My Life Now

I am settling into the life of a student. I have class 3 days a week and Monday is a killer - from 9:00 am to 7:30 at night. I will be adding a day of clinical next week. My Patho class, as feared, is the hard one but I think I will be able to handle it. There are two instructors, and one I seem to click with more. I bet I can get most of her test questions right. The other one is the question mark, but I plan to go see her next week to get a feel for her philosophy on test questions -- is it lots of patient scenarios, asking us what to do next? or is it more along the lines of left-sided heart failure causes which of the following symptoms? A little discussion won't hurt.

It's a lot of material. Here's a shot of my notes. Yes, that's Crabby's paw. She likes to "help" me study. I think I spend more time moving her off my books than reading some days.

I can see that I've let some other parts of my life slide. I haven't been in the pool in a week. I haven't made some appointments that I need to make. I haven't been good about returning calls (if that's to you as you read this -- sorry!). But the good news is that things feel quite manageable. My Advanced Health Assessment class has no exams -- unless you count them critiquing our physical exams as we perform them on a guinea pig. We have a quiz every Monday on the readings that we should have done, and I'm happy to say I got a 93 on the first one. And here's the thing -- it was, by far, the easiest test I've ever taken in a nursing class. It was basically a check to make sure you'd done the reading - nothing tricky, a little basic memory things. One of the two things I missed was where on your hand do you check for vibrations in a patient's body (where do you apply your hand to the patient's body part). The answer is the ulnar portion. This is the flat part alongside your pinky. I'm sure it was in the book. I think the ease of the exam is the correct approach -- this is a class on learning how to PERFORM skills and that's where we'll be graded.

We have ACL (Austin City Limits music festival) this weekend and we'll be attending on Sunday. I probably won't be in spin class as usual on Monday at 5:30 am, but other than that, I expect to do everything on Monday at school as usual. It's up to me to spend the next 3 days preparing and making that happen. And guess how many chapters I need to read? It's 8. Kind of ridiculous, but nursing is nothing if not an overwhelming amount of information. I mean, the education time stays the same in spite of all the medical advances being made, so guess what.....they just cram it in there. Because it's all important.

My psycho-social class has an interesting real-life experience component. It's on culturally competent nursing; being able to work with people of many different cultures. A good thing to know, and a good goal for someone in the helping professions. The professor decided that she didn't want to keep us so late at school (the class should be 3 hours, it's the last one of the day) so she lets us go after two hours. Which is a big relief on long Mondays, but here's the kicker....we have to make up those hours in "cultural contacts" with people different from us and then write a paper about it. Again, a good goal - let's make it real - but we have to go out and find those people ourselves and we're not allowed to use our workplaces or classmates. I'm wondering how to line this up. It's quite a stretch - get waaaaay out of my comfort zone. (that probably is the point, right? ha) I have no idea how to line this up. I thought about utilizing the place where I volunteer - AIDS Services of Austin. I'm sure I'll find this a valuable experience when it's over, but getting started is proving hard. More to come.

Anyway, I'm going to go study some Patho.