One Race I Am Not Gonna Win

I am just rounding out my fifth week of school and I am already ready for winter break. The novelty has worn off as I am more and more sluggish to wake up at 6am or 7am to go to class. I am hoping to hold it together for 10 more weeks before I can reboot and prepare for the next segment.

I only have 3 classes, but they are intense. Every time I get one assignment off my plate I get two more and of course all of it is research and critical thinking.

I have this class called Informatics that is taught on-line and I feel completely lost in. I am not understanding how this pertains to nursing. It seems like busy work and no one in my cohort is in this class. They are all in the general nursing program. It doesn't seem to use any crittical thinking. It requires to post your work and then respond to (2) other people's work with comments. I try to post something of value, but I receive feedback such as "ohhh, I really like the background you chose for your powerpoint" or "I thought including a link for the websites and citing your work was a good idea." Come on people!!! How about some in depth feedback????

Into to Accelerated nursing is busy work. Write papers utilizing APA citation. I am not really sure why I have to know how to write research papers when I am going to be dealing with patients hands on.

Nursing Assessment is by far the most intense class I have. It is 10 hours of class time with a test every 2 weeks. I just finished my 2nd test. I studied and fretted over the first and scored a 93 (it is 100 multiple choice, bubble in your favorite freaking letter). I can usually get through 70 quesitons before my brain is fried and an acute case of ADD kicks in. Yesterday I had the same situation, 70 questions done and ADD hits. Our grades were posted today range of 96-71. I scored a 93 again. I am not sure if the test was harder as I only studied for 4 hours the night before and completely neglected to review the section on skin assessment.

I have learned a lot about the type of person I am and that I do not necessarily agree with everything being taught. For example you are not suppose to give false reassurance to a patient and say "everything will be okay." You cannot guarantee it will, therefore do not say it. Also, if a person smokes you can only tell them the facts about smoking. You cannot criticize them or tell them they should quit. That is just Bullshit!! I will never be mean or condescending to a patient, but you can bet your ass I am going to try to very nicely convince them to quit.

Oh, and people "WASH YOUR FREAKIN' HANDS!!!" The most common way to prevent the spread of infection is by washing your hands. Scrub those bad boys for 15-30 seconds and when I say scrub, I mean use some friction for cripes sake!! Getting them wet does nothing. The key is FRICTION!!! Oh and if you meet somebody with a PhD do not shake their hands. Studies show the higher the education level the less likely a person is to wash their hands...GROSSS!

Temperature is usually taken in one of the following ways, tympanic, temporal, oral, axillary or rectally. I am sure most know this, but do you know on the new oral thermometers they have red and blue thermometers? The blue is for oral and the red is for rectal, so if a nurse ever says open wide and goes to stick the red one in your mouth....RUN!!!!

Euthanasia is not legal in the United States anywhere, but in Oregon and some other state Physicians Assisted Suicide is. I guess the process takes 17 days from start to end. The patient must meet certain qualifications, meet with the physicians and a therapist and if all checks out they are given pills (not sure of what...maybe arsenic) that they themselves must take to end their life. Creepy.

I was hoping to be near perfect, but all the work is taking away from my running and really making me cranky. I started this program hoping to graduate as an overachieving nurse with damn near perfect scores, but now I just want to pass and be done with it. I did not choose this profession because I wanted perfect scores on tests. I chose this because I want to provide people with the best quality of life they can have, even if it means they will die prematurely.