I lucked out today, didn't have to go in until 5 pm and just worked until we closed for the evening. I was home by 9:00. Awesome! That helped a lot, and I was able to take an hour nap this afternoon.
I have a full plate on the running schedule this week. I'm not going for mega miles, probably will end up somewhere around 65, but I do have a couple of faster sessions planned along with running the Equinox Half Marathon at a good tempo run pace. It's downhill, so that should take a few seconds per mile off the pace and make it a little easier.
Tomorrow is normally tempo day but I will be doing a couple of sustained hard 20 minute runs in with my morning miles. And then speedwork on Thursday, likely 800s. Not too many, though. I want to get a couple of 20 mile days in this week and that, combined with everything else, should make it a good quality training week.
I've continued on the up and down emotions the past few days. All day Saturday at work I was holding it together on the outside but all I wanted to do was cry. I continued that on Sunday, and it was a little harder to hold back the tears but I still managed to keep it together while the patients were around. Back in the nurses station I had a few moments of wiping away tears.
I had a really difficult patient over the weekend, and one of the hardest things to deal with are people with dementia and/or brain metastases from cancer. I'm not sure what was wrong with this one patient because there was no mention of brain mets in his scan or history but the type of cancer he has is likely to go to the brain and his behavior was so inappropriate.
I had to endure two days of him, the first day when I did his chemo for 7 hours, and the second day even though I wasn't taking care of him, he was being verbally abusive and upsetting other patients, and it was horrible.
Sometimes I wonder why we are putting people through the treatments we do. We are so focused on trying to cure things or control things, when sometimes it's just torture for the patient.
I see so few patients who, faced with terminal disease, make the choice to not go through the rigors of treatment, and they sometimes have a better quality of life and live longer because they aren't purging their bodies with chemicals and radiation and being sick from that the last few months of their lives.
But I don't have any tears now. Don't know where they went. I have been so totally unfocused and unpredictable with my emotions. The hot flashes are not helping.
All I want to do is go look at the changing aspen leaves somewhere. I know they are peaking now and won't last long. I should have known better than to overbook myself this week. I always try to get up to the cabin or go somewhere up high to see the colors the third week in September. That was so dumb to miss out on that!
I suppose I could blow off all my runs and studying to go up and see the leaves but right now I feel so crunched for time and so stressed out with deadlines that I think it would be more stressful. So I'll stick to the plan and wait for the cottonwood, maple, and other trees to change here in another week or two.
Not the same as aspen, but I did this to myself. Now I pay for it. Dumb. Really, really dumb.
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