I’m tired. I have training at 3 which means I have about an hour and a half before I need to leave. I have combat practice which I still want to go to that I’m scared of not making due to the tiredness.

I don’t want it to win, yet at the same time, the thought of going out to my car feels heavy. Knowing that the dishwasher needs to be unloaded reminds me that it will then need to be loaded afterwards and that my clothes still aren’t put away and that I’m running low and prepared food and that I work the next three days and won’t have a chance to cook or clean because one of my shifts is in Omaha again and that alone is two hours worth of traveling if traffic isn’t bad.

It feels like a lot even though I know it’s not that much. I know it’s doable with planning and conscious, thoughtful intention, but right now staying in bed and just… not… is so much more appealing in the short term.

I’m finally eating my breakfast even though it’s noon. It’s warm and tasty and I think that’s helping. I know I need to drink more water since I haven’t had any since last night. I know once I’m at the gym and moving around that I’ll be better and that thought is what I’m holding on to. If I just start, if I can just get myself there, everything will work itself out, but that’s the hardest part, isn’t it?

That’s the part that doesn’t get done; the “getting there” part.

Yesterday was a decent day at work but even that had its own issues which kept me from doing things I had been looking forward to.

I worked with my FA for the first time on the floor by ourselves. It went well except for the morning because she didn’t know how to unlock the door properly so the patients could get inside on time. That put all of our patients behind by a few minutes, but once you’re behind there’s no way to really catch up and it dominoed into the rest of the day.

I spent most of the day making needle packs so now I have a proper setup; at least one that I think will work for me. There are two bins of 15 gauge needle packs. When one runs out there’s the second to replace it and the first can be refilled without causing a breakdown in the chain of supplies or the worry of old supplies never getting used and buried under the new stuff. I still want to make another bin worth of standard packs, ones without needles, for the times we need 17, 16, or 14 gauge needles. It’s easier to grab a premade pack and add the needle lines into them since very few of our patients use anything outside of 15s.

And since the clinic is down to three days a week, I’m able to keep all of the packs I need for the week in one of the drawers at my station, so I don’t have to worry about making sure I have the packs out of the stock room for the next day. I can reset on Friday for the coming week and be good to go. So far it’s been working well; the system I’m developing, finding, fine-tuning. It’s making things run easier for me, and because they’re running easier for me that in turn makes it easier for my RN and our patients because I’m able to do more. I can be more present rather than trying to take care of tasks that also need to get done. It’s an efficiency thing, and that’s something I’m good and figuring out, given the time to do it.

So yeah, yesterday I spent a majority of my downtime working with supplies. I also got to talk to our BioMed for a while after lunch which was fantastic. He answered a lot of my questions and I feel I’m more comfortable with the machines. That was another 15 minutes or so where I wasn’t on the floor prepping for the next day, though.

Once all of our patients were off the machines my FA wanted me to walk her through the “closing” tasks, so even though there were two of us doing them, it still took a bit longer because I had to explain what I was doing and why.

I had been hoping to get to the gym for a spin class along with doing the workouts my trainer wants me to be doing on my off days; the days I’m not working with him. The class started at 5:30. I didn’t leave the clinic until six. I had been looking forward to the gym all day. I’ve been eating better. I’ve had more energy. At lunch, I felt like I would have the energy to do it; to do to the class and maybe not crush it, but at least do it which would have been better than the previous week where I didn’t go at all.

After I clocked out from work, though, all I wanted was to go home, which was another thing that changed.

I had been told early in the morning that North Omaha still needed me to cover for them Tuesday morning. I was supposed to be at their clinic at 4:45 and work until around noon. I didn’t find out until 5:30 pm that they no longer needed me.

I’m not complaining about having time to myself, but it would have been nice to have had more warning that things were going to change.

Since I no longer had an hour drive ahead of me with a full day of work in my future, all I wanted was to go home and shower and eat and go to bed. So that’s what I did. I didn’t go to the gym and there’s a part of me who’s not happy about that fact. The difference between reasons and excuses are perspective and I can see both sides of my situation and it sucks. I made a smart choice by caring for myself and my introvertedness and getting proper food and rest. I’m also a slacker because I’m sure I really did have enough reserves to make it to the gym and do the things my trainer wants me to be doing.

Flipside… I haven’t stopped or had any length of downtime to myself aside from the two nights where I slept at the hotel and while I know that counts towards something, I don’t really think it counts as much as the time I have had this morning, right now, to myself. It’s the first morning where I’ve woken up and haven’t had to do anything or really plan for the immediate two to four hours after my initial wake-up.

Since I was supposed to be in Omaha, my at the gym training was moved to later in the day, so I had the ability to go back to sleep after Ox left for work, which I don’t know if that was a good call or not with how slow and tired I feel now.

I’ve been asked to cover a few shifts at the downtown Lincoln location in the coming weeks. I’ll be an opener on the TTS shifts so I’ll be one of the first techs to leave. I don’t want this to become habit or routine. I liked the South Omaha clinic so much more than the downtown Lincoln one, and maybe that’s because I was still in “training” while I was at DTL. It would be nice to see some of those techs again and a few of the RNs. It would be nice to see some of the patients I had in Beatrice since they had to move clinics temporarily while my clinic is down to only three days.

I would still get overtime and travel compensation for helping at the clinic, but there’s still, once again, a part of me who isn’t all that happy that I was asked to work there. It’s confusing and I don’t think right now, while I’m tired, is the time to try to figure those feelings out.

Instead, I think what I need to do is to figure out how to be ok in the coming days.

Combat practice doesn’t end until 8:30 which means if I stay for the whole thing I won’t be home until roughly nine, and I’ll need a shower, so I’m looking at a 9:30 bed time at the earliest while still having to wake up at 3 am for work. I think it might be better to only stay until 7:30 and have a larger time frame to prep for tomorrow morning.

I know that I need more burger and chicken. At least the burger patties since those are easy meals that I don’t need anything else for. I can precook them and take them with me if need be. I’ve been doing well with my metrics, even with having two bites of chocolate cream pie last night. I’m fully expecting my trainer to say something about it today but I would rather be honest about logging it than hiding it and I’m not going to regret my choice. Instead of having a whole slice I got to share it with Ox. It was a compromise. A halfway happy. I didn’t deny myself, but I didn’t do a full-on “zero fucks given” free-for-all either.

I will have a very brief window between training and combat practice where I could try to cook something as long as it’s fairly quick. It might be good for me to figure something out now because I won’t have much of a chance tomorrow if I’m driving up to a hotel in Omaha in the evening and that would leave me with no food for Thursday, and I won’t be leaving Omaha until 5 pm, so roughly a 7pm home arrival time with work again in Beatrice at 4:30 so there’s not much time in the evening to do anything that day either.

If I can survive until the weekend I’ll be ok. I just don’t know how to do that at the moment.

I’m going to need to do laundry since I still only have three pairs of scrubs and I work four days a week for the next three weeks it seems. It’s something I mentioned to Ox this morning while we were texting the first time I woke up. Even if I don’t use them, I think it would be smart to get more scrubs so the issue of laundry is no longer an issue. Maybe even another two pairs of socks so I can avoid that being a thing as well. And maybe that’s something I can look at today while we’re in town. I’m sure there’s a scrub store. I can look online to see if anyone carries the ones I want. Maybe even call and see if they have them in stock. I still have time. I can figure all of this out instead of sitting here and feeling like it’s all a disaster waiting to happen. It will only be a disaster if I sit passively and do nothing. I need to be proactive if I’m going to solve the issues that I know are problems.

I’m not going to be a helpless bystander who gets run over by Life. I’m going to be a bawce and take care of this shit because I refuse to let it make my days harder.

So I think that’s what I’m going to do. Instead of having a breakdown, I’m going to plan and take action. I have an hour before I need to leave.

I need to figure out a shopping list for after the gym. I need to figure out my scrub issue. I need to go to training. I need to stop by the store. I need to cook one meal since I still have enough premade breakfast left to get me through the week. I need to potentially pick up scrubs and socks. And then I need to meet with Ox so we can eat before beating each other with sticks at the SCA practice.

I will make this a good day.

It’s my one day off. I won’t let tiredness win. I WILL do the things and it WILL be a good day.