Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Support Group
Find support with others who have gone through a traumatic experience. Whether you have chronic or acute PTSD, we are here for you.
Thanks for the support in my going back to school this past Monday. It got me through. I've been scrambling, like teachers around the world, to convert years of face to face lesson plans to online instruction for a bunch of courses I'm teaching full time.
This week scrambling like that has meant being up until 2am working on lesson plans and then getting up at 7am and teaching all day from home via Zoom. I'm really pleased the students are coming to class on their laptops. I'm really grateful that when I don't know now to do some basic technical task while I'm teaching on Zoom my students help right then and there. They send me quick instructions via chat or tell me out loud what to click my mouse on. I'm talking about simple stuff like showing them a Powerpoint I've prepared.
By last night, though, just two days in being back to school, I was really exhausted. In my down time I was constantly rewriting those lesson plans until the wee hours in my hours outside the classroom. Then I found my experience of teaching via Zoom took extra mental energy just because I'm not used to it. So teaching a 50 minute class that would have been routine for me in my physical classroom took more than 50 minutes of energy, if you know what I mean. It took twice that each class session,easily. So by the end of the yesterday I was pretty wiped. I got up this morning concerned about getting through the rest of the week.
Looking back to the last few days, I saw why. This past weekend was the church year kick off for one of the 2 little churches I work for in my part time weekend job, too. So I worked with church folks through the weekend. I found out that D., one of my right hand people at one of my churches, has had his cancer come back. D. told me he's in a lot of pain and needed some counseling time with me about it, so we took some time for that. I teach death and dying classes to nursing students at my community college, and his returned cancer has spread through his bladder and colon such that he may die now.
Comforting him and being the speaker at my church service and all was something I enjoyed but didn't allow weekend time off. This morning I had some extra back pain and I realized today I hadn't had a day off since August 16th. I can't take time off today, tomorrow, or Friday now that school's started, so I'm looking forward to time off come Saturday.
Please send me your support to get through until then, would you? I'd appreciate it. I'm going to drive through McDonald's to reward myself with an ice cream cone, so I'm taking the break I can take. But then I'll come back home and go back to rewriting those lesson plans and uploading them online for tomorrow's classes via Zoom. It's simple, but for me it's a lot right now, so support welcome, y'all. I've collapsed 3 times from this sort of thing and ended up in the hospital from it every time, the latest being this past Feb. 24th. A coworker who teaches at my school, too, just called me to let me know he's praying for me offline, so any prayers or thoughts from here online at DS PTSD will add to his to get me through. Gracias!
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Hey All...I hope that you have a lovely, peaceful beginning of your weekI have a bunch of chores that need doing but may put them off til tomorrow and just hang out with my landlord/roomie todayWhat about you?...Anything special going on?Have a great day and take good care of you!!..Xo
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Once again I've had a fever today. I'm not going to the hospital because that's a huge waste of time but I did schedule a dr appointment for Wednesday afternoon.
You must be exhausted.
Take time for yourself this coming week end for sure.
You will be in my prayers.
I hope as you settle in it will get more comfortable... You deserve 2 ice cream ones and a Big Mac....xo
"Wow, do I feel stupid. I had a bad day offline at my job today, I misunderstood how going from face to face teaching to 100% online teaching affected my schedule at my community college. Thinking I was supposed to, I incorrectly changed the day and time a whole class of students was supposed to meet and therefore got 3 dozen students confused. My department chair called me at home tonight so I'd realize my mistake and fix it tomorrow."
I was already having enough of a challenge with this hump day today before finding out I'd make this mistake. That's why I asked for support earlier. Then it got worse for me.
I told SunCloud that what got me through my embarrassment over my mistake was that I knew I could come here. I knew I could tell her I had messed up and that she would still forgive me for being human and able to make a mistake. With her I could admit it, and then fix it.
The same goes for all of y'all here at DS PTSD. In my chagrin, I thought ahead to how SunCloud takes my making mistakes well. Then I thought ahead to the fact that I'd asked for support from everybody here at DS PTSD. I could count on having some support here when I logged back on even though my mistake at work today was all my fault.
Ev, visualizing myself in Mexico retired a year from now like you suggested really helped. It put things in a larger perspective that gave me hope for a life beyond having my job define me so much. It gave me hope for being valued as a person for more than what I can do on the job. Since, as you know, I grew up in Mexico and as a kid there had no career to worry about, I visualized returning there and being valued again for who I am and not just for what I do.
HUGS HUGS HUGS
I've always felt pain from the lower back hernia, because that's what gets used getting up and down out of chairs and car seats. Even though the upper herniated disk was always there, it didn't hurt as much because I didn't bend my back there up high as much.
Not so now. Since I've begun teaching online 100%, now that herniated disk up high between my shoulder blades is getting irritated because of looking at a computer screen for hours on end. It really hurt by the end of Hump Day yesterday Wednesday. I can't take any pain medication other than liver-processed Tylenol,
not even aspirin, because of my kidney disease.
I'm having trouble with "thinking" too much, too, because my college has me teaching 100% from home due to the pandemic. I'm glad I'm safer, since as a diabetic with kidney disease I'm a COVID-19 risk. But in this first week back to school I'm finding teaching 100% via computer is more tiring than when I get to be with students in person face to face in a physical classroom. I need to learn to take breaks.
I spent all morning correcting my mistake rescheduling that death and dying class to tell students on Brightspace, via email, and by video on Zoom (actually, Microsoft TEAMS) that I was wrong, that we ARE having that one class meet mornings as scheduled before the pandemic. Hope that settles things.
I didn't bother with passing on the blame for my mistake to an earlier email in the summer from our community college tech support saying wifi bandwidth was scarce mornings and to live stream afternoons. It doesn't matter if students think it was all my fault as long as they come to class after all when I live stream mornings starting tomorrow.
Really looking forward to resting up this weekend. I don't have church duties in my part time job this coming weekend like I did last weekend. So I'll get a day off for the first time in 2 weeks, and I'm really looking forward to it.
I hope that you can just kick back and take good care of you.....xo
That was how shameless it was that sending the guide wasn't out of concern to be really helpful. The guide was sent at the last minute just so that our IT help desk people at my community college could wash their hands of the technological mess that was to come in the upcoming first week of school. They were just covering their backs, not really reaching out to help.
That being the case from my community college administrators and IT staff, then, I'm grateful for your support here on this thread through this week. I'm thankful, too, for how students coached me live through figuring out what to click on my screen as we figured out live streaming on the fly. We did figure it out eventually this past week, so I'm hopeful we'll figure it out next week, too. One week at a time.
Hope this week goes smoothly for you. Best wishes.
If that's too much detail, hey, please remember I started teaching in 1980 before there even was an Internet. Our technology was chalk and chalkboards in classrooms back then, and getting colored chalk was a big innovation.
So starting week two working teaching remotely by computer was a big deal for me today. The problem, though, was that although I showed up and did the job, only 3 of my 20 students in my class showed up. A full 17 cut class.
I sent them an email telling them again the time and day at which the class is scheduled. They registered for it and paid for it, so I thought they'd know already, but I figure reminding them wouldn't hurt. I'd appreciate it if more of them would show up to class when we meet via computer again tomorrow.