Handling Debt

As an idealistic highschooler, I had images of my perfect GPA and shiny accomplishments netting me a full-ride scholarship to a prestigious university where I would obtain my BSN and proceed to live the good life. You can imagine my disappointment when I found that I had applied too late for most scholarships, FASFA had determined that I needed no financial help, and the cheapest university wasn’t impressed by a 32 ACT score anyways. My only choices were to choose a different career, spend a decade getting my degree debt free, or take out the dreaded student loans. Since I call myself “The Quirky Nurse”, you can guess which one I eventually chose.

So I took out all the loans I could, and my parents helped me pay the remainder. I went to school full time year round and graduated with exactly the number of credits I needed a full semester early, eager to start my new job in the Operating Rooms. At the back of my mind, thoughts of my loan repayments lingered, but I mostly ignored them while making half-hearted attempts to save bits of my salary as a hedge for when my 6-month grace period ended. And then my grace period ended and I got the full, horrific understanding that I owed more than a full year’s before tax income to the government, and my minimum payments weren’t going to make this monster budge for years.

I was (am) desperate to climb out of this hole that I had dug myself in, and immediately turned to the wise and knowledgeable older folk around me for help

“What is the best way to pay off debt?”

“How do you save money best to pay off more debt?”

“How long did it take you to pay this off?”

The responses shocked me. A full ten years later, many people still had student debt, and really weren’t too concerned about paying them off. The minimum payment is just another thing they have adjusted too, along with their car payments, mortgages, credit card debt, and other fees that seem required to obtain the “American Dream”. Let’s rewind for a moment, shall we?

The summer between my junior and senior year I had a job in the next city over but didn’t have the cash to buy a car, let alone pay for insurance and gas and repairs. Giving up never even crossed my mind. I looked up the bus schedule, loaded the piece-of-crap mountain bike of my youth on the front of said public transportation, and made it into work on time. Since I got out of work late, when the buses no longer ran, I biked the ten miles home, and collapsed into bed. The next day I repeated the process. It was incredibly difficult at first but by the end of the summer, and had saved enough cash to buy a high-quality bicycle made for commuting, and was in the best shape of my life from cycling twenty miles a day. I saved enough to pay for my last semester of college, and was now armed with the knowledge that I could THRIVE on virtually no money.

It was incredibly easy to get accustomed to my “fabulous nurse cash” (as my family calls it) paycheck, and it made it difficult to taper things off in order to start making more money available to pay off these loans. But just as we humans can adjust to having more, we can certainly adjust to less, and these past six months have been a lesson in that. I’m still wasteful in some areas, and sometimes blow my budget, but today I successfully paid off my second loan, with only two more to go. I am striving to finish by December of 2015. My life will not be ruled by debt, if I have anything to say about it.

Winter Commuting

One of the less quirky things I do is exercise on a regular basis, as human beings are apt do and should do. The quirky part is how I go about it. It’s pretty terrible to go to the gym bursting with motivation, only to be crushed when you realize that every single cardio machine and free weight is in the sweaty grip of some hopeful with a New Years Resolution. My nurse side rejoices, my human side frowns loudly. So what’s girl to do?

Simple. In the face of 10 degree weather and freezing rain, I geared up with, fueled up, and saddled up for a 15 mile bike ride. In my pre-car era, biking 20+ miles a day was not just an easy feat, but a fact of life for me. However, owning a car has rendered me soft and squishy, and at mile 8 I started to realize that maybe this wasn’t my best idea.

My helmet kept my noggin warm, and the wool scarf wrapped liberally about my face kept me toasty, until my breath started forming small ice crystals, an end dragged in a puddle, and the snot tendrils froze and poked me in the face. Still, it’s sodden fibers were better than the sting of negative degree windchill on my upturned French nose.

I had the good sense to don a base layer, since it was recently gifted to me AND made me look like Tron, but chose to spurn the mid-layer and shell, since I own neither. This was a terrible decision, although the base layer held up like a champ despite its eventual soaking-through.

My gloves were cut at the fingertips to accommodate my continual need to play with technology, but a short quarter-mile from my house, with my exposed fingertips turning an alarming shade of bloodless, I turned back home and donned my felted wool, ugly as all-get-out oven-mittesque gauntlets. They kept me toasty until mile eight, when I proceeded to drop them in a puddle. Turns out, saturated wool gloves do not have the insulated properties that they are made out to be having. The same goes for saturated wool socks, that began to freeze stiff inside my so called “waterproof” hiking boots.

I’m sure the suspense is maddening, so I’ll skip to the part where I made it home and stumbled into a warm shower with all of my digits attached and flesh colored. My wonderful bike offered to act as a drying rack for my gear while I thawed, proving once again that a bicycle is the most selfless, loving, adventurous buddy that a girl can have.

Overall, winter cycling is not nearly as terrible as it is made out to be. I easily covered fifteen miles in an inch of snow and some slick ice one a thin-tired road bike, although I went much slower and exercised a level of caution that is fairly untypical behavior for the likes of me. More clothes are necessary, and despite my great love of all things wool and earth-toned, some compromises with the world of spandex and neon and plasticy must be made if a ride is to be enjoyable. And if you love your fingers and toes as much as I do, suck it up, and go to the gym when there is freezing rain falling, because it will end with you weighing the benefits of lying on the sidewalk and giving up instead of pushing through that final mile. I, perhaps, did that. Or totally did that. I did. I did that.

Bike commuting is not just for pleasant weather. Try it. And even if you don’t love it, you can still brag to those around you about your sheer level of badassity and that, in and of itself, is worth it.

Winter

          I’m sure I looked like a deer in the headlights, for lack of a better analogy. Yet, season after season, I am shocked by the apathy and disgust that people have towards winter. My co-workers shook their heads and grumbled as we watched the flakes dance to the ground. The rationale forming part of my grey matter had assumed that people who immerse themselves in the cool, clean, sterile atmosphere of the OR day in and day out would be as delighted as I was when they saw the light dusting that covered everything in sight. If the steady and growing stream of disgruntled, snow-shaming instagrams and #IHateSnow posts had anything to say about it, I will be enjoying winter alone.

              Now, I have every reason to hate winter. My inherent inability to gain weight (go ahead, hate me.) makes staying warm sans fur overcoats difficult, I drive a small commuter-mobile which reacts to snow the way most middle school females react to spiders, and my all-consuming joy and passion must be hung away for the year to sadly collect dust, dreaming of the day when streamers can fly gaily from it’s handlebars, announcing it’s very presence with the cheerful, “ring-ring” of its shiny bell.

          Just kidding. I outgrew that style of bicycle years ago. But in all actuality, the first snow often means the last cycle of the year, and as an avid bike commuter and long-bicycle-trip-taker, this is cause for mourning. I attempted Four Seasons Cycling last year, but in an unfortunate event that still remains mostly a blur, my trip was cut short by my landing on my face in an ice patch with a shoulder out of socket. You would think I would learn my lesson.

           But I am instead eyeing the clock, waiting for the fateful hour that my relief arrives and I am free to play in the short span of daylight allotted to me. My main working hours encompass the time between 11 in the morning to 7 at night, which makes for a lot of free time in the twilight and evening hours – not ideal for a lone cyclist. So, through trial and error, I plan to find the light, tools, clothing, and various pieces of plastic that will make a winter ride not merely tolerable, but enjoyable in its own right.

Evenings

          The incessant clicking is getting on my nerves.

           See, during day shift, all of the noise of the OR blends together into one chaotic hum of machinery and racing footsteps and squeaky beds and the sharp twang of a dropped instrument, but during the late hours of the evenings, there is nothing to drown out the sound of my pacing footsteps. If the chart is accurate in saying that seven laps of this place equals a mile, I’ve already done a 5k.

          I step into a darkened OR for a moment, taking in the inherent creepiness of it all. I am greeted by the anesthesia machines that utter the sound of a dying accordion every 28 seconds, and the faint but constant humming of computers that never actually power down. The monitors scattered across the room glow in a uniform blue, creating only a dim outline of the tables and beds. The doors all click briefly as the air exchanges, almost sounding like someone is coming in to visit with me, but alas, no one is there. I turn to leave, but, as if sensing my disappointment, the heart rate monitor begins to beep, a gentle, regular noise that should only occur when the lead is attached to someone. I listen for a couple of moments before it slowly dies off, and I turn and leave, contemplating the chance of faulty wiring versus a ghostly entity of surgeries past.

          Some evening shifts are hectic, to say the least. Surgeries that should have been long ended forge on due to unforeseen complications: the airway took much longer than expected the establish. A fly landed on and contaminated all of our surgical instruments. The back-up generators went down and took all of our camera capabilities with it. The instrument we just dropped was the only one of it’s kind. That vascular clamp we thought we pulled out suddenly isn’t accounted for anymore. Walking into cases like these at 9:00 at night are always, interesting, to say the least.

          And then there are nights like these, where I tracks laps around the building and hide in out-of-the-way ORs to avoid being seen doing nothing – not that there is anything to be done at this time of day. All the people that leave at 7:00 have cleaned, stocked, and set-up the rooms in a flurry of activity, hoping to make their last few minutes fly by. Most nights, I say a prayer for the OR, willing no traumas to come barreling in, but tonight, I secretly hope that maybe some poor soul will need a gallbladder or perhaps an appendix out. Otherwise, this next threes hours will promise to be long.

          I glance at my watch. I’m getting faster – this last mile has only taken me 14 minutes. Since 9:00 is coming and most of our staff will be headed home, I decide to check in with my charge nurse, still fostering that hope that some urgent case has been booked. But I’m not hopeful – it promises to be a quiet night here in my little city.