Snow

The snow started just as I was leaving for church and continues to come down.  The wind is howling and forcing itself in through my windows.  I am thinking of December 11th, the day that I got towed off an exit ramp a mere two hours after the snow had started, the day I was buried - again - up to the bumper in my driveway 20 minutes later.  I was really grateful to not be working that day.  In fact, the state pulled the snowplows off the highways, but not the ambulances.  In second fact, two of our ambulances got stuck in the parking lot that day, and no one was available to pull us out.  But we still had to go.  And don't we dare complain.

I wonder what it has come to mean in my life that I don't ever get to say no.  I fear that it means I never get to answer with an authentic yes in any realm of my life.  When you feel like the world is always demanding your yes, when your right to protect yourself is negated by the fact that you're being paid to sacrifice (albeit poorly), how do you even know when your heart is actually wanting to say yes anymore?  I feel stripped of so much of my own will that I often feel like I have nothing left to offer to anyone or anything.  I have come to a place where I don't know how to say yes OR no any longer.  Life has become an endless cycle of feeling that I am required to give all of myself to anyone who demands it at all times, even to my own detriment.  I often find myself fiercely guarding every second of my time, and it doesn't even matter what I'm doing (or likely not doing).

I am scheduled to go in to work at 7pm tonight.  I will likely catch a few restless minutes of sleep, sitting up, while my legs ache, in a vibrating, loud, and cold truck - which will be filled with diesel fumes.  I will get up when the hospital decides that they are, rather, a clinic, and sends a patient who doesn't even need oxygen or a saline lock to a bigger, badder hospital - in a blizzard.  I will have to go when someone throws up a mere one time and thinks they are dying.  I will have to go for someone who drank too much and is now crying over a bad day. I will be hungry, tired, cold, and angry.  All of which I will carry forward into my personal life tomorrow: sleeping half my day away, eating refined carbs for energy, doing poorly on my midterm, and ignoring anyone who wants to talk to me because I can't handle people anymore. 

When I think of someone calling 911 tonight, I fill with anger.  You could even call it fury.  Then I want to cry.  When I think of the nurse (or even the HUC) who will lecture me about how a patient had to wait - a patient who is so sick that they need no cardiac monitor, no medication, and who snores loudly as they sleep in a warm, safe, non-blizzard-y bed - I actually get nauseated.  I will bite my tongue until I draw blood, because upseting a nurse has become one of the seven deadly sins.  To suggest, no matter how nicely and rationally, that patients may be safer off the road on a night like this will earn me some nasty labels, namely "ungrateful" - for the revenue revenue revenue this priceless institution provides to us, and ensuingly, for my job.

But most importantly, I will wonder when my safety and well-being, and now my heart, became the last matter of importance to anyone, especially myself.