I don't have time for this blog. I don't have time to clean my house, get my oil changed, or make crafts. (Technically time is not the reason I don't make crafts-absolute lack of talent, interest, or craft supplies are a few of the many, many reasons I am not crafting; but time sounds better and doesn't offend your Pinterest loving friends). I certainly don't have time to feed and raise my children, list making and grocery shopping are much too time consuming. I've resorted to flying through the Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market randomly grabbing the first five things I see and then flinging them on the counter at home while shouting "okay, I'm going to the library."
Among the many things I have learned in my first semester of (Accelerated) nursing school: I can manage nursing school as long as I allow everything else in my life to fall down around my ears. And by everything, I mean the dirty house, the empty refrigerator, the less than perfect meals. And by everything I also mean the friends I haven't seen or talked to in 3 months, the job I gave up on, the 8 (okay now 13) pounds I need to lose, the dark scowls when I miss family events, the dates I've turned down (imaginary ones, in my mind, proving I am willing, in my mind), and the NBA playoffs. My house is dirty, my pants are tight, my roots are terrible, and I forgot to pay the cell phone bill (again); but, I finished my last Final today and I couldn't be happier.
It's hard to believe how much I have learned since January, when I sat in my first nursing class overwhelmed with the amount of knowledge all the professors seemed to have. I felt like I should write down everything they were saying-they just spewed nursing knowledge and I knew nothing. Sometimes they would stop mid-sentence to ask us if we knew what a word meant and I would sneak peaks around the room to see if anyone else was as clueless as I was about diaphoresis was. I would read and highlight and take notes busily, but I felt like everyone else knew so much more than I did...which led me to the next big nursing school lesson.
I am not as smart as I thought I was, and I never thought I was that smart. But by about my third test in nursing school, I was trying really hard not to cry-every day. When you are a teacher it is easy to be the smartest person in the room, you design your class and your tests and engineer the class discussions and if kids have questions YOU always have the answers (even if you're making it up, which I was most of the time). But in Accelerated nursing school, surrounded by Type A personalities driven to succeed my Type B raft was rapidly sinking under multiple multiple answers and assessments I couldn't keep straight; and while my classmates bonded and struggled through the stress together, my shyness and insecurity kept me alone in my shell.
Which leads me to another nursing school lesson (and also possibly a song from an era I don't remember, despite how tired and old I look these days) we get by with a little help from our friends. I have always been a person who HATES asking for help; the ultimate sign of weakness for Ms. Independent. However, nursing school taught me real quick: ask, beg, cry for help. I asked teachers, because I didn't want to kill someone, for help with skills; I asked other students, because they all seemed to know more than I did; I asked my friends, because my kids still had lives which didn't change just because I had reading, and assignments, and tests. My son rode home from practice so many nights with one of the other wrestling families they probably should have gotten to claim him on taxes. I began to look up from the ground once in a while and talk to my classmates; I found them to be much less intimidating once I spoke with them. I found out some of them were frustrated, even struggling at times, too.
We survived competencies, when we had to demonstrate skills in front of our clinical teacher. I, a woman who faced down angry administrators, held the hands of grieving teenagers, and gave birth to two children, almost threw up with nerves over demonstrating that I could take a blood pressure on one of my classmates in front of my professor. Somehow I passed without heaving. What's more, my professor did that awesome thing I have seen so many wonderful teachers do-she looked at me and saw something I couldn't see in myself. And I saw myself through her eyes.
The first time I walked into the hospital on a clinical Friday, I just wanted to stop in front and announce "this is my life now, I belong here." Until I realized in my bright green student scrubs with my huge book-stuffed backpack, I was probably the last thing the actual nurses, doctors, PCA's, even the nice volunteer ladies at the front desk, wanted to see. Nothing screams eager, but clueless, like a full backpack of nursing school books on the floor. A hospital can be a very intimidating place to a sick patient, it can also be a very intimidating place to a new nursing school student entering a patient room for the first time about to perform-or attempt-a skill. Again, years of standing in front of a classroom went out the window and nerves almost paralyzed me; and again, we get by with a little help from our friends, and we become what our teachers believe us to be.
A few weeks of clinical can teach you a lot; experience is a great teacher, and a great humbler. You see how far you've come and you also see the reality of life in the hospital, of life for sick patients. Nursing is not like Grey's Anatomy day in day out on a hospital floor. But the lives of each patient are just as important. When I started nursing school, I was there to get a BSN, now I understand the importance of both the BSN and the RN I will have once I pass my NCLEX. I want to work in a hospital and I want to be one of the nurses caring for the sick, or injured, patients.
Today was my last final, the end of a stressful two weeks of measuring what we have crammed into our heads in this first semester of nursing school. I hate to break it to my professors, but the tests didn't even scratch the surface of all I've learned (some of which I feel like I forget and relearn every few days). The tests (even the choose all that apply) can't measure the values, the friendship, and the confidence. They can't measure the stress on my kids, the sacrifice of time, energy and exhaustion. They can't measure the sheer determination it's going to take for all of us to survive the next 12 months of Accelerated nursing school-it only gets more difficult. Even knowing that, though, I know-for me-nursing school is the best decision I have probably ever made. Unfortunately I don't have any more time to explain why (or to add fun pictures).
