i see a tiny light. like a flashbulb sparkle in the night.

after work tuesday night, i got to thinking about something. well, truth is, i'm always thinking about something, but here's what i had on my mind specifically.

as a nurse, you do a lot of unpleasant, sometimes hurtful things to and for your patients in order for them to feel better. for instance, tuesday night, i put a ng tube down for a patient who was having abdominal issues (ng tube = a tube that, basically, goes up the nose, down the back of the throat and into the stomach to drain the stomach of, well, yucky stuff). this patient had been feeling awful, but almost immediately after the tube was inserted and in place - a simple, yet significant, procedure - the patient began to feel better. there was this sense of sudden relief.

this got me thinking of something else (besides the fact that i spend way too much of my time in my head). it got me thinking of one of my favorite quotes - a sea of flowers won't bloom without the rain.

the last week or two, i've been in this kind of funk. i still have yet to figure out why, but i guess it is what it is. and, since things have been so great lately, it seemed even harder to be feeling "down" for a while. i wasn't used to it, and i hadn't felt that way in a long time. yesterday, though, something was different. it was like a weight had been lifted. and it only took a few small, yet significant, things for me to start feeling better - to have that same sense of sudden relief i mentioned before.

i've talked about what the above quote means to me in other entries before - that, sometimes, you have to go through the bad to get to the good. lately, i've realized, you can think of the quote in one of two ways - one, the bad days are there for a reason - to remind us that, no matter what, better days are ahead, to make us appreciate the better days; and two, the good days are there for a reason as well - to remind us of how far we have come, to give us a chance to look back and learn from the bad.

to me, seems like, no matter how bad you're feeling, feeling better and better days are always just around the corner. i'm more and more thankful every day that the better days largely outnumber the bad and to know that the simplest things can turn a bad day good. it's a blessed life and i'm happy to be here.