Today I'm feeling like I've bitten off more than I can chew this quarter. I'm taking Anatomy and Physiology I, and an online bio course, so that's 10 credits total. I'm working full-time, 3 shifts a week at the hospital, and one at the Dementia Facility.
On a typical day, I get up at around 7:30, get ready, catch the bus to school, get home from school at around 11, and then study/eat/nap until time for work at 15:30-23:30. I try to get to sleep by 1am, then do it again the next day. And lord, am I tired. I've fallen asleep on the bus, nearly fell asleep in the bathroom at work last night (the auto flushing toilet woke me up with a start and I LEAPT to my feet!) and in general am just so tired and feel so behind on everything.
Next quarter, I'm going to only take one class because I can't afford to cut back on work and I want to really learn this stuff and do well in my classes.
There's all this weird drama in the nursing program at my Community College, where the previous director of the program just finally "stepped down" aka got fired, and a new one is taking her place. The new one is my academic advisor, and I like her quite a bit from what I know of her in that context, so hopefully she can turn this ship around. Right now the nursing program's retention rates and NCLEX pass rates are very poor. So in many ways I might be better off going to a different community college, but Father Sainty's will either help pay my tuition at my current community college or at the University. If I want to go to the University, there's a couple of extra prereqs I need to take (including Chem 131 - yikes) and it would be a long commute to take classes there all throughout nursing school.
Anyway, all of that is something I shouldn't be worrying about this early on. If I don't focus on the present my grades will suck so badly I won't be able to get into school.
Work is going pretty great though. I just (belatedly) had my 90-day evaluation at the hospital with my nurse manager, and it went quite well. I got some nice comments on my peer reviews including "Pollyanna is soft spoken and calming to patients" and one about how I'm pursuing my education and always happy to share new things I've learned. So those both make me feel really good!
I feel so, so lucky every day to be working on the floor I'm working on. Our charge nurses are awesome, the floor nurses are easy to work with and appreciative, and the majority of our patients are motivated to work hard toward their recovery goals and get back to their lives as soon as possible. I like being able to help them with that.
And this week in A&P we're going to start studying the skeletal system, which I'm very very happy about since I hear the terminology at work all the time (about fractures and where they are and what type and so on) but don't understand it. So I cannot WAIT to put cell respiration behind me and move on to something that feels more relevant to real life!
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