One Semester Down, Three to Go!

Christmas is very nearly here and finds me ruminating on the last few months. I began Nursing school in August and it seems this is the first deep breath I've taken since undertaking that challenge. We had a couple of short breaks while we were in the term, but they were not nearly long enough and we had tests at the end of them. You, dear reader would not believe the amount of material we studied while we were in school!

We began clinicals feeling woefully inadequate to the task of taking care of a patient on our own. We just knew we would be responsible for someone dying on our watch. But guess what? None of us did! Most of my classmates and me came out with flying colors! : ) We really did learn how to take vitals (the old fashioned way with the manual sphygmomonometers) and assess them from head to toe. I even had the great experience of finding a galloping heartbeat and a radial pulse with a thrill in it. Heart beats are supposed to sound like Lub Dub. Sound one should be equal in duration to sound two. This heartbeat sounded like Lub Dee Dub Dee Dub. It was awesome. A pulse should feel like one strong beat on a drum at one time. A thrill feels like a vibration under your fingers. It was way cool...More cool was the fact that I recognized it for what it was. We also got to give medications to patients. They said that gave good injections. I liked that a lot. I learned one other thing about clinicals, "The hurrieder I go, the behinder I get." One needs to just breathe, relax, and get into a routine. This is the best way to stay organized and on top of things.

I had one patient I will never forget. She was in a reduced level of consciousness, had a ventilator, and J tubes to be fed through. Her hands and feet were drawn in. It was my goal every day to make her smile. I would remove her "air" boots to give her a bath and as I did I would sing, "These Boots Were Made for Walking." It got a big smile every time. I also washed her hair and found it matted to the back of her head. I took my bandage scissors and cut her hair right then and there. One of the most important things that a nurse does is provide comfort for their patient. I know that she felt better because I took five minutes to make her feel better. She smiled again when I told her she was beautiful.

I also found out that I couldn't see worth a toot. When my lab partner and I did our head to toe assessments on one another her vision was 20-13! I now call her, "Eagle Eye!" I don't know what she calls me, but it could be, "Blind as a bat." : ( My vision was somewhere near 20-60 in both eyes and that was with my glasses on! I did not have time or money to go get new glasses until now and I'm proud to report that I have an appointment to get new glasses and contacts the Monday after Christmas. I also could not smell coffee in one nostril. It could have been ever so much worse. I didn't have anything horribly wrong with me and they are both fixable.

When was the last time you bought books for college? For the last several years I have bought around $500-600 worth every semester. This semester, I bought $1600 in books! OMG! When stacked in one stack they came up to my thigh. The Fundamentals book is three inches on its own, the Medical-Surgical book is four. My friend and I decided to buy all the recommended books too. We never had time to even open them. They are listed on Amazon for half what I paid for them. Just like new.

We also learned that N-Clex questions are hard! N-Clex style questions are application questions of what you have learned, not straight out questions about what you learned. It's hard to decide sometimes which of the four right answers is the one the instructors want you to use as the correct answer! Being the oldest person in class sometimes has a drawback. I am not as technically savvy as the younger students. I didn't learn until the fourth test where the others were finding all the questions they studied. Better late than never! As a result, I missed making a B for the semester by .58 of a point. That makes me nearly sick to my stomach, but onward and upward. I've learned so much and I've almost caught up with the technology.

We started with 100 students in our classroom. Another 40 attend classes in Marietta. We only saw them once at orientation. We are all in class together every day. Steadily throughout the semester our numbers declined. A few were gone after the first test, a few more after our two attempts at the pass or fail Clinical Calculations test, a few more after clinicals. I think we have somewhere in the 70s in our classroom now. I wonder how many will return after the Christmas break. I hope they find something else that they want to do, or that they reapply next spring for the program and they will know more what to expect.

We have wonderful instructors in our courses. They are really interested in how we are progressing and will answer any question. We are all broken up into groups and have a mentor. The mentor really wants to know us and what our struggles are. The faculty at our school is awesome!

Karen Williams Thompson and I along with our classmates putting on our isolation regalia.

I am looking forward to our next semester. Sometimes I find myself feeling all alone in my struggles to learn the material, trying to keep up with my home, paying bills, going to church, and finding family time. I find comfort from my family and friends and other classmates. I also find comfort in seeing all the photographs of the nursing graduates that line the hallways and know that they did it too. One semester down, three more to go and in the meantime, you will find me...Living Life!

Candace Watson and I finding our temporal pulses while studying.