Yes, I’m Still Alive (Barely)

I’m out of breath, have aching muscles, and I’m sure that it won’t be long before the gray hairs start to spout officially making me the oldest young woman alive. Oh, my new job! How I love to hate thee! You give me so much pain and satisfaction at the same time, but I’m starting to realize that maybe the pain overshadows the satisfaction.

Yesterday, especially, I was truly at my breaking point. My car broke down, one of the therapists at the clinic was annoyed with me, the front desk staff was annoyed with me for moving the furniture around in my office to suit my needs, and my supervisor was breathing down my neck for me to recruit 300 people to the project and I just don’t know if I can do it all!

But just as everyone else in the world was discussing how much they hate my guts, I was surprised at how hard the guy who hired me was working to get me hired into a permanent position. He’s really pushing hard to convince his colleagues to hire me for a new Research Associate II position that just became available. This job is a lot better than the one I turned down a few weeks ago, because it doesn’t require any life-threatening trips to patients’ homes and it’s even more prestigious than all of my other positions combined. If I’m lucky enough to get offered the job, there’s no way that I will turn this one down. However, I wonder if I’m really qualified for the position. A big part of this study is drawing blood and administering EKGs, and they are currently interviewing several people who have experience with both. My supervisor brushes such requirements off as no big deal, saying that I can take training courses on how to draw blood and do EKG’s. I just find it curious that I’m suddenly being thrown so haphazardly into doing such technical, medical tasks. I mean can you even imagine me poking people with needles or straping them into some type of electric wave measuring machine? It’s kind of an eerie thought.

Everything about my work days is haphazard. Today for example, my supervisor had the audacity to ask me to interpret Swahili for a client. I may have put Beginning Swahili skills on my resume, but I never thought that anyone would actually take that comment seriously or put my non-existent skills to work. I mean saying “Habari zako,” and helping someone through a major depressive episode are two totally different things. Oh, I just know the gray hairs are coming. I can feel it. I can feel it...