Grateful me...

If you are going to follow me along this journey, it's only fair you know a little about me... I could go on and on about so many parts of my life.  But I'm going to try to keep it to just enough to give you a feel for who I am and what makes me tick...

My real name is Susan.  I am 44 years old.  I am of Italian descent and was born on the East Coast, Washington DC to be specific.  We moved to Southern California in 1976.  My parents are alive and wonderful people- smart, kind, active, generous and fun.  I have one sister, and she is great person.  She is two years younger than me and we are polar opposites- physically and personality-wise.  She is tall and lean, curly hair.... I am short and curvy with hair straight as a board.  I am pretty easy-going and laid back, but I have an Italian temper.  I am extremely expressive.  I am a risk-taker (and have the scars to prove it).  I am on the messy side, and not the most organized person.  I love naps and sleeping and I cherish having free time- time to do absolutely nothing.  My sister is neat and organized.  Her entire life is planned out down to the minute.  The only time I see her sit still is to eat a meal- and even then she is the first one up and on to cleaning up before most of us are finished.  She is pretty conservative and plays it safe.  Despite our differences, we are very close.  But we both understand that we are very different people.  My whole family lives nearby- parents are five minutes away and my sister, her husband and her two kids live about 20 minutes away.  My sister and parents are all extremely successful and well-educated.  My father is a surgeon, my mom is a marriage/family counselor (2 masters degrees) and my sister is a urologist with a busy practice.  I am blessed to have have them all in my life.  I truly enjoy being with them and now that I am a parent, I appreciate them even more.

I went to Santa Clara University after high school.  My goal at that time was to go to medical school but school wasn't easy for me, and...well... I liked to party. No, I loved to party! I ended up choosing the path of least resistance, and an easier major.  Doing this gave more of that free time I love so dearly, and it allowed me to spend a semester in Rome. That was one of the most thrilling experiences of my life.  During college, I had a part time/summer job back at home in the Emergency Room of a local hospital.  It was my work there that I fell in love with Nursing.  After graduating with my BS in Psychology, I decided to go to Nursing School.  I worked and went to school full time and paid my own way.  The majority of my nursing career has been spent in an Emergency Medicine.  I also was a nursing educator and did a lot of Quality Assurance projects.  I was very involved in EMS and training for paramedics and EMTs.  I worked my way up to manager of the same ER that I worked in during college.  It had been my career goal for as long as I could remember- my dream job.  But it turned out that my expressive, risk-taking, authority-challenging personality wasn't a great fit for middle management.  Admittedly, my pride also got in the way.  Maybe with some maturity and more time I may have figured it out.  But during that time I was going through my divorce and had a whole mess of personal issues.  Leaving that job was a painful blow.  It had been my identity for so long- who I thought I was was so deeply entrenched in my job, that when the job was gone- I suddenly didn't remember who I was- who Susan was- not the nurse, but the woman.  Since then, I have worked at a few other ERs (staff position- which stung) and for the EMS Agency doing Quality Improvement.  I have worked in the recovery room at an outpatient surgery center.  My latest job was a gift and I got it because of the wealth of experience I have accrued, which felt good and sort of made up for my failure at hospital management.  I was recruited and offered a position to help develop a nursing program with the local ambulance company.  It is a critical care transport team.  I manage about eight nurses and also do patient care and marketing.  I oversee the team administratively and clinically. The clinical work is a little slow (not a busy operation) but the patients can be extremely challenging.  I also like being outside and working with paramedics and EMTs.  We have a lot of autonomy.

I married one of my childhood crushes that I reconnected with when I was in nursing school.  We dated for 6 years and then were married in 1997 when I was 31. I loved him so much and really thought we would be together forever.  I still love him and he is wonderful man, a fantastic father.  We had two boys, Nicholas and Matthew.  They are 12 and 10 years old now.  I left Bryan in 2004.  He was an alcoholic.  And despite vowing to stay with him "in sickness and in health," I still left him.  It's not that I didn't try to help him- I did.  But I was a highly skilled co-dependent, and eventually I lost myself in his problems...and then mine began.  I didn't understand the disease of addiction- which would turn out to be one of the greatest ironies of my life.  But that messy story will be another blog....

After my divorce, I was a lost soul.  I got into an emotionally abusive relationship with a physician that I worked with- it was full of lies and control and manipulation.  At that time my self-esteem was at an all time low, and I was horribly afraid to be alone.  I stayed in this relationship for years, and it tore away at my very being.  Looking back, I can hardly believe the things I put up with, just so I wouldn't be alone.  We started using drugs and alcohol together in an abusive way- mostly drinking heavily and smoking pot.  But I had partied "hard" most of my life and that wasn't anything new, although it became more frequent and I started doing really stupid things.  My drama-filled relationship was very public at work.  And then we got into cocaine.  Within three years, I went from weekend dabbling to everyday use to not being able to function without cocaine.  Everything important to me began to suffer: relationships with family and friends, my ability to parent, my job, my health, my finances- everything.  I eventually lost all of those things as I became completely addicted to cocaine and the abusive relationship I was still in.  I came close to death. The details of this part of my life are materials for yet another blog (or maybe a raunchy made-for-TV movie).  Suffice to say that when everything came crashing in on me, I finally got some help.  I went to the Betty Ford Center and then spent a long time in a recovery home in Santa Barbara.  I needed to quit cocaine... and the boyfriend.  The geography change helped a bit.  Rehab is not a resort vacation.  It is gut-wrenching work.  It was the hardest thing I ever did.  I am proud to say that I am single, and that I gave been clean and sober for 3 and a half years.  In that time I have rebuilt my life and re-discovered who I am.  Although the true search for who I am will never be over.  I had lost my home in foreclosure, had spent all of my retirement savings, and I am still paying off debt.  So finances are tight, but I can support myself and my kids.  More importantly, I have solid, caring relationships with my family again, and I have built quality friendships with so many people.  I have genuine relationships with healthy women.  I am active in recovery and a 12 Step Program.  I have healthy, happy, smart, kind and beautiful children.  I am respected in the work force.  My ex-husband and I are very close- he is one of my best friends now.  Oh, and he, too, is sober now.  Ironically we have the same sober/clean date.  Our kids will someday come to realize how lucky they are to have sober parents, parents that are physically and emotionally present in their lives.  Life isn't easy, but it's good.  I wake up and go to sleep grateful every day.