Since my last post, school started. I started my third term of nursing school in mid-August and I couldn’t be happier about it. School’s been going really well and I’m liking my clinical group this term. A lot of the people I’ve worked with before in previous clinical groups, so I knew going in that I could work well with them. I just finished week 5 of my 8 week Mental Health rotation. I’m really liking the hospital that I’m at right now. Later this term I have a 4 week rotation in Maternity/Obstetrics and a 4 week rotation in Pediatrics. I change clinical instructors with each rotation, but I stay with the same clinical group, so it should be good!

I’ve already finished one presentation so far this term (only 1-2 more to go for one class, 1 group presentation for another), so I’m feeling pretty good about how the term is going. I hate presentations with a dying passion, but the people in the class I need to do presentations in front of are a good bunch.

I’m trying to be good about staying on top of all my readings, but it can be difficult at times. I’ve been spending a lot of time in the library studying and doing readings – about as fun as it sounds. And I have renewed my love for Chai tea lattes (courtesy of Starbucks) and I discovered that it is possible to reload my Starbucks card on my phone with Paypal. This is a bad thing for me to have the knowledge of. But I’ve actually been fairly good about not spending too much money. I took out a part-student loan for the summer May-August term, as I was only taking 3 courses, and it’s a government loan so it wasn’t supposed to incrue interest until after I was done school. But it started counting interest pretty much straightaway (I didn’t catch it until nearly a month later). Turns out, part-time student loans start counting interest right away, even though payments aren’t required until 6 months later. I kind of said “fuck that noise” and paid it off, in full, the next business day. The problem with doing that is that I’m fairly broke at the moment. Luckily, I still like at home and don’t have that many expenses – but my bank account is still looking a bit tiny at the moment.

In other news though, I got an extra day off from clinical because my instructor was ill. I got a lot of work done that day. I also went to Value Village that day on a tip my classmate gave me because they had scrubs for sale. And the scrubs had original tags on still (some were donated samples from a Vancouver-based company that normally sells them for $65 a piece!) and others were donated from a chain uniform store. I snagged some super comfy scrubs pants that could probably double as yoga pants, if I so choose to wear them as such. I also got a light pink scrub top because it looked cute on. They were being sold at $6/piece, which isn’t bad at all consider the original price and how much I’d paid in the past for scrubs (a lot more than that!) and they’ll be used for ages to come.

I quite recently got myself back into counseling. I used to go to a regular counselor at my old university because it was offered as a student service. It is at my current school as well, but they cannot guarantee that I can see the same person all the time and their hours aren’t as useful to me based on my clinical hours. I’ve been struggling with body image, eating (or lack thereof) and just self-acceptance of my body for years now and the thing is that this time I was able to recognize when I stopped eating as much or eating less and less. And while I’m certainly more comfortable with the way I feel about myself now, there’s always been thoughts that it’s just not good enough for me. So I got myself into counseling to talk to someone about that. The unfortunate (fortunate?) thing is that I’m unable to qualify for an outpatient eating disorder program because it’s not severe enough (and there’s a waiting list). If I hadn’t been so good at covering it up when I was a preteen, I probably would have been able to get in then (there’s a % weight-loss requirement). But right now, because I am aware of the fact that I’m eating less, I’m also forcing myself to eat even when I’m not hungry because I know that I need to. Guess that is an improvement from what I used to be like!