Well, a lot has gone on since the last time I've written on here, and there's some housekeeping to be done. Let me just say that I realize how long these things get (Chatty Cathy and all that).
1. I am in my final semester of nursing school, and at this point already 5 weeks in. This semester's clinical hours are divided up 6 weeks with two 8 hour shifts in the medical/surgical floors at MUSC doing really, really gnarly crazy gross stuff that they would not let us even look at before. The last 6 weeks I will spend doing 88 hours in the Labor and Delivery department at Trident, and generally begging them for a job for the duration. I'm currently on the floor at MUSC that receives patients when they graduate from the ICU, so alive and kicking but just now stable. I have one week of this left, and probably the craziest thing I have seen so far is a 21 year old gang banger who was shot in the abdomen with a shotgun and no longer has an esophagus or intestines, yet continued to eat in the ICU. Now, if you really think about that statement.... there's nowhere for the food to GO, per say. So his body (amazing) created a fistula (abnormal tunnel) from his neck to the outside of his body so the food falls onto his shoulder when he eats. The surgeons, seeing that this was never going to stop, created a nice little stoma for him there on his neck so he could attach a colostomy bag. So now us lowly nursing students have the pleasure of fetching him insane amounts of food from Subway, then watching him eat and drink and his little baggie fill up, he empties it into a basin, and we flush it down the toilet. Modern medicine for ya, ladies and gentlemen!
2. I kinda wish I could go back and do nursing school all over again. Not in any way because I am eager to spend another 16 months of my life like this, but because I was so uncomfortable the entire time and I'm just now finding my groove. I feel like if I could go back to the beginning with the level of comfort I feel now, I could have gotten so much more out of it. Its not the schooling that has been difficult, I've always been book smart and up for a scholastic challenge, but nobody realizes the insanely uncomfortable things we are asked to do every day at a student nurse. Let me see if I can put this is lay man's terms for you: say you're in Harris Teeter and you're in the bread isle and you see a nice man in a wheelchair choosing bagels. Now say your boss comes up to you and says, "See that nice man? Go put this enema up his butt and squeeze the contents into his colon then help him to the bathroom so he can blow his intestines out of his bottom. Good girl. Oh, then measure his stool and record it, but make sure to wipe his butt for him first." As one is shoving a piece of plastic up a strangers rectum, one cannot help but hear the little voice in one's head saying, "WHAT AM I DOING?!!!!!" Well, that voice has been loud and strong and adamant in my head through most of nursing school, and it really has not been until this semester that it has given up trying to convince me that social norms still apply to me in particular. It has pretty much been ruining my life in a very real way up until recently. When I am out of my comfort zone (ie The Hospital) I get nervous and become an absolute bumbling idiot. I cannot talk properly, I stutter, I spit when I talk, I cannot so much as pick my pen up off the medcart without sending it cartwheeling in a trajectory toward my own eye, I trip over my own feet, and generally want to crawl under a rock and die. You think I'm exaggerating, but I really am not. For example: I was putting a client's meds into a little cup for him, not exactly rocket science. I was popping his pills out of the little foil packets and as I'm pushing a harmless little ibuprofen, it (I kid you not) shoots 20 feet down the hall and rolls into a patient's room under his bed, where there are of course 2 nurse's to observe my little mini-fiasco. So I have to walk into this stranger's room, face these two experienced nurses (did I mention I'm dressed in white polyester head to toe?), and march over to pick up my fugitive capsule. Then I have to go find my assigned nurse and tell her she needs to go back to the med room and get another ibuprofen, and of course she's going to want to know why.... the humiliation really never ends. So this is how clinicals are for me, one fumbling incompetency after another. But... this semester I seem to have turned a corner. I love people, I love talking to patients, that has never been a problem. But when I am that far outsize my comfort zone, my personality is locked in a dark little padded room in the back of my mind somewhere sobbing quietly and leaves me to bumble through alone, socially incompetent, and practically drooling on myself. Wednesday I had three patients to care for, one who is a known pickle and the RN's on the floor avoid being assigned at all costs, one who I've taken care of 3 times in the past, and Mr. Gunshot Fistula Neck Man. For some reason nursing school is starting to percolate in my little brain, and I'm realizing that I really do know a lot about a lot of things (as opposed to a little about a few things and feeling chronically stupid). Its gotten to where I have been doing the same things now for so long that the little freak-out voice in my head has transferred more into a "Wow, what a nice rectum you have Mr. Bagel Man" as opposed to the previous "RUUUUUUUUNNNNNNN!!!" impulse. So I talked to Ms. Pickle Patient as if she were one of my massage clients as I wiped her butt, and she wound up absolutely loving me. She wanted to know all about my childhood in Mexico and Wyoming, and had me tell it again when her husband came. She was as polite as could be, and my nurse was flabbergasted. My other elderly patient, who I'd had 3 times, refused to have her mouth swabbed by my nurse who said she doesn't even try anymore, but I told my nurse she'd always done it for me. I got up in her face and cajoled and cooed and next thing you know I have that nasty tasting swab in her mouth scrubbing every last corner, and I look up at my nurse who says, "You're my hero." It was a good day, and I'm finding that I'm having more and more of those these days.
3. I know stuff. :) I have had 3-4 classes each semester learning the bare bones of nursing concepts, in addition to spending time in the hospital for hands-on training. We've had to take NCLEX practice tests all though school to determine our probability of passing our state boards upon graduation. It's not your typical 100% grading, a holy-grail score for such a test is considered a 73.3%, which has been pretty much unattainable because we had not learned everything yet. Well this semester we have no class instruction, we have learned everything about the human body, disease processes, and drugs that we are going to. We just had to take the mother of all NCLEX practice tests on Thursday, and there was a lot riding on it. It is graded in 3 levels: Level 1 means you are no way no how going to pass the NCLEX, Level 2 means you might pass but you need to study a LOT between now and then, and Level 3 (anything better than 73.3%) means you're golden, keep doing whatever the heck it is you have been. Anybody who did not get a Level 3 on Thursday's test has to go into mandatory remediation the rest of the semester, and re-take the predictor test the day before graduation, and if they still don't pass they don't even get to graduate. So we had a lot riding on this test, and considering most of my class has never even made a Level 3 before, it seemed unlikely. The class before us has 75% of their class placed in mandatory remediation. Scary! My previous 2 practice tests I'd scored a Level 3, but one still never knows about these things. As I was taking the test, it slowly dawned on me: I know this stuff. I am a nurse, and the nearly $50K I've invested in my brain the last 16 months has worked! I scored a beautiful 82.3%, and right under my score were the words, "Probability of passing the NCLEX on first try: 99%" Bring it on, baby.
4. I was chosen for the MUSC Women's Club Scholarship recently. I had to go to a fancy luncheon/tea to accept my $1500 award, and one of the women on the Scholarship committee pulled me aside just to tell me that when they were choosing the recipients, my application got almost unanimous votes out of all 60 and that has never happened before. For the life of me I cannot remember what the heck I wrote on that thing! I was touched an honored, but even more so seeing that I was the only nursing student selected and there were only 14 awards handed out university wide (as in Pharmacy, Medicine, Physical Therapy, Ph. D, Dental, Physician's Assistant... the list goes on and on). I certainly did NOT mention to anyone there that I planned to buy myself the mother of all tattoos with my money, a nice little graduation present to myself. Somehow I think they would not approve....
Here is a link to their webpage and you can see for yourself how I stick out like a sore thumb in this crowd, they really had no idea what to think of me even after taking all my facial jewelry out and covering my tattoo. I saw one 80 year old women eyeballing my sparkly green toenails during the ceremony. :) http://academicdepartments.musc.edu/womensclub/scholarship_recipients10.htm
5. I have been invited to join the Sigma Theta Tau nursing honor's society, which is a little bit awesome (and apparently expensive!). Right now I have the 3rd highest GPA in my class, and with a 3.975 I am certainly not begrudging the people ahead of me. Everybody says that when it comes to grades in nursing school C=RN, but after being told in no uncertain terms that not only would I never make it into the program, and NObody makes an A at MUSC I just want to go dance on somebody's grave. Or at least go find that little floozy Trident student nurse at St. Francis and wave my degree that will say Summa Cum Laude and my pretty little graduation cords in her face and say, "Booyah!" This shall terminate the gratuitous boasting portion of my blog.
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