I really have to apologize for the dearth of posts lately. I've got no good excuse except for the usual premium on spare time that comes with nursing school. So that aside...

A Summary: I really want to talk about my experience as a UNE (student nurse extern) in the ER over the summer. I freaking LOVED it. On speaking with some of my classmates, it seems that I got pretty lucky in my placement, because my particular ER is small and ultra-inclusive - there simply wasn't enough help to go around, so I was always considered part of the team, and like an extra set of hands. Turns out some other people placed on Med-Surg/postpartum were viewed as subpar RN stand-ins. As student nurses we are mandated to take a smaller patient load and lower acuity than staff nurses - which makes sense. Yet some of the staff nurses took the perspective that the UNE had it easier and so made their jobs harder, where other nurses saw us as a bonus to the existing staff and as lightening the load by taking a patient away from each of the other nurses.

So I am even more grateful that I had such a positive experience this past summer. I was on the unit from May through the beginning of September. My scope was pretty big. There were a few things I couldn't do at all or without RN supervision, and some of my meds needed to be cosigned, but I worked really hard and helped out a lot. I almost never sat down except for a quick charting session. It got to the point where I was starting to anticipate the flow of the ER and what might be done for certain patient presentations. I asked questions and clarified interventions. I saw several urgent presentations and maybe even a couple of emergencies, although I still haven't witnessed a code or done CPR on a human. I made real differences to several patients. I learned how to work as a team, contribute, and COMMUNICATE. I made more money on shift differentials then I ever expected (woo night shift!!) - but, most importantly to me, I gained so much experience in the nursing role and, like, quintupled my comfort level with all the psychomotor skills that made me so nervous in lab. I saw so much this summer.

Some of my coworkers were more difficult than others to really learn from. One in particular struck me as an exceptionally competent nurse, very confident and knowledgeable, but she was like a prickly pear to talk to. I guess like your typical Type A ER nurse (for the record, I'm pretty much a Type B introvert, and I still enjoyed the ER, so don't let anyone tell you otherwise). I got a lot out of shutting up and watching her, but forget asking her any questions, she didn't have time for students. Or so it seemed. And there was the charge nurse who wasn't the best teacher. But the overwhelming majority of my RN/LPN coworkers were super kind and patient with me. They all made such an amazing difference in my practice and I told them so!

Would I recommend Alberta nursing students be a UNE during the summer after 2nd and 3rd year? Unequivocally YES. It's like nursing school on speed. You'll start making sense of the theory in ways you didn't expect. You'll gain the psychomotor skills to actually do lab skills on real patients without your instructor hovering over your shoulder, and while you do those skills you'll start to work patient teaching into your practice. Then in 4th year you'll have real-world examples to back your shit up when you write papers. Or blogs.

A Conference: I was the fortunate recipient of a travel bursary to the CANO annual conference in Halifax, NS. There was supposed to be another student who went, but I never met her.

In a nutshell, Oncology Nurses are seriously knowledgeable. They are also awesome because, from what I experienced at this conference, they are valued as collaborative and worthy team members even by physicians (kind of a hard status to come by, it seems) and are extremely supportive of complementary/alternative medicine (CAM), not so much because of the evidence surrounding CAM but because patients want it and find relief from it, and they need their primary providers to be open and knowledgeable about it too.

The conference was 4 straight days of learning. Corporations sponsored almost all of our meals, and during each meal there was a presentation on some new wonder drug or different approaches to patient care. There were also a multitude of workshops to attend, where nurse researchers would present their latest abstracts and findings.

I had a lot of difficulty integrating myself into the conference because, as specialists, the presentations were operating at a pretty high level of comprehension. The conference attendees were almost all advanced practice nurses - NPs, CNSes, and tons of nurses in research and academia. They would debate different chemotherapy drugs and weigh the pros and cons, and things like that, which was kind of meaningless to me as a student. There was some stuff I did learn a lot about, such as a yummy dinner symposium at which we learned about treating clogged CVADs. I don't remember learning much at all about CVADs in class. The dinner was beef and chicken. The beef was served medium-rare, and pretty pink/fleshy in the middle. It was at that moment the presenter posted some photo examples of blood clots extracted from CVADs. They looked eerily similar to my beef dinner. At which I thought, "Only nurses would be totally cool with watching this as we eat..." mmmmm :)

Another challenge I found was the huge jump, not only in experience, but in age between myself and the other attendees. Being as they were almost all out of bedside nursing (and with the commensurate experience), I'd peg most of them as 40+. Not that there's anything wrong with being 40+. It just didn't give me much to talk about with them. So most of the time I would sit down with a new group of people at a table, introductions would be made, and they would ask me where I worked.... when I would say "Oh, I'm a student".... and the conversation would awkwardly shut down or divert amongst the RNs. It made for kind of a lonely time at the conference although I did meet and network with lots of people. I even met the lady who does the clinical placements for our local Cancer Care centre, where I am hoping to get a placement for my preceptorship.

The CANO BoD contacted me after the conference and wanted to get my perspective as a student attendee. I think I will recommend that they try to designate a "Conference Guide" for future conferences, who can assist the students to really understand the presentations and kind of bring it all together. I think I would have benefited from some kind of debriefing.

On a totally positive note, several of the nurses I sat with were really pleased and happy to help me understand the presentations. I could see that a lot of them were probably involved in teaching. So that was really kind and super helpful. I got a ton of notes from all the presentations, so I might be able to review them once I am practicing and maybe they'll make more sense. :)

A Project: Through my work with CNSA as Informatics Officer, I have been working with CASN and CNA on developing informatics competencies to add to curricula for undergraduate nursing education. I think it's cool that I'm working alongside some heavy hitters in academic and professional spheres on a project that will impact the future of nursing education in Canada. At our teleconference in August, we needed to elect a chairperson for our committee, and some of them suggested that it would be a good experience for me. I think so too, but I really don't know what I'm doing as a chairperson. I told them that if they were patient with me I'd be happy to take on the role. Part of this means I will be presenting our findings to a stakeholders' symposium in Toronto at the end of November. At our last teleconference I discovered who would be considered a stakeholder. I'm super pumped/terrified to meet these people, but wow, what an opportunity.

An iPad: It's no secret here or anywhere else that I have a special fondness in my heart for Apple products. I was one of the original hires to help open the first Apple store in Western Canada (which was a pretty fun day! :). The love is waning a little bit with Apple's continued pricing structure, surging popularity, and militant control of how I enjoy my products, but, on the whole, I still can't beat the user-friendliness of iOS/OSX. Can't argue with the fact that after I convinced 4 of the family members who called me all the time with computer issues, I don't really have to troubleshoot anyone's crap anymore, because it doesn't need troubleshooting.

So when I saw the reading list for this semester, and noticed how much of it was PDF academic articles, I winced and wished there was some way I could read these in a more comfortable manner. I really try to avoid printing anything because I am cheap and scatterbrained. I also hate reading articles on my laptop because of i) the searing pain in my lap once my computer's been on for >20 minutes, and ii) I am way too easily distracted by Spaces.

So I started checking out some different kinds of tablets. Initially I was intrigued by Samsung's Galaxy 10.1 since I might be converted to Android. I certainly am willing. Anyway, after lots of research and playing with tablets at Best Buy, I decided the extra $50 or whatever was worth the negligible decrease in performance/portability/resolution in exchange for an exploding App Store and seamless integration with my existing tech setup.

Anyway, I bought the iPad last Saturday on an extreme trial basis. I had very specific criteria in order for any tablet to be superior to my laptop. I was/am ready to return it if it didn't work for me:

1) It had to be incredibly easy to integrate with my cloud server on Dropbox
2) Accessing and editing documents on Dropbox had to be seamless
3) Accessing and editing PDF articles and class notes had to be comfortable and realistic (nothing too complicated)
4) Google Calendar had to play nice with iCal or an acceptable equivalent
5) There had to be apps out there to make it superior to my browser-based existence
6) OSK is just not realistic for me, so I wanted a great/portable Bluetooth keyboard

Today is day 5, and honestly, I don't know how I got by without it. I LOVE curling up in bed, locking out the rotation, and reading/annotating my PDF articles or even just web browsing or watching Netflix. I am beyond impressed with how most software seem to integrate with Dropbox or other cloud servers.

Right now I have been using Goodreader to read/annotate PDFs, Quickoffice Pro HD to view/edit my Word/Excel docs, and iProcrastinate to manage my workload. Unfortunately iProcrastinate only has an iPhone app at this time, but it syncs up with my Macbook so it's all good. So nice to be able to see what's coming up next between all my classes.

Tomorrow I will try AudioNote especially in my Philosophy class. The prof is very much a talker, and doesn't tend to summarize her points in any logical fashion, so I think recording her lectures and having them timestamped to the notes would be a great thing. We'll see how it goes.

I have been finding a lot of apps that might be suitable to nurse-types, so I was thinking I might do a review of these in the future so you can get a feel for it without shelling out money.

As far as the keyboard setup, I was heavily swayed by NNR's review of ZAGG's keyboard. I checked out Future Shop and found one open box, missing the USB cable. Since I have a few of those anyway, I sashayed up to the sales guy and asked him to "make me a deal" on it complete with flirtatious lashes. He knocked off another $20(!) for me, dropping the price from $100 to $75. Excellent. I love the keyboard, too, although it's good that I don't have man hands, because the keyboard's certainly petite. Together with the iPad, it still weighs roughly 2/3 less than my Macbook, not including the charging cable, and it definitely takes up much less valuable space in my bike pannier.

So altogether, between the cellular data, the apps, the cloud integration, and the ZAGG keyboard, I am quite pleased with my setup. Bonus points for form factor, weight, battery life, and lack of hard disk drive. I will continue evaluating right until Saturday of next week which is the end of the allowable return period.

Anyway, I have been blogging away from yet another new app - Blogsy. I really like it. Even better than I like Blogger's old back end. I used it to write this blog post - I am hoping that the improved mobility will make it easier for me to blog when I have the desire instead of waiting for when I have time at home with my computer.

I guess that about covers everything. For now. :)

It was 4 in the morning and we'd been steadily bringing patients back all night:

• a very large woman with a nasty wet cough satting around 85% on room air (her chest x-ray was almost white)
• a frail grandma who had just finished radiation for cancer, who came in at midnight because she couldn't sleep and felt nauseous
• a kid who'd been maced (by security?) at an event
• a guy with inverted P waves admitted for stabbing chest pain - turns out someone placed the ECG leads wrong, he was fine with some Toradol
• a young couple and their weeks-old babe with diarrhea
• a gangbanger who punched through glass instead of his girlfriend, but seriously sliced his arm just proximal to the medial epicondoyle - deep lac was about 4 inches long and gaping about 3 inches wide - the police found him by following the trail of blood down the street

It was hopping in the ER. I was running ECGs back-to-back, taking specimens to the lab, and herding someone's 5 children under the age of 10 that she decided to bring with her to the ER without extra supervision. One of the docs left at 0300 so we were down to just one doc until 0600 and of course that's when things started to get hairy. Our nurse at triage decided to hang out in the back and keep an eye on triage using the security cameras, because all of the people with sore throats and vomiting in the waiting room kept shooting her death stares.

We had one lady on cardiac observation, the guy with the inverted P waves taking up our peds trauma bed, and another guy came in about 2 weeks post-CABG with crushing chest pain, tachycardia, and a-fib (tachy a-fib? or is it just that it was reading the extra atrial beats as the actual pulse rate? forgive me, cardiology nurses, for I know not what I don't know!), the gangster with the arm lac woke up from his drunken snooze and started howling, the grandma who couldn't sleep still hadn't been seen, the kid who got maced needed a shower, all 5 of the loose children started getting tired and cranky, and the young couple thought we were ignoring them and kept hovering around the desk with babe in arms.

So despite the madness of those three hours, I rolled with it, because the staff were so awesome to witness. This wasn't their first barn dance. With one swoop, the nurses got the kids cozy with some coloring books, told the young couple that they WOULD BE SEEN but not NOW, got the maced kid into the shower, buried grandma in 5 warm blankets (and lo, she fell asleep!), soothed the gangster back to sleep until he could be seen, and all of a sudden the charge nurse pulled me into the other trauma room and said "watch this".

The guy with a-fib was just signing his consent for conscious sedation and attempted cardioversion. They placed the electrodes sandwich-style on his left chest and back, snowed him with fentanyl and propofol, and set the current. Then the physician gave the go ahead. The nurse called CLEAR and made sure we were all back before pushing the shock button. The guy went rigid and then limp.

"Owwwwww," he groaned, motioning to his chest.

We all watched the rhythm as it settled into normal sinus for a few beats....and then blip, blip, blip-blip-blip his heart rate climbed back up to 140 and we saw the beats become irregular again.

The physician ordered a higher electrical current. ALL CLEAR! Shock given. Normal sinus, and then a-fib.

Again, higher current, shock, normal sinus, and then a-fib.

The physician decided to discontinue the cardioversion and instead just hold the patient until he could be admitted to cardiology in the morning.

A couple of hours later, the new doctor was coming on so I pulled someone out of the waiting room for the first time in hours. I looked in the chart. Sore throat x 3 weeks with slight cough, no fever, nontender palpation of lymph nodes. Came in at 0300 on the Saturday of a long weekend (and waited 3 hours) for....what, exactly? A throat swab and dispo with abx...

And then it was 0700 and the gangster was getting his arm stitched up. I played doctor's helper and held the pt's arm in an awkward superman position, while also running to grab sutures and stuff since, although the doc had the suture cart right there, he had managed to turn it so I couldn't get into it, and he was sterile so away I went. It was worth it though because it was awesome to watch him pull the lips of the lac together and get it sewn up. There was a large vein that had to be tied off. He started in the middle of the lac and guessed where to start sewing. After a couple of false starts he got it evenly joined and worked his way out to either end, and then filled in the gaps. All together I think there were 10 sutures. It was neat to watch him pull the edges together , all the subcutaneous fat kind of popped out and sqooshed all over the place. Once he was done, it looked amazingly clean. Especially considering the amount of blood I'd washed off his arm, and how much had caked onto his pants.

I applied a dressing of adaptic, 2x2s, 4x4s, and cotton wrap. Then the oncoming day nurse told me to go home.... so I did :)

*Pinches self* I can't believe I get paid for this. I LOVE EMERGENCY NURSING!

This made me giggle, especially in light of the paper I'm writing this week.

Thanks for the awesome feedback on my conference summary, you guys made me feel like I was heading in the right direction. In fact, last Friday I had a faculty meeting about setting up a big pilot project for our school. I don't want to speak to it too much just yet but it would be very exciting. I met with some 4th year instructors and they gave it a huge thumbs up.

Re: L&D.... thanks to availability heuristics, I now fear for every couple in their reproductive years. If you see a crazed third year nursing student running down the street yelling about folic acid, teratogens, abruptio placentae, or the importance of colostrum... rest assured that the police already know about me and have likely sent the squad car to take me home again.

Sociological Images is a really interesting blog that I found purely by accident and now enjoy regularly. The discourse is particularly engaging and thoughtful. Actually, that's not really something I'm used to - most of the medbloggers out there have a steady supply of Angry Layperson Commenteurs who rage unintelligibly against any post they might make. So it's nice to see comments that are as educational as the post itself.

In other Interesting Things Found While Googling Research Topics, a fun diversion to learn about all kinds of different biases can be found here. Be prepared to win any argument by saying, "Well, sure, but your logic is flawed, due to the ________ fallacy."

You're welcome. ;)

Have a great week everybody!

Also - you're looking at a Couch to 5K graduate! Over the course of my C25K experience, I have run more than 19 hours, totalling 73 miles, and burned approximately 8100 calories (yep, I track every run!). I can run for over 30 minutes without stopping. I don't run very fast, but I run. I do get bored as hell, and I'm looking forward to running out on the trails next spring. BIG thanks to NurseXY for inspiring me to start :) When I looked at the C25K training plan in those first weeks I could never have imagined running (and enjoying it!) like I do now.

This video would be breathtaking on any horse's back - but Zenyatta? *melt*

On Saturday, I jumped out of a perfectly good plane.



It was my friend Trish's 21st birthday, crazy girl that she is, she invited a bunch of us from Pharm out to her birthday activity of choice - skydiving!

Unfortunately everyone from Pharm pussied out except for me and her. A few of her other friends came along though so there were 6 of us in total.

I'm going to share this story because I want to remember it in beautiful detail.

The day dawned clear and cool. The sun was shining when I woke up to my alarm at 0645. I packed my sweater and some snacks, and jumped in my car to go pick up Trish and everyone on the north side of the city for 0715. We then drove out on the highway for about 30 minutes, tired and nervous and a little uncomfortable.

We found the place okay. As we pulled in and stepped out of the car, it felt like we were entering a trailer park! RVs were all over the place. It all came flooding back to me.

A little backstory - I grew up at a drop zone much like this one. My dad spent the better part of my childhood being REALLY INTO skydiving. He logged thousands of jumps and my family was out at the DZ during the summer pretty much every weekend. I know what skydivers are like and I'm familiar with DZ's in general. I learned how to use a keg at a boogie when I was 8 years old and my daddy thought I'd be good at pouring beer, haha :) I had planned on skydiving just like him one day, but he actually had a couple of really bad crashes where he had some serious trauma to his spine and legs. That was over 10 years ago and he will have a limp and mild mobility issues for the rest of his life. So my plan to jump at 16 was derailed.

So, when Trish asked if I'd be interested, I jumped at the chance (nyuk!).

The classroom seated about 20 and there were posters on all the walls of good and bad things that you might see while falling. Parachutes not opening, twisted lines, reserve parachute deployment. Diagrams of equipment and things to do and not do. A LOT of information.

Now I was a little nervous that I wouldn't be able to remember anything. I can learn pretty much anything given time, and I'm good at memorizing random factoids, but psychomotor skills are definitely my weakest link. I can tell you WHERE the cutaway and reserve handles are, and I can (with time) tell you what situations they need to be pulled at, but the actual motions of looking down, locating each handle, and punching them out in the proper sequence is more of a challenge for me. That was concerning because there is no redo option on that - it's life or death!

It really didn't help much when they were handing out the waivers. Double-sided legal paper FILLED with "I acknowledge that skydiving is inherently risky" and "I hereby promise to not sue the jump school if I am terribly maimed or dead even if it is due to their gross negligence". Putting pen to paper and signing that was... well, I wasn't exactly smiling at that particular moment.

Jodie was our instructor and I really liked her. She was witty and personable, and very empowering: "Yes, you CAN save your own life!"

We watched some retro cassette videos on the gearing up process and how the jump was expected to go, and Jodie talked about the importance of maintaining a good arch. We then went outside and practiced our arches about a million times, shouting our post-plane-exit mantra:

Arch thousand!

Two thousand!

Three thousand!

Four Thousand!

Five Thousand!

Check canopy!

This particular mantra was to help us keep a sense of time lapse and give the parachute time to open before we started panicking. The parachute should be fully open and deflated by 6 seconds, so at the end when we said "check canopy", we were looking up at the parachute and preparing to resort to emergency alternatives if necessary.

The questions we asked ourselves, shouting out loud:

Is it RECTANGULAR?? (Denoting a properly deployed parachute - no tangled
lines)
Is it INFLATED?? (Are at least 7 of the 9 cells performing, or am I
still dropping like a rock?)
Is it CONTROLLABLE? (Can I steer this puppy away from a tree or
worse?)

We were wearing some Wal-Mart Greeter-esque vests with a mock-up of the cutaway and reserve handles so that we knew where to grab in an emergency. Jodie emphasized the importance of LOOKING at the handles first instead of groping wildly, telling us of a previous student who, upon seeing his rectangular parachute emerge round in a mass of tangled lines, promptly grabbed and ripped off his red radio instead of the red cutaway handle. (He lived, but still!)

LOOK! (Make sure that red thing you're tearing off isn't your
radio!)
LOCATE! (Grab ahold of each of the handles)
PUNCH RIGHT! (Forcefully drive your fist through the red cutaway handle, freeing you from a
malfunctioning canopy)
PUNCH LEFT! (Forcefully deploying your reserve)

We practiced our arches, our counting, our emergency procedures, and our plan for two hours. I tell you, my back was sore and my throat was hoarse, but I would have spent all the time they wanted me to doing those very steps over and over again! Not a place to cut corners!

We also spent some time in a hilariously inadequate mock-up of a plane. It was basically a box frame made out of 2x4's, elevated off the ground, with a wheel stuck off the side and a pretend wing strut. We each practiced twice getting out of the "plane" and climbing out to the end of the strut where we would let go and plummet to earth. One thing entirely to do that with no relative wind. Quite another in reality :)

After lunch we had a written T/F exam (presumably to be legal evidence that we had at least absorbed the information, even if we entirely failed to put thought into action) and then we hurried up to wait for the actual jump.

Happily, the day was beautifully sunny and warm for one of the few times this summer. There wasn't a cloud in the sky and the weather couldn't have been more fantastic. Trish and I and her other friends hung out sunbathing, pretending we weren't really going through with this and we weren't really nervous and this wasn't really the last time one of us might have a fully functioning central nervous system. We admired the skydiving crowd, especially the several tanned, ripped, and devastatingly sexy men walking around shirtless (!) doing skydiver things like packing parachutes.

Jodie came up to me.

"UgRN, I'm going to need you to to go up in the first load. You're friends with Trish, right? You don't mind?"

Perfect.

I was scheduled to go up with a bunch of strangers in the sixth load, well into the afternoon. This sped up my schedule by a solid 2 hours. And I'd get to jump with the birthday girl!


Suddenly, I heard my name called out on the intercom. E.N. Jump School, Load One, roll call - please meet at manifest to get your equipment.


Heart? Meet throat.


Trish and I walked up to manifest sporting ear to ear grins and excessive diaphoresis.


Our Jump Master, Rob, helped us get kitted out in some (very) snazzy jumpsuits. Mine was an eclectic mix of neon colors and I looked like I had beat up a 1992 Alpine ski bunny and stolen her outfit. Yeah, SunIce!


Another guy got my pack ready and strapped it on. Surprisingly heavy! It was probably at least 30 lbs. Although that hardly matters when you're falling, it makes quite a difference when you're trying to get to the plane.


While I was waiting to get an appropriately sized helmet - one that wouldn't squish my brains out, preferably - I happened to notice a lady who looked very familiar. She was engaged in hearty conversation with another lady so I waited patiently for a few minutes trying to decide if my mind was playing tricks on me. Finally I tapped her on the arm.


"'Scuse me, but you do by any chance know [father of UgRN]?"


She looked at me funny and then erupted into a full scale motherly hug. OMIGOD the last time I saw you, you were this tall and collecting bugs that you kept in jars and this was over at that old drop zone that closed down and-- hey, where IS your dad, anyway?


Sadly, my dad was out on a cross continent Harley trip and couldn't be there to witness my first jump. I told him later that I ran into some of his old buds though and that was pretty cool, actually. I was inordinately pleased that SOMEONE from those old days would be there to witness me follow in my daddy's laughably risk-taking and poor-role-model-y footprints.


For the record, I love my dad and I think he is the best person ever.


So I get my helmet finally and meet up with Trish and Rob the Jump Master. There are two other people jumping with us as well - a friend of Trish's and some old guy who was winning major Awesome Points just for being old and being gutsy.


They loaded the plane from lightest to heaviest, so Old Awesome Guy would jump first and I would jump last. (Yay for being the lightest! ...I guess).


I clambered in behind the pilot and knelt on the padded floor. Rob gave me a comical look and said, in all seriousness, um, it's Transportation Canada regulations that everyone in a plane wear a seatbelt at all times while ascending... so we'll need you to put that seatbelt across your knees.


Safety first, people, safety first.


We were all loaded into the plane and then the pilot fired it up. God, it was soooo loud in there, I couldn't hear a thing. The plane hauled ass down the dirt runway and then lifted up into the sky. I saw the ground drop away from me and with a violent lurch It Hit Me.


At some point, that door is going to open... and then I'm going to jump out of it. At 3500 feet in the sky.


I couldn't see myself but I can imagine how I looked - I could feel the blood draining out of my face and I probably had the most grim expression that I have ever wore in my lifetime. That little voice started.


If you've been following my blog for a long time, you may remember that I have issues surrendering control to other people. I just genuinely don't trust people to do right by me a lot of the time. This was, like, the ultimate in surrendering control. Rob the JM was going to tell me when to jump out of the plane and I was going to trust him that it was the right time. I was going to trust that whoever packed my parachute did it properly and that I wasn't going to plummet to my death. I had to trust that my radio was going to work and that the guy helping me land was going to remind me what to do. I had to trust all of these things, and trust that God wasn't going to call me home today because I sure as hell wasn't ready yet.


The fear was at its worst when my sense of height was screaming YOU ARE SO HIGH ABOVE THE GROUND THAT YOU MIGHT AS WELL JUST DIE NOW, WHAT THE F*** ARE YOU THINKING IN GETTING OUT OF THIS PLANE?


I had talked to my dad just before the jump and I asked him what he thought about my fear of heights, and how that was going to gimp me in trying to accomplish this. My dad reassured me that once you were high enough, the crippling fear would be replaced with a sense of wonder. Your brain wouldn't look at the ground and think OMG SO HIGH UP past a certain point. That was certainly true for me - at 2000 feet I stopped looking at the ground thinking "holy shit, ground" and started thinking "cool, carpet tiles!".


Then the door opened. 3500 feet. Wind rushed into the cabin and anything I heard the JM shouting was completely lost.


Old Awesome Guy knelt knee to knee with the JM and then, just like we practiced, stepped onto the wheel, grabbed ahold of the wing strut, climbed out, and dropped away.


I mean dropped. Like a freaking 250 lb sack of potatoes.


Trish's friend - same thing. Knee to knee with the JM, stepped out, grabbed onto the wing strut with her feet flying out behind her, and dropped away.


Time for Trish. She took a while getting out the door, which I attributed to nerves (I was definitely there with her!). She did her thing, and then dropped away.


I eagerly peered out the window and saw 2 progressively tiny colorful canopies below. Wait, only 2? Where's Old Awesome Guy?? I shouted at the JM, who replied he's on the ground already!


Then it was my turn.


I shuffled forward, knee to knee with Rob and did my best to look brave. The wind was rushing in through the open door which was only inches from my leg. Every ounce of me was screaming WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING, GET BACK IN THE PLANE!!


Rob leaned toward me and shouted with a grin, "Are ya ready to skydive?"


I have never been more terrified, and specifically because of that, I knew I simply had to do it.

I gritted my teeth and tried to exit the plane like I was taught. I grabbed the door frame and stuck my foot out into the wind.

Oh my God, the wind.

Picture roaring down the highway in a minivan, opening the sliding door, and trying to climb onto a platform with no guide ropes and only your own power to make sure it happens.

I literally shoved my foot into the windstream onto the tire of the plane. I punched my right hand into the wind to grab ahold of the wing strut. It was hard and made worse by the complete and utter shutdown of my self-preservation response. I mean, how hard are you going to try to kill yourself? The whole thing was so counter-intuitive that I couldn't do it. The wind was fierce, my hands were ice cold, my stomach had a death grip on my throat, and I. Pussied. Out.

I retreated back into the cabin, momentarily defeated but even more determined to do it.

Rob smiled at me. We're just going to take it around again, and then you can give it another shot.

A few minutes passed and he gave me the nod.

I grit my teeth and summoned every ounce of courage I had. I flexed every muscle. I tried to feel as strong as I know I can be.

I shoved my foot out the door.
I punched my hand out onto the wing strut.
I forced myself to leave the plane.

In the grip of consuming terror, I let my feet fly out behind me - no going back now.

GO!!

I released my grip on the plane and proceeded to freak the hell out. I fell in 5 seconds that were, simultaneously, the best and worst 5 seconds of my life. I plummeted to earth and in total panic started screaming ARCH THOUSAND, TWO THOUSAND, THREE THOUSAND, FOUR THOUSAND...

And in a moment of complete beauty and the most profound sense of relief I may ever experience, my bright yellow canopy unfurled above me. Rectangular, inflated, and, yes, controllable.

My radio crackled to life.

Hello, Jumper 4, please proceed with your flight check and enjoy the ride.

I laughed, I cried, I couldn't believe how beautiful it was - the sun glinted off of the lakes and I could damn well see everything. The world was green and fresh and full of life. The fall was gentle and incredible. The view was unimaginable.

Jumper 4, please make a 180 degree turn to your right - no, your other right - that's it, all the way around.

The soothing voice of the landing controller guided me through steering my canopy across the target area to the turning point, and back around to the target.

Work with me here, Jumper 4 - make that thing turn!

I yanked on the right toggle and the chute handled beautifully.

All of a sudden I noticed that the ground was rushing up at me and I was like, oh, shit! I flared the chute, pulling hard on both toggles to slow me down. I was going a trifle fast and tried to run out the landing, but I fell and slid on my butt across the field. It was a very pleasant slide and I was experiencing so many incredible emotions that I probably wouldn't have noticed any pain even if there was some.

I collapsed back on my open chute and laughed the most uninhibited, joyful laugh that I've had in years. A photographer out on the landing area captured it for me, for which I am eternally grateful.

I called my dad: Hey, I guess I'm a skydiver now.


----------------


There's my story. Would I do it again? Absolutely. Would I recommend the experience? If you're like me and have an insane need to conquer your fears and test the extremes of your capabilities... absolutely.

2 of my cousins are autistic and I did a lot of work with the mentally handicapped... this woman's video blew my mind. Completely and utterly. http://www.cbc.ca/national/blog/special_feature/positively_autistic/