Life Experience

When being so young it is easy to forget how lucky you are to have a life. For me, I have two wonderful parents, a mother and step-father, who are always there for me. I am lucky enough to be able to go to college and fulfill my dream because my parents worked hard to have the money to put me through college. Living everyday life, normally people don’t think about all the good they have in their lives but only focus on the bad. Why is that? Guess we’ll never know.

Until recently I didn’t realize how precious life was, I mean really appreciate having my life. About a month ago a young boy who attended my high school hung himself from years of bullying. When this happened, it was like everyone in the town was silent. Nothing had ever happened like this before and now that something major had happened to our perfect little town, it seemed to open everyone’s eyes. The young boy wasn’t much different than I am. He did believe in a religion that gets a lot of criticism but in the end we all put our pants on the same way. What I can’t wrap my head around is life being so bad that I would want to end it. I understand bullying happens everywhere and sometimes as early as primary school. Kids will be kids but in my life I always had my parents to back me up and motivate me to get back up on my feet. From what I’ve heard, this child did not have parents that acted this way. They regularly ignored him and didn’t pay attention to the fact that the bullying was as bad as it was.

This event really opened my eyes. I may have very bad days and think my life is a living hell but I actually have a life that others would envy. I wake up not scared to go outside and drive to school without the military stopping me and robbing me like in other countries. I got an education and was lucky enough to go to college unlike some countries where children don’t receive an education at all. These are just a few things I’ve noticed that I should be thankful for. Living in America, and never having to deal with these road blocks, Americans have no idea what is going on in the world around them. I am one of those people. I pray for my family and friends every night but I don’t regularly pray for those children who are sleeping in tents with tatted clothes and an empty stomach.

Living this life is something to be so grateful for. Realizing how good we have it has made me change my life and how I live it from day to day. Just like the young boy who took his life, I live for him and all of those children in other countries. It takes a mature adult to realize these great characteristics of life and these instances have molded me into the person I am today. No, every day can’t be perfect and every day I don’t feel appreciative but realizing it is a start.

 

My Mother and Me - Winter 2012

The Effects of Shift Work

I am writing my paper over the effects of shift work on the human body. Some aspects I’m specifically focusing on are the melatonin levels in the brain and how they change with shift work experience. Another is the development of cancer in people who have worked shift work for a long time and if working shift work heightens their chances of getting cancer. The reason I am writing about this topic is because I plan on working in the medical field and I unfortunately will have to work shift work schedules for the majority of my career. I know it will take years for my body to get used to the varying work schedule and reading about the effects of shift work on our bodies helps me take precautions when I am working in the future. Not only am I studying this topic for personal experience, but it is a topic that has little recognition. Many doctors work up to eighty hours a week and suffer time away from their family, sleep and even regular eating schedules. Not only can shift work effect your mood, but it also effects your mood because your family has to live around your schedule.

Specific ways I intend to use for appeals to my readers are logos, pathos, ethos and kairos. When using logos I will argue that shift workers don’t get enough appreciation from employees and that mistakes can be made at work because the workers are exhausted. Pathos is persuading with emotion and I plan to use an example of a mother with a young child who isn’t there when her son is awake during the day because she has to sleep for her night shift but sometimes she stays awake to visit with him but the repercussions of her being tired at work could be harmful to the patient. Persuading the reader through moral authority or credibility is known as pathos and how I plan to lead this part of my paper is appealing to the person’s life when they work shift work. Basically put yourself in that person’s shoes and imagine if you’d like working in that environment. The last appeal to the reader is kairos which is arguing at the right moment or to stress the timelines of an issue. One famous example I will use is a nurse giving a patient important medications and administering the wrong dosage to the patient because she’s so tired to think straight. Here I will argue that changing a normal shift work schedule from two twelve hour shifts to three eight hour shifts would keep this from happening. Something dangerous could happen with workers in a chemical plant mixing highly explosive chemicals and if someone is too sleepy to pay attention then the Baytown area could be blown up.

I plan to incorporate how people are missing out on the beautiful night sky because they are working and are fed light through electronic lights such as computers or light bulbs. The types of research articles I have found are more study based articles where clinical studies were performed over a period of time on shift workers. The research is definitely giving me good examples and points to think of when I will be working shift work. All the articles I have found are based in very different working environments with the workers having only one thing in common which is working shift work. These articles portray people of all age ranges as well as what countries they live in. I’m trying to find the most diverse articles to compare to each other to prove that shift work is detrimental to a person’s health.