Difficult stuff

Only time for a brief post. Lots of stuff has been happening that is taking up my time and mental energy. Two things, most notably:

First, one of my supervisors was just diagnosed with breast cancer. It's still unclear what is happening with this, and what it will mean logistically, but it definitely is a bad thing for many reasons, on many levels.

Second, my roommate (another intern) has been in the hospital since Saturday, related to a congenital heart condition. The story is long and complicated, but the short version is that she started to feel sick for the first time in years, we went to the ER, and now she has a team of doctors trying to figure out what's going on. Her family is far away (though her sister flew in on Sunday), and I'm doing my best to help out.

So these extra stressors are not too fun. The good news is that there are lots of good people here, who are very supportive. And, I get to go to Seattle to visit Jeff this weekend, which will be a much-needed break :)

Is the glass half empty or half full???

The lessons learned continue:

1. You know all that stuff your clinical supervisors have told you about watching for changes on self-report measures, especially changes in self-reported suicidal ideation? And how if you notice a change you should follow up on that? Yeah, your supervisors are right.

2. When your clients call you to tell you they want to kill themselves, you are doing a good job. Because that means they are calling you instead of killing themselves.

3. When you can help a client make a plan to not engage in self-harm on Friday at 4pm, and then not worry about it again until Monday when it's time to check-in? That means you are adjusting. Because last time you dealt with a suicidal client on Friday afternoon, you thought about it all weekend.

4. It is possible for your client to say hello to you in the waiting room in the morning, and then try to kill himself later that afternoon. But if he calls someone in your clinic in the middle of the suicide attempt, then you are probably doing a good job (see #2).

5. If a client calls to say he can't make his appointment because he is headed into a manic episode? That is a good sign, because he is using those self-monitoring skills you talked with him about. And yes, maybe he does need his medications adjusted, and yes, that was good of him to call his psychiatrist first.

Other thoughts:

It turns out that ACT isn't so bad. It's just that Steven Hayes is a bit verbose, and I don't so much care for his way of describing things sometimes. At the very least, my clients seem to believe now that ACT will in fact help them lose weight, and my chronic pain clients say that it is helping them cope with their pain. And if they believe it, I suppose I might be able to as well.

Successes, Failures, and Football

Jeff visited over the long weekend (yay!). It seemed like the universe was set against us having fun this weekend, but our time together was limited so it was necessary to have a good time anyway, and we did. For example:

:( Jeff's ankle was still bothering him when he arrived (he's been having problems with it for weeks), so doing a lot of walking was out of the question. This is problematic, because most of the fun stuff we like to do involves walking.

:) Jeff used my bike as a "wheelchair" to get around the neighborhood, and I walked beside him. On Friday night we walked/wheeled to self-serve frozen yogurt at a place where there were at least 8 different flavors, and 30+ toppings to choose from (and you can have as many flavors and toppings as you want in your dish). Jeff went a little crazy, as you might imagine-- red velvet fro-yo topped with cinnamon toast crunch was just the beginning...

:( On Saturday morning I got a crazy bad headache complete with nausea, hyper-sensitivity to sounds, and my whole body feeling off-kilter. I have been told these headaches (which I get occasionally) might be migraines, and whatever it was it sure felt like something awful.

:) We had a picnic with some of my intern friends at Balboa park anyway, and had a nice time.

:( By the time we got home, I was totally wiped out. So much for having a date night on Saturday.

:) Jeff made me burritos and helped me relax. We watched an episode of "Freaks and Geeks" (from netflix), did some crossword puzzles, and went to bed early.

:( On Sunday, I was still not totally back to normal.

:) But I was a little better. So we walked to the local farmer's market anyway, and got some excellent local grapefruits (one of the best things about living in SD), and some sunflowers:

:) We tried to relax most of the day, and eventually my headache started to go away, and Jeff's ankle even started to feel a bit better. We were feeling good enough to go out for our date night on Sunday. We had good sushi, and saw a good movie (Cold Souls), all within walking/wheeling distance of my house. By the end of the night, I felt like I was totally back to normal.

:( This morning we tried to go snorkeling but the beach was *crazy* busy, the waves were really rough and Jeff got seasick, and we didn't see any fish.

:) We came home, had a nice lunch, relaxed, and enjoyed the rest of our day together, mostly just hanging out and enjoying each others' company.

:( Jeff had to leave today. We won't see each other again for 3 whole weeks :(


On a completely unrelated note, my fantasy football league is having our draft on Wednesday night, and I need a team name! I have a tentative name: "intern-al combustion," which is supposed to be a play on being interns, but I forgot that internal combustion is about engines which I'm not so into (I was thinking more along the lines of spontaneous human combustion), and it also has nothing to do with football. So any thoughts? Any other name suggestions???

Order is restored to the universe

So about a month ago, maybe a little longer, I lost my watch, and I was upset. It's a cheap-o velcro sports watch, the kind you can get for $10 at any large discount department store, so it wasn't so much the absence of the watch itself that bothered me. It was that I had lost it in a seemingly impossible way.

Since moving here, I have not acquired a whole lot of stuff. I moved here with just one carload full, bought some furniture during the first couple of weeks, and that has mostly been it. The apartment is fairly sparse, and I don't have that much to keep track of. So when the watch went missing, I was confused. I use the watch to time my runs, and I had gone for a run on a Sunday morning, gone home, taken off the watch in the house, thought I remembered setting it on my desk, and then not thought about it until Tuesday when I wanted to go for a run again.

But it was gone. I scoured the apartment from top to bottom, my roommate looked everywhere, we were both disturbed because it seemed like it had vanished into thin air, and neither of us could think of a single place it could be. There were not that many places to look. We thought we were both going crazy, because really, how can you lose something in a nearly empty apartment, when by all reasonable accounts that thing had only ever been placed in two or three places (kitchen counter, my dresser, my desk)?

More than a month went by, and no sign of the thing. Then, yesterday, something miraculous happened. I was sitting on my bed, staring at my curtains while I talked to Jeff on the phone, and saw this:

Hard to see what I'm getting at? Take a closer look:

All is well.