Two Years After

It has now been about 2 years since I moved back home. I have thought a lot about those two years, and of that rough journey from being a nursing student to being the patient.

Summer Goals for Med Surg

I just started my Medical Surgical Nursing class today. Unlike the 3 previous classes I've had, this one will last 7 weeks and will be very, very content-dense. The basic schedule is class 2 days a week (9-5 or so) and 24 hours of clinical. I got assigned 12-hour shifts, so it might be more intense but I'm sure I will learn a lot.

This class will definitely require more study time, but I am continuing to focus my summer goals on my personal life. The times that school has become miserable for me have been when my personal life is overtaken by classwork and stress. Right now, I am focusing on eating well, working on my novel, and practicing my drawing.

Halfway Through Class #3!

(Warning to the squeamish – includes my account of placing a catheter in a mannequin for the first time).

            Friday was a very big day for the family. My brother and SIL moved into the new house. They hired movers, which took away one of the most difficult pieces of moving, remarking that this was an important new level of adulthood: hiring movers instead of asking friends to help in exchange for pizza.

            While Big Bro and SIL oversaw the moving process, I took my first closed-book exam at Villanova. It was going to happen soon enough, but it ended up being a lot less stressful than I thought it would be.

            Right now I’m taking Nursing Process, which covers a lot of basic nursing skills, like giving medications, bed baths, transfers, and urinary catheters. Yes, catheters.

Physical Assessment Lab Final/Uniforms

This week was the second week of Physical Assessment. We spent Monday-Wednesday learning pulmonary and cardiovascular assessment, and musculoskeletal/neurological assessment. So far, so good. I keep reminding myself that listening to heart/lung sounds on a (very) healthy 20-something is very different from hearing them on a very large, or very old person. (The more tissue you have around your chest, the fainter your heart/lung sounds).

Today was the lab final, which went well in the end (got 48/50 points), even though I was nervous about it going in. The way it worked is that my lab partner and I went into an exam room, and I logged into the computer in the exam room. Our lab instructor, who was in another room, told us she was ready. Through a loudspeaker. Depending on your metaphor preference, it was like the G-d voice or Big Brother. Instead of watching over my shoulder, she watched me via two cameras in the ceiling. What was odd was that I didn't feel self-conscious about being watched during the exam itself; hearing the G-d voice was a little startling.

After the lab final, I went into another room in the lab/clinical practice floor to buy my student uniform. The pictures of nursing students on my school's website featured people in pinstripe oxford shirts and navy slacks. I was less than thrilled. I didn't want to press slacks or wear a button-down shirt tucked into slacks. Button-down shirts, especially unisex ones, just don't work for my body type.

But the uniform has apparently been updated. Now we wear navy scrub pants, a navy t-shirt with our school's seal on the sleeve, and a white short-sleeved jacket with the school seal that looks like a less formal lab coat. I was pleased, once I finally found pieces in my size to try on. The uniform people brought a range of sizes (XS-XXXL), but most of the girls who came from the morning lab section were sizes XS-M, and some were XXS, so trying to find a small in anything was chaotic. But I ordered two elastic-waist cargo scrub pants (I have a drawstring pair of scrub pants from Brandeis Chabad, and think the elastic waist fit me better), two t-shirts, the white jacket, and two name pins (in case one gets lost/broken. And in a few weeks, I'll be signing my name with VUSN (Villanova U. Student Nurse) after it, which is pretty exciting.

Week 2 of Nursing School: Keep Calm and Carry On

When I started nursing school, I certainly expected long class hours and to go through the material very quickly, and prepared myself for an increased level of stress from my event coordinator job at a church. But I also make a conscious effort to focus on what I am learning in the present, and to not overthink future events, such as exams.
This does not mean that I slack off on my readings or studying. Rather, I try to focus on what I am learning each day, and not to worry about the exact composition of each exam. When I get a written assignment, I read the question and the paper's requirements, and proceed.

What bugs me about my program is the amount of class time in which people ask professors about what they need to study for each exam, what the exam questions are like, and how they should write a paper whose grade counts for 5% of the total class grade. As a detail-oriented person, I understand where these questions are coming from. I have always been very picky about my writing. What I don't get is why 30 minutes of class time is spent on these questions. Listening to people agonize over these things puts me on edge, and makes it harder to keep myself cool and collected.

When I go home, I look over my task list for the day, and sit down in the living room to do my work. Today, I punched out my 1-2 page assignment on patient learning while watching Parks & Recreation with my sister-in-law. It was incredible how much easier it felt to write that paper in a relaxed environment than when I was listening to people analyzing the rubric letter by letter. Likewise, I practice doing my blood pressure at home so that I'm not distracted by other people talking about how stressed they are about taking vitals.

Tomorrow is my lab midterm (doing vitals) and learning how to do an abdominal exam. Hopefully I can follow my stress-reduction mindset tomorrow morning and ignore other people's pre-midterm jitters.