My Knowledge Suffices! (AKA Graduation)

 It's been a couple weeks since I graduated with my Bachelor of Science in Nursing. It's not a small feat for anyone to get a degree, but for me, it was a massive milestone that I have been working on since 2003. Getting my ASN was hard enough. Getting my BSN was hard on a level that I have never experienced.

The nursing program at UVU is competitive. Pretty much everyone who gets into the ASN program, at least in my cohort, is a type A perfectionist; I definitely am not, and I had to learn how to be. The courses are difficult, the professors have high expectations, and the schedule can be grueling (especially with work on top of it). On top of full-time classes and the hours upon hours of studying that accompany them, there are clinical hours every week, and some of them are night shifts. The four semesters of the ASN program feel like an uphill marathon. Even with the heavy workload, the schedule, and the intensity of what we were learning, I managed to pull off mostly A's in my classes, with a couple of A-'s. I chalk that up mostly to my wonderful friends in my study group and supportive professors. 

The three semesters it took me to finish the BSN classes were hard for very different reasons. Around the time I started my BSN classes, I was noticing that I felt sick all the time. Then COVID hit. It turned my in-person classes into online classes. COVID got worse in New York, and my friend Amanda and I dropped everything and worked there for two months. We worked the night shift, and I was ALWAYs tired. Doing my assignments in New York felt impossible, and I failed one of my classes.

The next semester, I felt even worse. I constantly felt nauseated, had massive headaches, and inexplicable muscle pain. I maxed out on Tylenol and Ibuprofen every single day, and still had uncontrolled pain. I went to several doctors appointments during that semester and had a few tests, none of which yielded any answers. I was taking several classes, including the one that I had failed the previous semester. They were all online, and I felt like I was alone trying to learn some very complicated topics. Right at the end of the semester, I was diagnosed with ADD (inattentive type), which explains more about my life than I care to admit. With or without the diagnosis, going through that process of being diagnosed (talking with my therapist as well as my doctor) made me realize that all the ways that I had learned to be successful in school were not available to me with online classes. It explained much of the difficulty I was having. With the grace of some very understanding professors, I passed all my classes, despite my struggles in school and feeling ill all the time.

This last semester better in some ways because of the ADD diagnosis. I'm still learning how to best deal with ADD, because it affects other areas of my life besides school. I realized that I had to find new ways to be successful in school, including having more communication with the professors and finding very quiet places with minimal distractions to do my homework. I also started an elimination diet because I was desperate to feel better, and I was willing to try anything. The very, very good news is that the elimination diet worked for me- it turns out that cow's milk is the devil- and I started feeling better. However, there were a lot of big events happening to me and to some people I care about during the semester. I don't really want to go over what they were, but they took up a lot of my time, attention, and energy. As a result of the big events and resulting distraction, the last three weeks of the semester were the most stress-filled, sob-inducing weeks of my life. Despite wanting to hide away from everyone and everything, I was running on sheer panic of not being able to graduate. I basically had tears streaming down my face as I worked on all my assignments and projects. I have never been so sad or so stressed in my entire life. But in the end, on May 7th, I walked down that green carpet in the parking lot of UVU on a very windy afternoon and officially graduated.

I've been staring at the screen now for about fifteen minutes trying to think of what to say about all of this. Nursing school has been the best and hardest thing I've ever done. Being a nurse is an honor, not only because of opportunity to make a difference in people's lives every day, but also because I get to rub elbows with some of the smartest, kindest people. The past three years have been a wild roller coaster. Right now I'm torn between really loving my life and also being very sad about some parts of it, but the fact is, I'm really just one of the luckiest people alive. 

I don't know what's next for me. There are so many things that I've been putting on the back burner for the last three years, and I'm ESTATIC about being able to get back to them. Writing, making some art, spending time with the important people in my life. I'm 36 years old and am now just figuring things out for myself. It took me 18 years to finish my degree... It always seems to take me longer to do things than other people, but rather than being hard on myself, I'm grateful for the path that led me here. I'm a better nurse now than I would have been when I was 18 and starting college, or at age 25 and fresh off my LDS mission. It's been a hard journey, but I think I'm better for it, and hopefully that will be reflected in my work and in other areas of my life.

The source of my cap decorations (and the title of this post) by Nathan Pyle:

Big Fat Soap Box

 I'm in an interesting English class this semester that is causing me to (voluntarily) dig into some topics that are sources of past hurts I've experienced in my life, and to come up with research topics about them. Today has kind of left me with some thoughts that I want to verbalize but don't really have an outlet for.

I've basically been fat my entire life. Some of my earliest memories involve being teased relentlessly by peers, having medical tests performed on me to figure out why I was so big for my age, taking medication to help me lose weight, and being put on diets as a child. Being overweight has been one of the most formative aspects of my life, and undoubtedly bled into all other aspects of my life, including personality, relationships, hobbies, and my career.

There's no question that increased weight contributes to many health issues. However, I have to question the medical community's biases of weight. Based on personal experience, I can say that medical professionals miss vital information when they write off all symptoms as results of weight. My ten pound tumor, which was the size of a basketball when it was removed, is evidence of this bias. Medical professionals whose opinion I sought simply told me to lose weight rather than performing thorough histories and exams, which would have shown them the massive tumor. Yes, my weight made the tumor slightly less obvious, and it's genuinely embarrassing to admit that a tumor that size went undiagnosed for so long because of it. However, the lack of thorough exams resulted in YEARS of pain and embarrassment. Luckily for me, the only long-term effects of the tumor are a big scar and my body being slightly asymmetrical. Another personal example is that when I had a blood clot in my leg a couple years ago, I worried that my doctor would again just attribute my health problems to my weight. Both the tumor and the blood clot were the result of genetics; not only does this kind of tumor run in my family, so does a blood clotting disorder. No amount of diet or exercise would have prevented either the tumor or the blood clot.

Perhaps just as damaging (emotionally and mentally if not physically), entertainment media is quick to make overweight people the butt of the joke. Recently I watched an episode of one of my new favorite shows with a scene that was kind of jarring to me. The main characters did something bad. Feeling guilty, they found the person who they hurt in order to apologize. The person came into the room and cried over what had been done. The main characters stopped feeling bad and were clearly uncomfortable because this grieving person, previously unknown to them, was fat. Person is sad because of sad thing, but their feelings are invalid because main characters are uncomfortable with person's size. That was it, that was the joke; cue the laughter.

Critics of the "body positivity" movement argue that being fat is a result of laziness and gluttony, and unhealthy behaviors are glorified. While I don't accept this attitude, I'm not excusing unhealthy lifestyles. I understand that physical and mental health are potentially improved with diet, exercise, and other related healthy behaviors. What I AM saying is this: there are biases against fat people that are damaging physically, mentally, and emotionally. The solutions to the problems that arise from these biases aren't very clear because they are accepted so widely and challenged so little. To drive this point, let me say this: I adopted and accepted negative attitudes about fatness from such a young age and so wholly that I believed it when people told me there was something wrong with me because of my size, that I did not deserve to be in a relationship or deserve love because of it, that I was lazy and selfish, that all my health problems were the result of my weight, that I should be embarrassed about myself, that I have to make my life and my personality small because I am so big, and that I could not and would not be successful. Those are only some of the messages that are so widely accepted. It's taken me years to challenge those beliefs, and I try every day to rewrite those stories that other people told me about myself.

Where does this bias come from? How did society move away from appreciating people with extra pounds and towards appreciation solely for thinness? Why are we so quick to attribute weight issues to an individual's character flaws, rather than accepting that the issue is complex and multifaceted, with solutions that are equally complex? How can we be better healthcare professionals for people with weight issues? Why is it so hard to believe that fat doesn't always mean unhealthy, just like skinny doesn't always mean healthy? I have so many questions.