All I’ve really blogged about lately is school. School, school, school, clinicals, school.

For some clinical groups from my cohort, they’ve been alternating day shifts and afternoon shifts? My group, not so much. The first week we met up at 9am. It was blissful as I actually got to sleep in (!) as I normally have to be at school at 8:30. After that, we met up earlier (7am). Next week, which is also the first week that we’ll be at the hospital two days a week, is when we get there at 6:30am (or rather, 0630 – everything in military time!) and we get to  participate in rounds. I’m excited for it, but also apprehensive. It’s two days a week (!) in clinical, but it also means that we’re kind of “done with” sim lab for this term. The sim lab is great, but I like actually getting to talk to real patients so much more. That said, I still have skills lab, where the dolls aren’t as intricate (no bowel sounds, no heart beats, no pulses, no lung sounds) and cost a lot less. Which is probably why we’re allowed to interact with them without much supervision during open lab time [1. For the clinical skills class, we’re required to do a minimum of 3 hours in the open lab. I’ve done 2.5 so far.].

Two days a week in clinical means:

• More patient research to do on Monday nights
• I get to be with the same patient for two days in a row
• Get to build more of a rapport with my patient, and my assigned nurse

I’m excited thought. Nervous, but oh so excited.

This weekend I’ve done a lot of school work and studying. I finished a paper last week, but took a few days away from it before editing it/proof reading it as best I could before submitting it online. They don’t use TurnItIn (which I hate because it picks up the stupidest phrases and thinks you plagiarized from someone; that and my old school would require us to use TurnItIn twice which means the second time around, it thinks you plagiarized 99% of your paper), which is fantastic. But it’s also this weird uploading system. You upload it, and then you have to press submit again in order for the file to be properly uploaded/sent to the instructor’s inbox. That said, my instructor is a complete and utter failure at using computers. So who knows how long the turn around time for that assignment will be…

But in other news… I did a fishtail braid somewhat successfully on myself while I was taking a study break today. I was shown the fishtail braid over the summer from some friends and didn’t get around to actually looking for a tutorial (videos are helpful!) until this weekend because I wanted to do something with my hair. It’s really long, and I’m really debating on getting it cut. I tie it up and twist it up into a bun most days for clinicals – because no one wants bodily fluids in their hair, least of all me. I love having long hair, but it’s getting to be really long now. It currently hits the small of my back so I’m all “bleh, this takes forever to dry and to comb and to wash and to condition and omg, why do I have a giant matted mess on the back of my head right now?” sometimes. It’s lovely to have long hair, and last time I got it trimmed (4-5″) I had a huge problem with it because it was shorter than I actually anticipated it being and it gave me such a complex. So we’ll have to see what I do about that.

I have my first midterm tomorrow. I’m feeling pretty okay about it. I also have a presentation (!) to do on Thursday, I’m not feeling pretty okay about that at all. I hate public speaking, loathe it deeply. Sadly it’s part of the program and I need to be able to do it somewhat half-assed decently. We’ll see how it goes. I’ll probably blog on Thursday about how horrible it went or something. I hate public speaking, have I mentioned that yet?

I’m working on a new design for Imaginary Sunshine right now. I didn’t really mean to leave this one up for so damn long, but I did and meh, I like it – but I want a change! I’m really considering revamping the site a bit. Most of my ‘content’ will probably be going away, I haven’t really changed much of it and a lot of it was old pages from my blog from before I opened Imaginary Sunshine so it’s all out-dated or written by teenaged-Michelle and not relevant (or funny) anymore. So I’ll see how that goes. I may just archive it all and leave it on, but I’m not entirely sure yet.