A Well Needed Update

Hello all!

It’s been a long and tiring past couple months. I was completely engrossed in school at St. Thomas University and have also been fighting multiple infections off and on. Spring semester finally ended this past week and I’m now a free woman! I decided to take the summer off of classes and give myself a well-deserved break. The campus is 30 minutes away from my house (without traffic) and I use a bus service called Metro mobility to take me there and back. The rides are usually long (sometimes longer than the time I spend in school) and it was getting hard on me physically to attend four days a week. I ended up withdrawing from one of my classes in order to focus on my health and body. I was becoming increasingly stressed, which didn’t help my immune system.

For months at a time I battled frequent UTIs and was put on a countless number of antibiotics. This ultimately landed me in the hospital in March (my last blog post explains this). By being on antibiotics I also got other infections in my body because they killed all my good bacteria. Needless to say, I’m finally infection free for the first time since October 2012. Antibiotics and infections drag me down quite a bit which ultimately led to my inability to focus on school or anything else for that matter.

Unfortunately, I decided I’m not going to attend St. Thomas this fall. It’s too far to drive using Metro and they don’t have any online classes (the less I have to be there during the week to better). I’m not sure what I’m going to do in the fall. I am looking to volunteering a lot this summer and see where that leads me. Maybe an opportunity will arise from there. I just want to get out, meet new people, and help others at the same time.

The best part is I’m able to get outside and enjoy the sun (when it’s not raining). I love taking my dog Brody for walks around the neighborhood. (Most of my nurses like the exercise too!) I’m also going to start reading a book for fun. I say it that way because every time I’ve wanted to just read a good book, I felt guilty that I wasn’t reading my books for school instead. Same reason I hadn’t been updating my blog-too many assignments to write on the computer.

Now that I’m searching for things to do for the summer, let me know if you have any suggestions on things I can do to fill my time. I already have plans to update my resume and clean out “junk drawers”. The other day I had time to play a game and yesterday I painted for the first time in months. Needless to say my life is a little more stress-free at the moment.

Jenni

The Month of February

February has completely gotten away from me.  I started classes at the University of St. Thomas on the fourth.  It has been an enlightening experience so far.  I love my classes and teachers.  I’m taking Public Communications and Mass Communications Research Methods.  They are both required within my major, which is Communications and Journalism.  I’m very excited happy that I chose such a great school. The campus is gorgeous and I look forward to going there every day.  Although the schedule was a challenge at first, I’m getting better at managing it.  I go to class Monday through Thursday; I’m not used to being out that much.  However, it’s definitely getting me prepared for having a job in the future.

The hardest part so far has been transportation.  I take a bus service called Metro mobility.  It’s a rideshare program where you call and set up your rides, stating what time you’d like to be picked up at and need to be there by.  They determine based on what other people have scheduled what fits best with each driver.  Unfortunately, a computer does all the work and doesn’t calculate loading and unloading or waiting for passengers.  They are on a tight schedule and it makes it hard to ride with them.  The only good thing is that I can get bus tickets through the state which means I don’t have to pay for them. They charge four dollars for peak time (6-9 AM and 3-6 PM) and three dollars for nonpeak.

Since I’m gone at school four days out of the week, it doesn’t leave much time for other appointments or homework.  Hence the reason I haven’t been able to do any blog posts lately.  (I’ve been working on this one for a while now!) Nursing has gotten a little better.  We hired two nurses, one full-time and one part-time however, there are still some holes in the schedule.  Aside from that, a few other people have been willing to fill in on open shift days.  That’s always nice, especially because we get more back up that way.  Although, that also means I’m busy that day training in the new ones.

This is only the beginning of my blog post… Stay tuned in the next couple days for the other half.

Jenni

Morning Routine and Applying for Colleges

Although I love getting out of the house and going places, being a quad on a vent paralyzed from the neck down does have its limitations. I start my cares around 5 AM and continue with them off and on until about 8 AM. Most mornings I have some sort of therapy in the eight o'clock hour unless it's a shower day (Wednesdays and Saturdays). By the time I get up in my wheelchair it's usually between 9 AM and 10 AM. If I'm going somewhere during the day, say to school or an appointment, I rarely leave before 11 AM.

It takes a lot to get ready in the morning, especially with all of the things I need to get done. I start early with my bowel program and then do range of motion. After that I usually fall back to sleep for about an hour. My nurse's change shifts every 12 hours, at 7 AM and 7 PM; they come in in the morning and wake me up again around 7:30 AM. That's the same time my PCA shows up (they work 4 hours in the morning). I eat breakfast, do a bed bath and then I get dressed. On shower days I transfer into my shower chair the same time of the day I would do a bed bath, only I wash my hair as well. On Mondays I do a bed bath then wash my hair in bed using a tray that goes under my head. They use a pitcher to wet my hair and the water drains off the bed into a big garbage can.

I receive therapy most morings after I get dressed. After therapy I get up in my wheelchair, which as I said before is usually between 9 AM and 10 AM. So as you can see my mornings consist of 4 to 5 hours of cares along with therapy before I'm even able to leave the house for anything. I can adjust the times I do things, the order and also skip some if need be. However, I don't really like doing that if I don't have to. I have a routine down and don't like to mess it up very often. It may seem like a lot and a lengthy amount of time spent, but one thing to remember is that my caregivers are doing everything for me so it takes quite a bit longer to do things. But, like anybody else I have a routine and ways that I like things done, I just do them differently.

When it comes to going to school, I like to choose classes that start around 12:30 PM or later to allow adequate time for me to get my cares done and get there on time using transportation services. Normandale Community College has been great for me because they have a bunch of different classes at all times of the day so it's been easy choosing classes to take at the time I want. However, not all colleges are like that and I'm figuring this out as I'm applying to schools for spring semester 2013.

I'm certain that after this fall semester I want to go on to get my bachelors in communications. About a month ago I applied to Metro State University in Minneapolis and got accepted within a day. I was all excited and ready to start next year, but then I began looking at the different classes offered. That's when I noticed that each one was three hours long and only once a week; the options for classes were 9 AM, 1 PM or 6 PM. Then I saw alongside of the page that it said that the school is designed for people working full-time and that's why the classes were like that.

Looking at the times I found that only a few classes were offered at the 1 PM timeslot, which would be ideal for me. If I were to attend Metro State, I'd be going only on the sure bet that all of the classes I need to take would be offered at that time and I can't be sure that would be the case. So after figuring this out I decided that I needed to look at other colleges with more class time options.

My criteria I had for colleges that would fit for me was that it needed to be semi-close to where I live, have multiple class times, offer online classes and have the bachelor degree program I was looking for (communications). Searching through the different colleges within the Twin Cities I realized that none of them had all of the things on my list. They were either too far away, only had a night and weekend program, no online classes or no communications degree. If I was going to eliminate one of my items on my criteria list it was going to have to be a school with no online classes.

The two colleges I chose to apply to were Augsburg in Minneapolis and St. Thomas University in St. Paul. They were the two that had three out of four things on my list. Neither have online classes, which is okay but the reason why I like to take classes online is so that I don't have to go there every single day of the week to get the credits needed. The reason I figured it's time that I start just taking classes at the school and not online is because I have to prepare myself for a full-time job after school. That's going to involve condensing my morning routine so I can leave earlier and also being able to adapt to getting out of the house every day.

I'm waiting to hear back from both colleges, but I'm leaning towards going to St. Thomas because I like their degree option better. I will definitely keep you updated on which one I end up choosing. I'm ready for a change of pace and I think that will happen coming soon. For now, I'll just have to wait for a response and prepare for my future further.

Jenni

"Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today."
-Malcolm X