School's out for summer!

Spent my first day of summer break on a major tidy-up. Have done oddles of laundry and organizing piles and piles of paper from school. I bit the bullet and sorted through them all, placing the keepers in their corresponding notebooks, and adding hundreds more pages of paper to my recycle bag. I'm to the point where it's getting to be a challenge figuring out where my books are going to go. I currently have a book cubby, but I think I'm going to have to expand to a second, larger cubby, because I need all the books at hand for reference and easy access.  This is doable, but I reserve the right to grouse about it anyway!

Still, I'm ecstatic that school is out.  Ecstatic.

This semester a couple of times I wrenched my right knee pretty badly- once when sliding behind the wheel of a borrowed pickup when I was having car repairs, and the other time when sliding in that same direction into a fixed chair in a lecture hall with grippy upholstery- the chair wasn't moving, my butt wasn't sliding, and my knee is what gave out.  Super ouch.

I had an ear infection shortly thereafter and that pulled focus and I didn't ask the dr about it. I've had several days recently wherein I limped around pitifully. It's to the disastrous point that I can't even wear my hooker shoes.  Heck, I can't wear my modest shoes with a heel. DISASTER!

Went to the dr. on Monday. I thought I have a torn meniscus, but the more I consider, I think it will prove to be the MCL, because I have a horrid bruised feeling in the middle on the front below the knee, which would be the insertion point for that ligament onto the bone.  Ouch.  I suppose we'll find out. In the morning I have an MRI scheduled.  The metal in my maxilla is a titanium alloy, so hopefully it won't be a problem. The MRI tech told me just to tell her if it heats up during the MRI. Somehow, this does not comfort me, but odds are, sooner or later, I'll need an MRI for something really ominous, and it's better to know now if it's workable for me or not.

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I applied for a job at a hospital and really hoped to land that,  but in light of the knee problem, it's probably for the best that I have the summer NOT running around as a patient assistant all summer. I've got 3 good months to recover in time for clinicals in the Fall, whatever this is.

Monday I start back on a part-time basis at my old company. I'm grateful they'll let me come back, and it will be nice to see some of the folks I've been missing.

And speaking of old jobs... I don't recall if or how much I mentioned it here, but in mid-December I took a job as a part-time/relief dispatcher in a small town PD.  It was supposed to be 8 hours a week and then fill in when needed. My Mondays and Tuesdays for school would not be touched, and it seemed like a perfect fit. There was also the promise that when fully trained, I could study at work when the phones were quiet.  This just seemed like a win/win.  Things were seemingly going well. I was definitely progressing and felt good about my prospects there, and some of the folks were starting to feel like family. 

Abruptly, on February 19, the manager called me into the office when I arrived at work and told me it was "not working out" and that they were letting me go. The paper they gave me said the reason for my "resignation" was "training issues."  I was in a state of shock, but it did not break my heart, because I'd been training around 30 hours a week and they still wanted me for more hours. It was killing my study time, in truth. I'm glad it ended when it did.

Still, it felt terrible to be let go. It was a blow to the ego, and I wondered if I was crappy and a barely concealed joke, since I had NO IDEA there was any issue with the way I was progressing.  I mean, if I was failing at something, I'd have a pretty good idea it's going on, wouldn't I?  I never cried or panicked, even when juggling 911 calls and various local drama all at the same time. I thought I was holding my mud in a ball quite well. I felt certain that I was going to be a fantastic dispatcher eventually, and that I could even use this experience possibly in my future career as an RN. I left and I'm still friends with a couple of folks in the department.

Flash forward to today, and on Facebook I saw a video of the woman who had been "training" me mentioning all the department's dispatchers, particularly mentioning a new name-- her sister. It's as if the whole picture just came into focus: it wasn't me, it was THEM. I was apparently a convenient place-warmer until the time so-and-so's sister became available. In a way, it was a gift to see that video, because it confirmed that it really wasn't me at all. I was just convenient, and for a moment, they were convenient for me, too. Still, if people are that vapid and openly licentious in their dealings, I don't want anything to do with them anyway.  I'm too good for them, and well-shed of them. As my sister said when she was a wee girl: "good rivets."