Studying: it works!

I think I mentioned recently that after finding out that my employment at Father Sainty's is no longer such a gigantic helping factor in getting me into nursing school, I decided I needed to pull my grades up. I was getting a B in Anatomy and Physiology and an A- in Bio. That B in A&P was sort of tenouous, though, since I'd gotten a B- on my most recent exam.

I studied like crazy for my most recent exam on bones, and got a 90% on it! If I continue to study this hard and do that well on my remaining exams this quarter, I should be able to get my grade up to an A-, I think. So that's my plan.

Too bad I don't love muscles the way I love bones. I even had dreams regarding specific bones (I was in a butterfly garden but the butterflies were sphenoid bones that were flying around, and I was delighted!).

So while it may be tempting to put work first, I need to remember to put school first. That means if I have to sleep less to study more, that's what will happen. If it means showing up at work exhausted rather than after napping, then that's the deal. If it means eating dinner in the cafeteria instead of cooking and packing my meals, that's okay too.

After this quarter I only have to do A&P II and microbiology. I think I can technically apply to nursing school even with one class left to finish up, so maybe I can apply for admittance next Winter quarter and take microbiology in the fall before it begins?

Either way, I plan to stop working at the GreatRep once I'm in nursing school. That 10-hour workday is just too much time lost. If I can take out loans, i'll do that to compensate for the lost income. I know how incredibly lucky I am to be going to school for free right now, and I know that won't continue forever.

More and more the idea of goign for my LPN and working in a skilled nursing facility or inpatient rehab sounds appealing to me. If I'm going to work and go to school, part of me thinks that work should be the best-paying I'm able to get.

Either way, I'm back on board with school!

And here's a visual for anyone wondering about my dreams: they're a cross between this



and this

Best of Both?

I had a rough, rough shift at work last night. Was working with a nurse that is new to our floor, and coming from a floor that's notorious for having RN/CNA conflicts up the wazzoo. So I made time to sit and catch up with NewNurse when he came on shift halfway through mine. I already had 13-14 patients of my own, and the way we have it set up, all the call lights come to the CNA's first. If we don't answer, then they are forwarded on to that patient's nurse. So you can imagine how busy I am on these nights. Of my 13-14 patients, I'm likely to have at least 5 diabetics who need their blood sugar checked before meals and at bedtime. Another 2-3 who are confused/fall risk/non-English speaking. And 4 or 5 who are fresh post-ops, which means they're in a lot of pain, bed bound, and possibly needing to be strapped in and out of devices to move or steady their joints.

NewNurse got pissed at me for two things, one of which I think was valid (although I had no way of knowing about it) and the other which was absolutely not; one of our regular floor nurses scoffed at NewNurse when she heard him getting angry at me about it in the nurses' station.

Anyway, everything turned out fine, all my patients were okay (although one did give me a terrible scare, then when it became clear that my fear had been because of one of the machines giving a wrong reading the first time, the patient asked "Are we in trouble? I'll cover for us. What should I say?" which made me laugh despite how upset I'd been).

But I'm now mentally comparing that to my shift last week when I filled in over at the inpatient rehab unit (physical rehabilitation, not drug or alcohol rehab). I had such a mellow night, I was able to cover most of the unit by myself. And if I got tied up with something, the nurses were aware of it and went and did things for their patients themselves. I even had time to help a very sweet older lady get her Kindle working again, which delighted her!

It was more like a nursing home, in that it's lower acuity and the patients are there for longer periods of time. But it's a smaller unit, so that makes teamwork easier. And it pays at the rate of the hospital, not at the rate of a nursing home.

Is inpatient rehab the best of both worlds? Less stress, more time with patients, and the same pay and benefits?

Could be...

A piano fell on my head.

I am so frustrated right now. One of the main reasons I applied at the hospital (apart from benefits and pay) is that the hospital has a relationship with the community college (where I intended to go get my RN) where a certain percentage of the seats in the RN program are reserved for hospital employees, and where in turn, the hospital will help pay your tuition at school provided you agree to work for them for one year to help 'repay' that tuition.

I just got an email that the hospital is ending that relationship, becuase they no longer have a shortage of RN's in the area. Friiiiiiiiiick.

I think the educational assistance may still be in effect but is probably harder to get. And this means that I am now competing with the general public for admission to any nursing school. So I better be hitting the books for my prereqs.

I know, not the end of the world. But not news that I'm happy about at all. Not at all.

Mountain, not a molehill

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!

Oh, Gross! Again.

Now that I'm working in the hospital, I see waaaaaaaay more disgusting things than I did in assisted living. I won't say that hospital is definitely more disgusting than home care because sometimes people's homes are just beyond nasty. But assisted living tends to be pretty decent.

So now that I've been exposed to more things, I figured you all would be delighted to know what I find the most icky.

1. The Worst Smell Ever; when someone keeps vomiting blood and poo. It's just so, so bad. I mean it's three unpleasant things all mixed together. And it smells ungodly.

2. Trach suctioning. I know, not nice. It's necessary. Sometimes people need that tracheostomy (a hole at the base of their throat in front) to help them breathe. And sometimes that hole gets plugged up with mucous. And then that mucous must be suctioned out. And yep, it's exactly as oogy as it sounds. Especially if they're coughing and end up with puddles of phlegm pooling on their chest, which then also must be cleaned up.

3. Pulling out lines. This is more of an "I feel phantom pain imagining this" reaction on my part. The people who do this aren't with it enough to be as bothered by it as a normal, alert person would be. But the sight of someone ripping out their own IV, or (God help them) other lines or tubes just makes me shudder. Doesn't matter what the line is or what it's putting in or out of the body, the idea of them ripping out really grosses me out.

...and lastly, one that I'm surprised is not that bad to me? Wound packing and unpacking. When someone has MRSA or whatever and it eats a hole into them, that wound must then be frequently packed full of stringlike bandaging, then have that removed, and replaced with clean packing. It sounds awful, but it's actually pretty cool. It's what allows people to heal from the inside out, rather than the outside in. You wouldn't want your skin to close up over a big empty pocket in your body, because that wouldn't be structurally sound. So instead this way it heals properly. But it does look pretty weird.

Code: Disaster

Winter kicked my little town's ass this last few weeks. I know, everyone jokes about how we are such wusses about snow in the Pacific Northwest, but the thing is, we are never ever prepared for it. We don't have the infrastructure in place to handle it well. It's not just the snow, or the unplowed roads, but the fact that we have approximately 8 trees per square foot* and a lot of them fall down during storms and knock out our power.

So this last week was a special week at the hospital, as a disaster code was called. That meant all staff on premesis was not allowed to leave. People were mandated there for 30+ hours, sleeping on the floor wherever there was room for a short respite after 12-16 hours of work.

AWFUL.

I wasn't there during this, and had no way of getting there, which suited me just fine except that I felt so badly for my coworkers who were carrying all that load understaffed. In spite of this, they made it, and did well.

The thing that I found most touching was that we all got these desperate emails begging us to come and donate blood, because obviously all the regular blood drives out in the community weren't able to happen. Much as I hate needles in me, I wanted to go and do this, but again, had no way of getting to the hospital.

The other day I got an email from some muckety-muck about how that turned out - the big hospitals from the nearest Big City had some donors (3-10), one of the local Big Companies, had around 20 donors, and our hospital had 70+!! By far the most of any facility that did the emergency blood drives. And this was all from employees that couldn't leave. The email referred to us as "the little hospital that could".

And with that, my heart grew three sizes and I vowed to donate the next time the van is on campus at my school.



*scientific and accurate. Totally.

Ahhh, Winter Break.

Tomorrow I'll be back on campus, doing Anatomy & Physiology I, and also doing Bio 100 online. Winter break has been so, so nice. Just working gave me time to catch up on things like cooking, making gifts for my family members, going and helping out my Grandma with cleaning her apartment, etc. I'm almost sad to go back to school even though I know I need to. I expect this quarter to be really hard, because I'm doing 10 credits and working full-time (75% at the hospital 25% at the dementia facility).

I'm hoping to have at least one classmate from my chem class in my A&P class to study with, since most of us were on the prenursing track. But all the ones I talked to at the end of last quarter were going into a different A&P class, dang it. We'll see. It's just nice to have a familiar face around.

Yesterday we closed our store for New Year's day and I went and helped Mr. Polly clean the heck out of it, as well as rearrange some things he'd been wanting to change for a long time. The co-owner of the store is still out of town (taking care of his aging father) until the beginning of March so that means Mr. Polly has free reign to go nuts and put things where he wants them. He was so happy about moving some shelves and file cabinets! And I scrubbed the bathroom within an inch of it's life. I still want to repaint in there - it has rainbows and unicorns, courtesy of the previous owners. That could be okay I guess but it's so "LOOK WE'RE QUIRKY AND FUNNY" and also the bathroom is tiny and dark so I want to paint it off-white and put more lighting in there. I'd rather have a clean-looking bathroom than an "adorable" one any day.

Besides, everyone knows that acorns are the new unicorns.

Happy new year!