I think I’ve entered a new grieving stage, the stage of RAGE. The adjustment process of accepting that I’ll (hopefully) be here for a long time has been hard. I’m on day 4, of hopefully ~60-65. It feels like a long, long way to go.

Meanwhile, small things make me feel trapped and frustrated. Things like:

• The wifi sucks. I’ve been tethering on my phone constantly in order to work or just use the basic internet. I’ve burned through ~4 GB of tethering data in less than 4 days, and at this rate, I’ll get throttled pretty soon. Luckily it dawned on me that I could try to connect to the Ethernet, so my coworker is bringing some dongles and cords today to help with that (Thank you Von!!) UPDATE: they won’t let me use the Ethernet here. Ugh. So I ordered a boost mobile hotspot. It says I can get up to 50gb!
• My iPhone cord went bad. This turned out to not be such a big deal because they sell new cords in the gift shop, but because I’ve been tethering so much, I burn through battery fast. (the iPhone/Ethernet cord irony is not lost on me, given that I’m here to monitor for cord accidents)
• There are so many lights in the room, and I have been sleeping less and less each night. Last night, I really wanted an eye mask (which I left right next to my nightstand at home!). The nurse couldn’t find any. To need things that would be so easy to acquire at home is frustrating. I did find an eye mask in the gift shop this morning.
• I can’t refill my own ice water!
• Working remotely in a culture that doesn’t use video for meetings very often. This feels isolating. The transition to working fully remote is also hard and weird. I expected this because product management is a hard job to do remotely, but it’s still been a difficult transition.
• I had an important meeting this morning so I circled “Do not disturb” on my door, but 2 people tried to come in anyway
• Just generally trying to balance work with the variability of the monitoring is hard. It’s hard to know when I’ll be available for meetings, and having a large part of our team in India requires frequent 8am and 8pm meetings, which perfectly overlap with my monitoring. Sometimes monitoring takes an hour on the dot. Sometimes it takes more than two hours.

I’m sure I will adjust and find ways to settle in. It’s just hard letting go of my independence!

Not much other news to report. My last 3 NSTs went much better, and they were able to get pretty continuous monitoring for the hour. We don’t expect anything interesting to happen for awhile, and so far that has been true!