Reader participation:

My semester has me sequestered into stressed out manic homework crazytown. So I invite you to a topic I've been thinking about a great deal:

What is your definition of health?

I hope some of you will chime in with your thoughts. I have my opinions (which, after the craziness subsides, I hope to blog about), but for now I'd love to hear yours...

Flight.

I, as those of you who know me already are much aware, am a nervous flier. And by "nervous", I mean that I cry on about a third of the flights I take, and panic at least briefly on probably 95% of them. Strange? Surprisingly not. Plenty of people on any given flight are wary at best, but in my own experience there are always others like me on board.

Some of my favorite flying adventures have been with the people I've met on flights. Several years ago I was traveling from Kansas City to Missoula, with a connection in Salt Lake. Weather in Missoula had been bad for days - inversions with heavy freezing fog, and they closed the Missoula airport just as my flight was boarding in Salt Lake. I got a hotel room for the evening and hoped that the fog would lift in time for my rebooked flight to land the following afternoon (the woman next to me on the plane had been trying unsuccessfully to fly into Missoula for three days - she said she was giving up and renting a car). The next day I was seated uncomfortably in row one of a Canadair regional jet (no leg room in that row!). The man in the seat next to me was a pilot who would be returning with the plane to SLC on the next flight. He was a friendly sort of fellow, who laughed and smiled as my white knuckled hands gripped the armrests. "Nervous flier?" he asked unnecessarily. "That would be an understatement," I replied. He spent the next half an hour explaining the details of flying, along the safety features of aircraft in general and particularly those of the little plane we were on. I appreciated the gesture, thought my problem is not a cognitive one. My brain knows that odds are strong in my favor of surviving each and every flight I take, but my viscera disagree.


On a flight from Kansas City to Minneapolis several years ago, I had a young, fun, equally terrified flier as a seatpartner. Jane, her name was. We introduced ourselves as we sat down and, given the storm outside, both promptly disclosed our fears of flight. As we ascended into the bumpy skies, she shared her flask of whisky with me, and I my mini bottle of wine with her. It turned out to be a fun trip...

Last year I was flying from Boston to Missoula, with a stop in Denver. The first leg of the flight was on a bigger plane, with rows of three. I found my seat at the back of the plane, sandwiched between two large men, and half obscured from view by their overlap. "That's me," I said to the guy on the aisle. "Oh good," he said to both me and his friend. "We were hoping it was someone little." (That's a good way to win most girls over right away.) I slid into my seat, the big guys' biceps encroaching on my space, pinning me snugly between the two of them. Most people might complain about this arrangement, but that was the safest I've ever felt on a plane. They were nice guys, and we had a pleasant chat during the flight.

It's strange, my flying problem. I have a little fear of heights, which contributes to the flying fear. "Flying isn't the same as heights," someone once told me, prior to my first trip on an airplane. "Like hell it's not," was my reply after that maiden flight. It's exactly like being 28,000 feet in the air, which seems pretty effing high to me.
Ironically, I love traveling. And airports. My issues with flying have never stopped me from taking a trip - in fact, I fly at least three times a year. And usually, after a few minutes of panic stricken fidgeting and gripping at my armrests, I calm down and enjoy the rest of the flight.

I go through spurts of obsessive reading about flying. Here are some links I found interesting.

Ask the pilot: turbulence - ask the pilot is a column written by a commercial pilot. Interesting stuff.

Turbulence forecast - gives predictions of turbulence over the continental U.S.

Flight Aware - track flights currently in the air

Nurses for Obama.

Senator Barack Obama speaks to the American Nurses Association. The ANA endorses Obama for President.

This semester I am taking community and public health nursing, nursing leadership and management, and health policy and economics. This is an exciting time in our nation's history to be covering this content - especially the health policy course. When I have more time on my hands, I plan to pen a post about the health policies (lack thereof, mostly) in our country. You should be outraged, if you're not already. I thought our situation was bad, until I learned more about it. Now I think we're on the brink of system failure, unless something is done. Soon.

More when crazy schedule permits.

No debate for me.

I couldn't bring myself to watch the final debate - it's just too stressful.

I hate this phase in the countdown to elections - the trash-talking, hateful, tearing down time. It's a time tested tactic of campaign strategists (yes, I know the difference too), but I really believe that it's detrimental to our society. Don't tell me what your opponent won't do for me - tell me what you will do. I yearn for a leader who can inspire and unite, someone who can truly lead our nation. I'm keeping my fingers crossed - in 20 days, we just might get one.

Where is Mandi?

Buried. Buried alive, kicking and screaming, beneath a heaping helping of clinicals, projects, papers, and other craziness deemed by my esteemed professors to be important to my education. This, our final semester before we are turned loose on the "real world," appears to have been designed to kill us. If you live, then you get to be a nurse.

The bulk of the work this semester is "self directed" learning, meaning that we set our schedules directly with our preceptors. This is a test - a test of organizational wits. Nursing students are organized by nature - we have to be. Clinicals at all hours of the day, labs, papers, class, clinical prepwork, it all eats up monster amounts of time. Ask any of my classmates to see their organizer, and you'll be handed a full size dayplanner, complete with neurotic, color-coded highlighting and dozens of mini post-its clinging to every page. But this semester is the ultimate time challenge. We have three separate clinicals; nursing management, community/population based, and home visits. We are assigned three separate nurses within the community, and we have to coordinate our schedules with each of them. And somehow we have to make it to class, and for most of us, work as well. Egads.

The saving grace for me this semester is that my assignments should be fun. For my management clinicals, I will be working with the nurse supervisor at the Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge. It will be interesting to look at health care within a government system. For my population project I will be setting up protocols for and coordinating hearing and vision screenings for a small school district that has been without a school nurse for the past few years. My home care client is a high risk pregnant woman who I will be working with before and after her delivery, providing resources, education, and whatever she needs as she transitions into her new role.

So where won't Mandi be much this semester? On Blogger. Blogging is my favorite way to decompress after a long or stressful day (and god love the handful of you who show up to read the thing), but unfortunately it's also time consuming. I hope that my blog won't go the way of my kitchen, my eyebrows, and all the other things that have been neglected as of late, but at the moment I just don't know. But -- thanks for coming by, and I'll be around whenever I can.
:)

In my life

Luis and I chose this song (the original Beatles version) for our first dance as husband and wife.



I just came across this video today and I got a kick out of hearing it performed by Dave, although I still prefer the original.

Don't let Luis hear it - it'll probably ruin the song for him :)
(I know, can you believe I married someone who doesn't like Dave Matthews?)

One more.

This Slate article says exactly what I've been thinking about Mrs. Palin. I'm working this evening, but I'll be listening.