I wrote my last final of my fourth term of nursing school yesterday. It’s an amazing feeling to be another term closer to the goal – graduation, becoming licensed, becoming a registered nurse. It has been an incredibly difficult fourth term. The learning curve is steeper, the depth of knowledge I’ve needed to have is a lot more than ever before. Expectations on me have risen while my own standards for myself have gone up at a stellar rate. But I got through it,through a lot of hard work and possibly more than a few sleepless nights. When I was going over my final clinical evaluation with my instructor, she told me the following “You study too much, Michelle. You work too hard.” Because nursing school, despite what it seems to do, shouldn’t be the be all and end all of my social life. Even though it is, although I did manage to make some time for friends and the boyfriend throughout the term. I don’t want to be someone who barely scraps through nursing school, and I don’t think anyone would want a nurse who did that. So I hold myself at high standards that even my fellow over-achiever classmates think are impossibly high standards.

My spring/summer classes are forthcoming. One actually started the first week of April (my school doesn’t understand what the phrase “summer” class means) while the other two will be starting on Monday, the 12th. In the meantime, I’ve been taking my instructor’s advice and just taking a break, even if it is just for a little bit.

Life, in general, has been pretty good to me. I’m confident that I’ve been able to pass all of my classes, I working on my specialty nursing certificate right now (the class I started in April goes towards that), I finally read something for fun for the first time in what seems to be ages… and I’m in a good place right now. I’ve been knitting a lot, but being absolutely horrible ta keeping my crafts blog updated. I’ve been blogging a lot, but just not there, and I’ve just been keeping busy. The chronicles of Michelle took a backseat this term because, in all honesty, the journal of me just didn’t seem to be important over things like studying, or patient research, or attempting to get to bed by 9am before a clinical day (when I woke up at 4:30am).

My plans for the summer will of course include working on my three online classes. I’m also hoping to start volunteering again, do a lot of crafting, be a little bit more active with the blogging, and, of course, spend time with friends and family. I find as I get older, it’s harder to do that. Friends move away, they start working full time or part time with odd hours, they’re still in school. And then there’s me, who doesn’t feel like hanging out at night when I’d been up since 4:30am. Is this how my life is going to look when I graduate and I’m working shift work for real? Probably. But the thing is… I love nursing. I found out this term that I really enjoy complex wound care. That’s probably a rather disturbingly morbid thing to day, but I love wound irrigation and packing wounds. Possibly the most fun thing I did throughout the entire term. I will leave you with that thought… because I can.