Spring Break

Hi all! I haven't been on here in so long and so much has happened, I don't know where to start. Right now, I'm on Spring break so I have a little time. You may wonder why I didn't write when I had a month off for Christmas. Well, the answer to that one is pretty simple. My house was so disgusting that if it didn't get cleaned and straightened out, I would have moved out leaving my husband and children all by themselves. And yes, it took me a month. Very simple answer right? Anyway, I miss writing about the craziness of nursing school. So much has changed in my life though, so let me start there. Jamie's business is blessed everyday. He has been supporting us all by himself since August and we have been so thankful that he can. Our little Rosie had puppies! They're quite a handful but in a couple of weeks they will be able to go to their own homes. The little white one is going to my mom and we're thinking about keeping the black and white one. She's too cute to let go. Hold any judgements about having another dog in this home, please. Nothing anyone can say could be worse than the reaming out I'm giving myself :) Jamie and I are going back to court to try and get custody of Syd, so we may be looking at a new dog and a teenage addition to this home. I can feel the bulging seams as I sit here. But thank God, all the same, life is good. Nursing school life is a totally different story, and that's what this blog is about, right?
We are a little over halfway done our second semester, and it's about as insane as you can get. The first semester was hard, really hard, but this semester will break a person's will. The first test was so hard they threw out 6 questions. This test they threw out another 6. It's unbelievable! We had this past test's material taught by 1 teacher. The difficult part of that is the teacher is very hard to understand. What she teaches you is, mostly, on the test but in a different sense then how she taught it. They added on an additional clinical day and an additional class. So the past 6 weeks of clinical and school have been like this
Monday 8-10 class 10-11 lecture Get patient and do care plan until 1 in the morning
Tues - Clinical til 3:30 Tweak care plan for following day
Wends - Clinical til 3:30 Pass out dead
Thurs - Class 9-12
Friday - meet at school to try to figure out what the hell happened to us this week

It's been a blast. We were on an Oncology floor for clinical and there were some great learning opportunities. It was aweful though because the nurses hated us and wouldn't teach us. I would have thought maybe I was reading them wrong and it was just me, but my clinical instructor by the end was telling our school to never send a clinical group to that floor again. I had good experiences, though. I suctioned a tracheostomy patient, cleaned a trach, did a dressing change, did a dressing change for a central catheter (big deal because if you do it wrong the patient could get an infection go straight to the heart), took out a Foley catheter, and learned to work independently. It was very rewarding to have confidence in my clinical skills now.
We're now in Maternity, and the rest of the semester should fly by. We no longer have to get our patients because we won't know who is going to have a baby. Monday night I will be able to SLEEP!!!!! Yay! We are going to do a couple of twelve hour days so we only need one clinical day that week, the following day we have off. We also have to work on a presentation for clinical which should be interesting. Our clinical group has many different personalities to say the least. This should take a lot of patience.
I thought Maternity would be easy for the lecture but it's not turning out to be so easy. We have a little while before the test, though so I'm going to wait until it's closer to freak out. This week is going by way too fast, I need to get working on my list of to-dos. It was so nice to vent on here again, it made me realize why I did it to begin with. Now, I am off to tackle some nursing stuff. Hopefully, I will begin to have a little more wiggle room and post here again.
Lots of Blessings!!
Mary