I finally sat down to log in here, and found a draft of a post I meant to post back in early October. I back-dated it and put it up.
Anyhow, hiya. It's been a while since I wrote. I need to fix that...life's been kind of stressful lately and I really should be letting it out in some way, shape or form. You'd think I'd be knitting more (and I am), but alas, Yet Another Yarn Blog stands barren too.
The funny thing is that now I do actually have some free time: class is no longer 24 hours a week, but every week it's a two-hour lecture one day and two lab/clinical days. I get two whole weekdays off: one is still earmarked for volunteer work, but today is a completely free day. Joy! I'd like to say I'm filling today with nothing but studying...but I'm not. I'm catching up on everything else that I haven't been able to do since August.
How things have been going...
Got my A in fundamentals. People were looking at me like I kicked a puppy when they heard about the A. I'm getting tired of hearing everyone go on in clinical how they'd rather have the C student for their nurse than the A student, the reasoning being that the C student may not be book smart but will be street smart while the A student will implode on the floor, so now I keep all my grades on the QT as much as possible. Besides, that's my fear (the implosion) too...I don't know if it's from hearing it so many times and/or my lack of human medical experience, but I do worry about bungling it in clinical. I haven't yet, but I stress over it.
Had one glorious night off before Physical Assessment and Pharmacology (Pharm for short) started. Drank wine and once again, started a class with a hangover.
Now, Pharm...the teacher's nice but they shoved this class on her at the last minute (the previous teacher "retired", I say no more so you draw your own conclusions) and there's so little organization that we feel like the unloved class. We never know what room we're meeting in, they keep changing the test schedule constantly, they keep changing the course outline constantly, and we lost three clinical days because they couldn't find instructors. Then they found instructors but not enough so for legal reasons, one or more students at clinical have to (or are SUPPOSED to) sit out and observe.
Last night was out first Pharm clinical. I got to sit out--no one wanted me for a partner...that sounds bad. As far as I know, no one wants me dead. And truth be told, I didn't exactly ask anyone either. I was in a strange mood last night and kind of kept myself to myself. Anyhow, I got to be the Shadow and true to the law, I did not touch a patient. I did get to learn all of the ins and outs of the floor though, which is handy to know. I hope the other extra students in the other clinicals did the same...probably not though. I was kind of bummed...on one hand, I got to hang back and observe since I have to admit I was feeling a but overwhelmed. On the other hand, my classmates got to do all sorts of fun stuff and all I could do is watch and fetch supplies.
But I suppose it was for the best in the end because of rule #5 of nursing school: CYA. Yeah, I'm coming up with a list of things I learned in nursing school and making a list of them for myself. When I get them better organized, I'll post them.
