meant for Lucy. She plays with the cats a lot. Thinks she's very brave making feignts at them snarling and showing her teeth, all the while trying to avvoid those sharp claws. Cats play dirty, so I don't even bother anymore. Anyway, Lucy had only just started chewing on the mouse when Master saw her and took it away. I guess the cats felt sorry for her cause they brought her a new mouse later on and she managed to chew it up and swallow it before Master was able to get hold of it.



I try to teach Lucy manners whenever possible. But she always starts crying and then Master and Mistress come running and make me stop and comfort her. It's sickening. Still I let her know whose boss as often as I can and give her a thrashing whenever I can get away with it.

Christmas Eve

It's been a long hard fall. Starting with Father's death; then, when I got home classes to attend, papers to write while catching up on the ones that I missed. Since the beginning of October, practice nursing on the anesthesia unit in Elverum, all the while working half-time. It was tough, worse than in the spring. In the course of the 10 weeks I had the swine flu (H1N1), a multiple choice anesthesiology exam as well as preparing for the home exam in anesthesia nursing. At the evaluation my teacher and nurse mentor strongly recommended that I put my books away and rest up during the Christmas break. I was exhausted by then, and it was affecting my performance.

Immediately following the period of practice nursing came the home exam. We were given the exam-text at 9 am on Monday morning and had to hand it in by noon the following Monday. We could choose between 2 subjects: obstetrics and general surgery. I chose obstetrics since this would be my last chance to learn about the subject. During the practical I had only actually been involved in 2 cesareans. I planned my days carefully with 3-4 two to three hour work periods, totalling 8 hrs a day for 7 days (9 hrs on the last day). Between work sessions I walked the dogs, went shopping, made dinner, hung laundry etc. The only problem was that when I was done writing I had 1300 too many words. I spent almost the whole last day cutting back. In the end I wrote a little about a lot. The question is whether I rather should have written a lot about a little. But by the time I realized that I should have done it completely differently it was Friday afternoon - too late to start over.

For those who are interested here's what I wrote about: We were given a case. Part A was to identify and describe the challenges for anesthesia nursing contained in the case. Part B was to write about one of these problems in depth. The case was a young women coming for a semi-emergency cesarean because of failure to progress with labor after an uneventful pregnancy. In my paper I took her through all the scenarios which could necessitate conversion of an epidural anesthesia to general anesthesia and then all the complications relating to airway management during the induction of general anesthesia and the options which each complication presented.

When I went to work in the afternoon after handing in the test I found I still am not up to my best performance. This has been bothering me since. As a nurse you have to be up to your best, all the time. As a nurse anesthetist even more so. And so I have decided that the advice given at the evaluation was good and that I would try to rest up during Christmas. I have so far been able too stay away from my books. I have some withdrawal symptoms - a kind of restlessness, but am doing my best to frivolously do things like watching Grey's Anatomy, reading novels, playing logic games (griddlers) online, and do some working out (unfortunately all this school stuff is not good for my waistline).

During the last few days I have also been enjoying baking hutzelbrot and bagels, shopping, setting up the creche and decorating for Christmas. Really I have to thank my family that we are having a Christmas at all! Husband baked almost all the cookies. Ingvild and Christhian trimmed the tree yesterday. I am now going to start cooking christmas dinner, before picking up Irene from the bus from Oslo, and Ingvild from work.

Merry Christmas!