What I've Been Doing

I keep thinking I should write a post about nursing school.  How it’s been, what I’m learning, if I’ve made friends, etc.  But, in reality.  I’m in nursing school.  There’s hardly any time for anything.  So, here’s the short version.

Nursing school is HARD.  I thought since I’ve already graduated with honors with a BS in Psychology, there was no way this ADN program would be any harder than that.  WRONG.  There is a reason why there are so many memes and cartoons about how hard it is to be a nursing student.  It’s damn hard.

In orientation, a student a year ahead of us said that she studies about 8 hours a day, on average.  At the time I thought “Surely that’s an exaggeration.  No one spends that much time studying.”  WRONG.  5 weeks in, I can already see that being a very real estimate.  And have, in fact, spent more than that amount of time studying in one day.  It’s a ton of information, and unless you’ve been working in health care for years, it’s primarily new information.  And you can’t just learn it for the test.  Because on lab days, and in clinical, we’ll have to DO the things we’ve been reading about.  And in lab, sometimes the instructor will simply say “You read about it, so go ahead.”

I’ve had a couple of meltdowns.  Sometimes, I just want to sit on the couch with my husband and put my phone, books, and computer away.  But, I can’t do that with a clear conscience most nights.  We can get new assignments at the last second (Case in point, Wednesday night at 7:30pm we got an assignment to prepare for lecture the next morning at 9am.  Thank God I checked my email).  Luckily, I'm getting a little more comfortable with everything, so I'm finding the down time I need to stay sane.

I’m getting down a system of how to organize my information and I’m still working on trying to find an effective way to study (if anyone has one, I’m totally up for hearing about it!).  I’m incredibly motivated to get through this program, and I have a good group of people I can talk to if I need to vent or need clarification on something.

So, I’m surviving.  It’s challenging.  But, having been a patient in a hospital, I do feel better knowing that nurses need this kind of intense training.  You’re responsible for someone’s health and that’s a big deal.  The training is definitely effective.

But, I won’t lie.  We watched Divergent last night, and during the Dauntless training sequence I thought “Hey, that’s kind of like nursing school.” 

But, don’t worry.  No one throws knives at my head or beats me up until I’m unconscious.