Snapchat and Selfies

You guys, I just don't understand the appeal of shapchat. Or the point. Usually, it just ends up with me getting a ton of pictures of a ton of selfies. And I retaliate with a ton of selfies. To what end? And the captions, they are the best. I'm waiting to go to work... I'm bored. I'm tired. Look, I braided my hair. Here, a picture of my dog.
I am just kind of at a loss. I commend all you friends who continue to send me snaps, even though I never respond because I just feel a little bit weird about sending a selfie in the library, or even in my own kitchen for that matter. Is this really what we do for entertainment? They say that this fast-advancing day-and-age, it takes more and more to entertain us, but I am kind of feeling like it is the opposite. If we're entertained by a bunch of random selfies, then I am pretty sure... we're fine.

Also, story time. I flew to California a few weekends ago to visit family and see one of my best friends. We ended up talking on the beach for like 4 hours. Of course, I forgot my sunscreen and got FRIED. And my chin broke out into second-degree blisters. So I wanted to get rid of this THING on my face and applied some Neosporin.. only to find out I am allergic.
So now I have this huge reaction, and I look like the living dead.
So I go to the doctor (because as much as I love people staring at my chin when they are talking to me...) and as soon as he walks in, he takes one look at me and immediately, "Oh-[insert horrendously long mumbled medical term here]--impetigo! yeah, you have an infection."
He then proceeds to prescribe me some antibiotics and tells me that a side effect may be that my skin falls off and I am hospitalized. (No kidding, look up stevens-johnson syndrome. Only if you have a strong stomach though. It's terrifying.)
Then, as if it doesn't get better, he asks, "Would you mind if I took a picture of your chin for my NP lecture at the U? I update it every year and this is the perfect specimen. Don't worry, I won't give your name or anything- **SNAP."


Awesome.

So I'm just feeling kind of weird about this day.

And I'm not going to document it with snapchat, okay?
Good.

On a lighter note, please enjoy this fabulous song. I am going to their concert tomorrow gremlin-chin or NO, and I could not be more excited.

[fake] blood and guts

So I have this fear of needles.

And I've definitely been working on that since like, the dawn of time.
But it is still very apparent in my life.
It's not even the blood, at all, it's the needles! Ask me why that makes sense.
If I didn't receive confirmation after ridiculous confirmation that I am supposed to be a nurse, it would probably have gotten to me by now. But you take it in baby steps, you know?

Well today we started our first IV's, in this mechanical arm that's got GREAT veins. It looks like a real arm, you use real equipment, you are in a lab that feels like a real hospital room...the only difference is that the arm is hard plastic and feels nothing like a real vein, or real skin! But you know, whatever. We take what we can get.

Truth. EVERY DAY.

Well I kind of freaked out. I have been acting all composed and all that crap this entire week, you know, fake it till you make it? Today I freaked out. It began when I inserted the IV and didn't send the catheter in far enough, so fake blood started spurting out all. over. the place. 
I couldn't get it to stop, and my instructor was like,.... "YEAH Kaitlin! You're doing grea--- oh."

I laughed, and everyone else laughed, and it was all fun and games, but inside, I was still freaking out. It kind of reminded me of the time last semester when we were learning to do some kind of irrigation (I won't go into too much detail, because none of you really want to know, trust me) and I put real soap in the IV bag instead of caster soap. My instructor got a good kick out of that.
I am so excited to look back on my little 22-year-old student-nurse self and laugh. I'm glad God has given me the ability to laugh at myself. Even though I still freak out a lot, it helps.

nursing humor at it's...finest?

So I'm gonna keep practicing. A LOT. And I am gonna think happy thoughts, and tell myself a million times over that needles are not that bad. Because they really aren't, right? They are itty-bitty compared to like fifty years ago, when my parents were kids getting shots with these huge honkin' things. Last semester I freaked out about giving shots, and now it doesn't phase me anymore, so IV's can't be that different, right?
Er. Emphasis on the question mark.

So if you see me around, just give me a hug. You don't even have to mention that you read this. Just give me a little encouraging smile and say, "You're doin' great."

 In the meantime, I'll be in the open lab. Sticking needles in things and drinking a lot of gatorade so as to avoid any feeble knees.

This one is called: my life in a nutshell right now.

Today I stumbled upon this beaut. Please relish in it for this small moment with me, because I think it is so great.

A Day In The Life of a Provo College Girl-- August 26th, 2013

1. Wake up

2. Eat breakfast

3. Get picked up by friend #1

4. Help friend #1 try on wedding dresses 

5. Meet a new friend, #2, a newlywed. who proceeds to tell you all about being a newlywed (and my word people, sometimes even for a student nurse there is just too. much. detail. I needn't expound.)

6. Go home and help friend #3, who happens to be your roommate,  find a venue for HER wedding

7. Find out friend #4 is engaged to someone she met 4 weeks ago

8. Help friend #5 with a ride to her new apartment, the one which her and her soon-to-be-husband will be moving into

9. Comfort friend #6 that nothing is wrong with her, yes she has been dating her boyfriend for 6 months and yes it is perfectly normal and okay to not be engaged by now.

10. Ponder about how much I do not understand this Provo thing and wonder if I ever will

11. Throw a dinner party

12. Break things off with a guy, hate hate hate it, wonder if I'm going to live a defective life by being too picky, conclude that I'm okay

13. Sleep. So deeply.

You guys. Provo has this reputation, see, and I'm starting to see that it's there for a very real 

r e a s o n

!

It's a jungle out there, you guys. J to the U n g l e.

August 18th, 2013: "Words that Inspire me"

"Have courage for the great sorrows of life, and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace; God is awake."
Victor Hugo

"The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become."
Charles DuBois

"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."
Greek Proverb

"The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things."
-Henry Ward Beecher

"Ladies, place your heart in the hands of God and He will place it in the hands of a man who He believes deserves it."
Unknown

"The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him, he's always doing both."
James A. Michener

"Your body is the harp of your soul. And it is yours to bring forth sweet music from it or confused sounds."
Khalil Gibran

"We were not sent to this world to do anything in which we cannot put our hearts."
John Ruskin

"There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind."
C.S. Lewis

"Believe. Believe in your destiny and the star from which it shines. Believe you have been sent from God as an arrow pulled from his own bow.
It is the single universal trait which the great of this earth have all shared, while the shadows are fraught with ghosts who ram the winds with mournful wails of regret on their lips.
Believe as if your life depended on it, for indeed it does."
Richard L. Evans

"I have wondered if I am trying to force a life. While the life I lead may not match the picture in my head, perhaps the one offered me is just as full of joy, its pigments just as bright, just not what I expected."
Richard L. Evans“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one... lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable,irredeemable.”
C.S. Lewis"You have to go whole-heartedly into anything in order to achieve anything worth having."
Frank Lloyd Wright

"Today we're younger than we're ever going to be"
Regina Spektor

“I’d like to repeat the advice that I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun."
Jon Krakauer

Carlfred Broderick, in his book "My Parents Married on a Dare",  shares this personal experience that took place while he was a stake president:
 
            A woman came to him when he was a stake president for a blessing.  He said:  "I had known this sister for years and in my judgment she had made some very poor life choices.  She had married a handsome, charming young man who initially wasn't a member of the Church but joined the church for her.  She waited a year to marry him and then went to the temple.  It was the last time he ever went to the temple.  I knew he was a flake from the beginning.  It didn't surprise me that he soon returned to many of his pre-church habits.
         There was a great pain for this woman.  A good, good woman, she kept in the church; she kept in the kingdom; she suffered enormous pain because her husband went back to gambling and drinking and other things that were unhappy and unwholesome.  But, the greater pain came when her children, having these two models before them, began to follow him.  They gradually seemed to adopt his lifestyle, values, and attitude toward the Church and toward sacred things.  Although she never wavered from her own faith, her family was slipping away from her.
         As she asked me for a blessing to sustain her in what to do with this awful situation in which she found herself, my thoughts were,  "Didn't you ask for this?  You married a guy who really didn't have any depth to him and raised your kids too permissively.  You should have fought harder to keep them in church rather than letting them run off to racetracks."  I had all those judgments in my head when I laid my hands on her head.  The Lord told her of his love and his tender concern for her.  He acknowledged that he had given her (and that she had volunteered for) a far, far harder task than He would like.  (And, as he put in my mind, a harder task than I had had.  (I have eight good kids, the last of whom just went to the temple.  All would have been good if they had been orphans.)  She, however, had signed up for hard
children, for children who had rebellious spirits but who were valuable; for a hard husband who had a rebellious spirit but who was valuable.  The Lord alluded to events in her life that I hadn't known about, but which she confirmed afterwards.  Twice Heavenly Father had given her the choice between life and death, whether to come home and be relieved of her responsibilities, which weren't going very well, or whether to stay to see if she could work them through.  Twice on death's bed she had sent the messenger away and gone back to that hard task.   She stayed with it.
         I repented.  I realized I was in the presence of one of the Lord's great noble spirits, who had chosen not a safe place behind the lines punching out the ordinances to the people in the front lines as I was doing, but somebody who chose to live out in the trenches where the Lord's work was being done,
where there was risk, where you could be hurt, where you could lose, where you could be destroyed by your love.  That's the way she had chosen to labor.  Then the thought,  "I am unworthy to lay my hands on her head; if our sexes were reversed, she should have had her hands on mine."