Imaginary Sunshine

85% and Summer Classes

Michelle — Fri, 17 May 2013 01:03:40 +0000

My name is Michelle, and I’m officially a third of the way through my school’s nursing program and that much closer to qualifying to write the CRNE¹. My school doesn’t have letter grades, but according to my other post-secondary school that’s an A average.

I just got my final grades in for the term and I have (again) a GPA of 85%! My highest grade was in Clinical Skills (clinical is a pass-fail course, so no percentage for that), which makes me happy as it’s one of the most important for considerations of preceptorship choices. Having good marks in clinical skills, pathophysiology, microbiology and immunology are the makings for getting a good preceptorship choice. Possible choices right now include: emergency, med-surg or high acuity. I adored my clinical rotation in the surgical unit, but I’m curious about emergency. Not because of the medical shows that I watch/used to watch², don’t get me wrong. Medical shows are wrong and are all about the drama. For instance? On-call rooms? Haven’t come across one at all. Maybe it’s an American hospital type of thing. Also, why are the IVs never dripping in tv shows? It’s all wrong – I’m a joy to have around when a medical drama is on, I swear. I don’t get to make preceptorship choices until (I think) January 2014 and my preceptorships don’t start until January 2015 – never hurts to think ahead! My next term (August-December) and my clinical rotations are: mental health/psych, maternity and pediatrics.

As for my summer classes… Lots of reading, with stupidly expensively reading materials, and discussions about things that I don’t actually care about. It’s… required. If it wasn’t, I would spend my summer doing fun things – like vacationing, reading for leisure, working on blogs. Instead I’ll be doing things like: reading for school, vacationing, working on blogs… It’ll be interesting an interesting summer, that’s for sure! I’m hoping that my grant money³ comes soon as I, unfortunately, have greater expenses than an income (comes from being an unemployed student).

Readings and more readings. Such is my life.

Canadian Registered Nurses Examination ↩
Grey’s Anatomy, ER, General Hospital – which is more about mobsters than medicine. ↩
For being severely low income. I’m eligible for a Part-Time Studies Grant for Low Income Individuals because I made less than $23k in the 2011 tax year. ↩

One year done, two to go!

Michelle — Tue, 14 May 2013 22:40:54 +0000

Last week I finished off my last final for the term. Being done the second term means that I finished my first ‘year’ of nursing school. Officially, year two doesn’t start until August. Until then, I have summer classes to contend with. Let’s discuss how much I’m not looking forward the sheer amount of reading that one of my classes has (5-10 extra readings besides the textbook, the pdf files start at 25 pages and go up from there…). So while I’m working away on my summer readings (and there’s quite a bit of it), I’ll also be taking in some tv time, as well as hanging out with friends and even some traveling.

For one of my classes, I have to read this entire book this week. And it’s the one that has a ton of readings weekly. Pretty sure even if I were to devote every waking moment reading for that class, I wouldn’t get it done.

I’m still waiting on my final grades to be released. I know roughly what my GPA is going to be, but still waiting for the ‘official’ numbers is annoying me. I’m also still waiting on a final exam mark for one class. Fingers crossed for doing well!

My life, currently

Michelle — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 02:34:36 +0000

School, school and more school.

Finals are coming up soon. I have 2 more days of clinical left, 1 week of classes and then 1 week of finals! People in my class (class = everyone that started the program with me) are talking about going out to the pub after the last final (patho). It ends at 12:30pm – but it’s always happy hour somewhere in the world.

Oh hai, I have a blog?

Michelle — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 02:30:25 +0000

I’m still alive, promise. I’ve been super busy! Since my last post, I was on spring break for a week (where I picked up a week of full time work). My break consisted of homework and work-work. At least I got paid for one of those… But the money is already spoken for, oh well! I have exciting things that I’m doing with the money that I made. Plus I filed my taxes for 2012, and I’m getting a refund (due to putting money into income tax that didn’t need to be put in, grr).

A lot of studying has happened, due to the fact that it’s still midterm season. I have one more midterm to go before finals. There’s currently five more weeks of classes. This also means 8 more clinical days(!), which is both exciting and sad. I like clinical, but it’s a lot of work. I still have two more 12-hour shifts at the hospital

I started being able to do IV meds in clinical! I was very nervous. My clinical instructor has drilled into us that when IV meds go wrong, they are very wrong because there is absolutely no way to take it back. So a lot of prep work goes into clinical now for IV meds. There’s a lot of information to consider – what to reconstitute the medication with, what is it compatible with, what is it not compatible with, how fast to give it, what temperature is it stored at, is it already premixed? There’s a lot to consider with IV meds that I never knew that nurses had to consider – that I had to consider. There are a lot more precautions to think about with IV meds than, say, oral medications. But on the fist day that I could give IV meds, I got to give two. Which was two more than some of my clinical group members.

And it’s finally spring around here! Flowers make me happy – the crocuses and daffodils are out and gorgeous. I can’t wait until daisies (June-July) are out because I love them. Love, love, love daisies. But they won’t be out for a bit, so in the mean time I’m enjoying the flowers that are out. Plus the roses in front of my house have started with new leaves, spring is always so much fun. I saw a bumblebee for the first time this year two weeks ago and it made me smile. Warmer weather always means that the insects come out.

Protected: Difficult decisions

Michelle — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 19:13:18 +0000

Protected: Positively negative!

Michelle — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 02:06:58 +0000

Protected: One step at a time

Michelle — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 04:06:01 +0000

Protected: You called me up again just to break me like a promise

Michelle — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 02:57:55 +0000

All it takes is a little something…

Michelle — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 00:46:09 +0000

All it takes is a little something to make you question everything about what you thought you understood, knew and trusted.

For me, it was a phone call. And the week that occurred before the phone call.

Questioning everything, hiding away from social media. Because if I turn to social media now, I’m a bit afraid of what I might say, or do.

Back into the swing of things

Michelle — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 04:06:21 +0000

And it’s almost like…

I didn’t get a break at all…

Life as a nursing student has been busy! I’ve been busy as the term quickly turned into a lot of work. I just turned in my first paper of the term, I’ve been doing loads of readings every single day, doing research for a presentation (first one of the term – next week!) and just trying to enjoy the process. I’ve had clinical since my last blog entry and I’ve had some wonderful patients so far. I’m really looking forward to getting to do more (removing Foley catheters, nasogastric tubes, IVs/saline locks, pulling out drains) in the coming weeks. This week in lab we’re learning about checking blood glucose so I’m getting my finger pricked tomorrow and I shall see what my glucose levels are at!