Lost

No blogging for a while, no ideas, no motivation. Just feeling kind of lost and adrift. Seems like there are so many better and more interesting EMS blogs that it isn't worth writing about calls, med school isn't happening and I'm just out of things to say.

I've got a new full-time partner on the ambulance, which always takes a little adjustment. Things at the ambulance company are in a constant state of transition for the last few months, which is unsettling and stressful for me. I can adapt to change, I'm entirely flexible in how things work on calls, but I just don't like not knowing what I'm walking in to every day. There is one supervisor, moved up from the south station, whose personality just grates on me and I've already had a run-in with him in the first 4 weeks. Once I'm in the truck and doing my thing, the rest of it fades away and I really enjoy what I'm doing. Even on the Thursday night that was so busy my truck did back-to-back dispatched calls because we were the only ones even close to available. Normally the city runs in a 4 truck rotation for calls, giving everyone at least a little time to find an ER bed for their patient. The middle of the night call was the drunk assault victim I had told my partner that we were missing for the trifecta, so at least the night was complete.

Running is going. I was feeling pretty good about the whole deal, but a week where I wasn't able to accomplish what I wanted to (including a day where I was dehydrated and it was 85+ degrees and ended up walking home - and then had to work overnight) has left me feeling despondent about the whole idea. I feel like there is no way I'm ever going to make the 12 miles I was supposed to run this week, much less the whole half-marathon in two weeks. K ran his 12 in speedy time yesterday, which just makes me feel like that much more of a failure. I haven't even been able to get in 3 days a week on the training schedule. I finally got my ass up this morning to at least run something because I was starting to feel like I just wasn't going to run any more at all. I'm hoping to make time tomorrow afternoon to get the 12 done and off my mind.

I can't decide what to do about medical school. Do I spend the $2k to get help on the MCAT, submit applications again to more schools all over the country, and silently hope something works out? After submitting the financial aid documents, I found out that my "expected family contribution" for school is over $39,000 a year. K's salary won't even cover that plus the monthly mortgage for a year, so I'm not entirely sure how anyone figures that we're going to live completely in the red. Even though K tells me not to worry, we'll figure something out if I want to go, I'm not sure that I could do a decent job studying if I knew that every minute I was there was costing us the financial security we've worked the last eight years to achieve. So, do I stay on the ambulance, spend the 18 months to be a paramedic and work until I don't want to be on the ambulance any more and then make a new decision? Do I start trying to get my ducks in a row to apply for PA school? Do I just run off and live under a bridge?

I can't wait until the office job is over. They're trying to kill me in these last moments by demanding that I'm on-site (1.5 hr drive each way) instead of working from home two days a week. Those are my only two completely "off" days from the ambulance and kill any available time for running. I'm training the three part-time people who are taking over my job and that is actually better than doing all this myself, but I still don't get why we all have to sit in the same place to look at items on the network drives.

I guess this is the long way of saying that I may not be posting much, but I won't go away entirely without saying goodbye.