Just Call Me Patient Zero

It looks like I've been circulating in a whole new pool of germs, and falling prey to most of them.

While writing my bio midterm last Wednesday night I started coughing and had to excuse myself in the middle of the test. I didn't think too much about it, (other than I was losing valuable minutes!) Well that cough lingered on and a severe head cold settled in. As usual, I proceeded to ignore it -- proving I am the worst patient ever (according to my nurse/sister who is staying with me, along with her husband and kids.)

I continued to drag myself through the scheduled visits with friends I had stacked up for this past long weekend, since I had dropped off the radar screen while getting ready for exams. By Monday, however, I wasn't just dragging with a cold, I turned a corner and got sicker than I've ever been in my life. I now know what "fatigue" means...not just dragging, but STOPPED. In fact, my will went with my energy and I didn't even have the strength to worry about my looming chem exam. I struggled up the 220 steps to get to the doctor, and being out in the cold air made my lungs feel like I was breathing razor blades. Fever, chills, racking cough. I think I cracked a rib from all the coughing, no lie.

Doc says its pneumonia. And whatever bug I had quickly passed to my sister, her husband and my little niece. I'm crossing my fingers that mom doesn't get it...

Just call me Patient Zero.

I've been in bed a week and now have a week's worth of school work to catch up on. Sigh. The only saving grace has been that we've had a couple of snow days, so I technically only missed 2 school days. But it is still going to be a rough go catching up.

Somehow I need to go teach myself logarithms, write up some labs, study for chem and write a psych test...sigh. Well the snow has reminded me that it's not spring (break) yet!

Dropping Like Flies

It's midterm week and I am getting ready for my hated biology exam tomorrow night.

Dread dread dread.

Sounds like a couple of my buddies from class will likely drop before the add/drop deadline this Friday since they are doing poorly in class. Not that I'm doing all that great, but I intend to hang on and fight through, especially since we are at the half-way mark. I keep reminding myself that I just need a C to move on. Still, it makes me sad to see so many of my class mates suffering with this tough prof. One kid is a pizza delivery driver putting himself through school to become a nurse. Very hard worker. Immigrated from the Ukraine when he was a kid, and because english is his 2nd language, he's having a rough go.

Part of me is jealous they are dropping. But I'll fight through that and just press on. As my esteemed ex-husband used to say... anybody can stand on their head in a bucket of sh-- for a short time. (That's what the cadets used to tell each other at the Air Force Academy apparently.

Luckily we have a long weekend coming up, and my sister and her babies are here for cuteness distractions. I'll do plenty of catching up with friends this weekend before digging in for the second half of this quarter.

Counting down the days until this class is behind me.

Trudge trudge trudge.

My Mistake

Okay. 

I got a public talking-to. 

By my professor. 

Seems I grabbed the wrong tube in my biology lab last night. We were mashing up hamburger, straining it off with water, and running tests on in. (Very gory and disgusting.) So we needed to set up a batch of test tubes. And even though he explained the differences between the expensive cuvettes (only for use in the spectrophotometers) and plain old test tubes (to be used for my meat juice,) and even though it was also in my lab write up, I still managed to go for the wrong tubes.

It was like I had kicked his dog.

True, I had just come off 72 hours prepping for his exam, so I may have only skimmed the pre-lab write up. And true, I was operating on very little sleep and a whole lotta caffeine and missed a detail, but come ON man. Throw a girl a bone. So I got meat juice in your cuvette!?  Nobody lost an eye. I didn't release anthrax out on the general public. And we all came out alive.

As it was, I went about my business, finished running my experiment, and am now performing a public service for all biology students who come after me.

Just so you'll know, and never repeat my grievous error...here's a photo that will demonstrate their obvious difference:

Hey...don't say I didn't warn ya.

But seriously folks, he was obviously having a bad day. Otherwise, I enjoy lab with this prof quite a bit. I'm sure I couldn't deal with college kids in five classes and not gnash my teeth at them periodically. 

Plus I'll need to grow a thicker skin. I am going into nursing. I am bound to encounter testy patients, families and medical personnel on a regular basis. And I'll need to learn to roll with it. And I'm going to need to keep my eye on the details!

And I will.

The Calm Before the Storm

I have settled in to the pace of my new world of school now and am finding the transition between my former career and this life as a pre-nursing student challenging on some fronts, and refreshing at the same time.

The main challenge so far has just been the major gear shift I have had to make from an entirely creatively-focused industry to maths and sciences. For 15 years my world has been about design, which is entirely subjective. And as an Art Director, I directed that flow and spoke in terms like "the color needs to be a little warmer," or "I'd like to see a bit more contrast" or "how do these elements reinforce the client's brand message?" Good creatives excel at taking the subjective and applying some kind of rationale behind the design decisions they make in order to sell the work to a client.

None of that is going to fly where I'm going.

Now everything is either right or wrong. It's all linear (at least so far) -- and getting the decimal in the wrong place means you calculated the wrong dose, which could have dire consequences for your patient. The things I do now can be repeated, verified, tested. My creative friends who are reading this now are likely getting a little itchy. Designers don't like borders and strict definitions. They like to color between the lines. The thing is, I have always been a hybrid -- the daughter of an engineer and an artist, I'm pretty balanced between the linear thinking and creative/imaginative worlds. I can play in both paddling pools quite happily. So, the logic of what I'm studying now is new, exciting, and for once -- there is only one answer...the right answer.

That's kind of comforting for someone who has been having to defend the reason why something is more greenish-blue and less purple.

However, my brain is a little slow to make the switch. I have been joking with friends that for 15 years I have been feeding and watering the creative side of my brain, and letting the linear side atrophy and wither. Now I have turned on the fire-hose of information from my math and science classes, just pumping that under-fed side of my brain full of data points. And it has looked at me, raised it's eyebrows and said, "Screw you! You starved me for 15 long years and now you just expect me to carry you to the finish line?!" So now I'm busy giving the linear side of my brain a pep-talk. And we have decided to use this quarter as our warm-up.

Easy does it, linear me -- it's gonna be a marathon, not a sprint.

Week Two at School -- Whatever Was I Thinking?

Short post tonight, much to do.

Scheduling all of my pre-req's into 3 quarters by taking four classes instead of three each quarter just seemed like good sense when I was planning all of this out. When I chat with the other pre-nursing students I'm meeting in these classes and we discuss our class-load, they look at me with that, "are you nuts?" thing when I tell them what I'm taking. I suppose taking this many credits would have been fine if I had been starting from square one, but there are no more basket-weaving "buffer classes" to take. (I already took all those!) So, I'm in all pre-nursing classes -- back to back sciences and math. And I'm really feeling that 20ish year gap since I took calculus.

Just 2 weeks into my first quarter, with the avalanche of homework and memorization ahead of me, I'm thinking being tied to the train tracks might be more appealing.

Train's a-comin' folks.

I Fondled The Scrubs Today

Day 2 of my first week back in school and I have sweaty palms for many reasons. At the top of the list is just getting the classes I need. I may have mentioned this before, but my community college had only 3000 students a couple of years ago, now they have 9000. (I blame the economy. The unemployed are flocking back to school.) Getting classes is tough enough, but for the high demand programs like Nursing, it's a real slug-fest.

I just need ONE more class -- Biology 160 in order to have what I need this quarter. Because the Nursing pre-reqs are sequential, not having this single class bars me from getting into the Anatomy courses for the next two quarters. Unacceptable, since I am living on savings and know I'll be outta dough if I need to tack on an extra quarter this fall. My plan is to bang out all the pre-reqs in 3 quarters, making me finished and ready to enter a the Nursing college this fall (if God only provides me the spot!) I only need one kid to drop the class in order to slide into this class tomorrow. Plan B is to find any open seat at any college within driving distance...but I hope it doesn't come to that. I have commenced "bargaining-type" prayers today.

Next on my list of worries is clearing out the cobwebs of my neural-learning centers and remembering that I once learned how to write a number in scientific notation! I can see already that most days will find me planted at the math tutoring center drilling this stuff into my head. Hate math. Is why I went to art school!  ;)

So anyway -- there I was in the student bookstore to buy my lab notebook (sewn binding required...why?) And I looked up to see the SCRUBS! I have been biting my nails, trudging back and forth between buildings in the freezing cold, with all of the aforementioned immediate concerns on my mind, and then I saw the scrubs. Oh yes...the reason why I'm here. I got a little giddy like the time I was at the Wynn Hotel in Vegas, in line at the coffee shop, and I found myself standing next to Nick Rhodes from Duran Duran! (I was a rabid fan as a teeny bopper. Even dressed up as him for the middle school Halloween Dance! He wore a lot of makeup like any good New Waver would.)

In any case...like a silly girl -- I had been wondering what color scrubs the students at my school would be wearing. (Just like when somebody tells me they just bought a new car, I ask them about the color before I care about the make!) They wear navy scrubs. I highly approve! Slimming dark color, not easily stained with the inevitable fluids that will, no doubt, be splashed upon them.

My sister, who is already a nurse, is looking forward to my many "firsts" during the whole Nursing school season of my life. First bed bath. First injection. And now I see that the first day I don the scrubs will mark a victory over: getting through the pre-reqs, applying and becoming accepted into the program, and countless others.

Seasoned nurses likely grow tired of wearing scrubs, in the same way I grew tired of the business executive ensembles I had to pull together every day of my working life. The grass is greener syndrome, no doubt. As a business woman, rising each morning to spend time time extracting a nearly infinite number of outfits from my over-stuffed closet -- I always envied the Star Trek guys with their agreed upon uniforms. For the guys, with their Dockers (groan) and button-downs, it's not so bad. But for us gals, well -- I for one, will be glad to be rid of that pesky decision each day. For now.

Speaking of the transition from the working world to school...I had some kind of PTSD thing going on over the holidays. Since my former life was scheduled in 15 minute segments, and in every 15 minute block I could expect 50 or more emails to arrive in my bloated in-box, I had developed an iPhone checking habit that bordered on OCD-Rainman-Like behavior. The first couple of weeks sans job, during the holidays, I robotically checked my now-empty calendar and inbox just to stare blankly at it when no new calendar invites were sent, no new emails arrived, and no calendar alerts blinked at me. Then I'd chuckle nervously--assuming something must be wrong with the server, only to repeat said behavior 5 minutes later. I am happy to report that by the end of the holiday, I had weaned myself off the iPhone (unless it was to play Cut the Rope.)

So...baby steps, right?

Nursing Topics: What I'm Reading, Watching and Listening To

Sometimes I marvel at this modern age. Just think of all of the resources we have available to us to learn more about any topic we can possibly think of. Because I am going into nursing, I am naturally drawn to all forms of media that will steep me in all things medical...until such time as I can participate myself.

This is just a short list of resources I'm using to further my knowledge and interest in the field:

READING:

• A Nurses Story, by Tilda Sharif
• Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life and Everything in Between, by Theresa Brown
• Tending Lives: Nurses on the Medical Front, by Echo Heron
• Notes on Nursing, by Florence Nightingale
• Journal of a Civil War Nurse, by Georgiann Baldino
• Nurse: The True Story of Mary Benjamin, by Peggy Anderson

WATCHING:

• London Hospital, BBC Series 1 & 2
• Nurse Jackie, Showtime
• House

LISTENING:

• The Nursing Show Podcast
• Insights in Nursing Podcast
• Almost a Nurse Podcast
• Travel Nurse Talk Podcast
• Travel Nursing Insider Podcast
• Becoming a Nurse Podcast

SURFING:

• http://allnurses.com/
• http://iamanursingstudent.blogspot.com/
• http://nurseteeny.wordpress.com/
• ...and many more!

At times I need to dial down the media inputs in order to get things done! Truly no point in soaking up all these great resources if I still haven't taken the necessary steps toward getting into a program, but honestly, I need a balance and these research efforts keep me motivated.