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
