I GRADUATED today.

Yup, even though I still have one semester left until I am officially done with the nursing program, today I got to rock the cap and gown and walk across the stage. Last week was my last week of class and I only had class on Monday and Tuesday because clinical was done the week before, so it was a really quick and easy week! Then I got to go home for a few days for Easter and to spend time with my family. This past Monday was my final exam, which was cumulative and I stupidly spent approximately four hours studying for because I was home for Easter and voted that time with my friends and family was more important. I don't really regret that decision though. Ended up getting an 80 on the final and a B+ in the class, so I'm pretty happy with that overall. So that's the end of Nursing 420 and now we are in our FINAL semester. Awesome.

Which brings me to today which was GVSU GRADUATION! Because there is no graduation ceremony in August, students that are finishing up in August can either walk early in April or come back and walk in December, so we all voted for April :) So Thursday my friends Cheryl and Kathryn and I got together to decorate our caps so that they would say "RN" on them so our parents could see us during the ceremony. They are adorable. Mine has rubies and pearls on it so represent the sorority. I figured it was a good way to mesh together my two worlds in college: Alpha Sigma Alpha and The Kirkhof College of Nursing. Then Friday my mom, dad, brother, aunt, uncle, cousin and grandma ALL came up here for graduation. We went out to dinner at Carrabas and just hung out until late. My parents got me real pearls for graduation. How fitting if you know me. I love them. Then this morning I met up with Kathryn and Cheryl (And Matt and Casey) so we could all take pictures before graduation. The nursing students also got to have a whole room to ourselves while we waited to go into the arena so we had plenty of times for pictures and chatting. And we all got to sit together during the ceremony. No one fell on the stage, and the ceremony went really quick for having 1200 people (there were another 1300 at the 3pm graduation!!) It was an amazing day. Then we went out to dinner at Logan's and then the fam headed home already! Fortunately I have all of next week off so I will be heading home probably tomorrow to spend some time at home before I start the Spring/Summer semester.

I can't believe that I graduated today. Five years later. It still feels very unbelievable that we are SO close to being done and to being nurses. I loved being able to spend today with some of my favorite people, both family and friends. I am so thankful to have such a caring and wonderful family, and for the amazing friends that I have made in the nursing program. What an awesome day :).

So Long Saint Mary's Part 2

Today was my last day at Saint Mary's! I know I already had a post that was titled "So Long Saint Mary's" but I didn't know that I was going to end up back there for another rotation. Don't worry, this time I'm really sure though. So this rotation, wow. This rotation was a little crazy for me. I spent the first two weeks on 6 South, the third week in the ICU and the OR, missed the fourth and fifth weeks entirely because I was sick, then came back the sixth week after we had moved to 3 Lacks. Crazy. This week was kind of a struggle for me just because I hadn't been on the floor for 3 weeks and it was also my first day on Lacks when the rest of my group had already been there for 3 days. Everyone helped me out with finding things though and everything went fine. It's just hard to get back into the swing of things after being gone for so long. 3 Lacks is an AWESOME floor though. Like I said earlier, we moved to Lacks after 3 weeks because it wasn't even open yet when we started our rotation. So it's BRAND NEW. And it's just really awesome. It has a lot of the little things like they have at the new Children's Hospital like thermometers, blood pressure cuffs and supplies in the room. So anytime you need extra linens, gowns, alcohol wipes, syringes, IV tubing, etc, it's all in the room. Which is nice because the floor is HUGE so anytime you need to walk to find things, it takes while and it's usually quite a walk. I wish I would have had more time on that floor, but it was nice to at least have two days.

Today I had the same patient that I had yesterday, minus the GoLYTELY. There was much less poop, so it was a win. She's actually a really sweet lady and I spent more time talking with her today. Then we had our evaluations with our instructor, which went REALLY well. Our instructor is GREAT. She writes us very thoughtful and personal evaluations and she always gives us positive feedback. She also gave us all of her contact information and told us that she is always available to write us a letter of recommendation or a reference. And she offered to help us with resumes and interviewing as we get closer to graduation. Needless to say, I passed :) Then we went to lunch at Olive Garden. Moral of the story, I am now TOTALLY done with NUR 421, including seminar, lab and clinical. And all of left of NUR 420 is a final exam! We also get our papers back in class on Tuesday. I'm very excited to be done with clinical because it means we are almost in our last semesters. SO CLOSE TO BEING DONE!!!!! :)

I'm pretty sure...

THAT MY CLINICAL INSTRUCTOR WAS PUNISHING ME TODAY FOR MISSING THREE DAYS OF CLINICAL. Haha today was my first day back at clinical that I actually made it through the whole day! I only had one patient today since I haven't been on this floor since we moved from 6 South and still didn't know where a lot of things are. Usually having one patient is a breeze, however, my one patient was being prepped for a colonoscopy, meaning she needed to drink approximately ONE GALLON of GoLytely,which is a laxative that is given in order to "clean her out." This wouldn't be so bad if she wasn't also incontinent. And if I didn't need to put the GoLytely in through an NG tube. What this all means is that I spent 8 hours today alternating between pushing GoLytely into her NG tube and changing her briefs, pads and sheets every 20-30 minutes because she was going to the bathroom NON-STOP. In her bed. What a lovely day it was. I kept joking with my clinical group that this was my clinical instructor's way of passive aggressively punishing me for all of the days of clinical that I missed. Really she was trying to pick a patient that was having a procedure that I could go see, unfortunately the colonscopy got pushed back to 3:00 and I didn't even get to see it.

Lovely. But I survived. And tomorrow is our last day :)

My valient return to real life.

So my last entry was the "I have Bronchitis" Edition. Since then there was also the "I almost passed out in clinical" Edition AND the "I now have a sinus infection" Edition. So when I said that I was hoping to be at 100% by last Monday, I was clearly getting ahead of myself. Last week I had Seminar on Monday, and we had a chiropractor and a massage therapist come in and talk to us. It was kind of interesting,and the chiropractor was very knowledgeable and really knew her stuff. She also offered us a free consultation and thermal scan if we wanted to come in. I may take her up on that because who turns down a free consult? Monday and Tuesday we had theory and we talked about closed head injuries, coma, concussions, CVA, Parkinsons, and other brain and head things. It was actually pretty interesting, since the professor that was lecturing is one of my favorites because she tells a lot of stories and keeps us interested. Also on Tuesday our third and final paper was due. It was an 8-9 page paper bringing together the other two papers we wrote this semester and adding a compare/contrast section and making a decision about the ethical situation. I started it on Saturday and finished it up over Sunday and Monday. I feel pretty good about it, especially since I got a 94% and a 93% on the first two papers and they are all graded by the same person. We get them back next Tuesday so stay tuned! Then Wednesday we had clinical. Thursday this week we had the day off because we always get one day off during Med-Surg to make up for the time we spend doing our LEI visits. So I was feeling pretty good and ready to get back to clinical on Wednesday. Unfortunately my body was not. I got really light-headed and felt really sick all of a sudden, then I started sweating and got really nauseous. So I ended up sitting down and feeling like I was going to pass out for about an hour before my instructor finally told me to go home. I was home by 8:30. I did have to do a make-up assignment this time, but it wasn't anything too hard. I then went to the doctor and was diagnosed with a sinus infection and started on ten days of Amoxicillin. So here's to hoping that THIS week I will be back to normal and able to completely return to the functioning world. This is my last week of clinical so Thursday is only a half day and we get our evaluations done and then we all go out to lunch! Then next week is our last week of class and on Tuesday of next week I get to go HOME for Easter :)

Also last Friday I had my last LEI visit of the semester and I turned in my completed LEI binder this morning so that's done for the semester! Today was our last seminar for the semester and I finished all of my quizzes, medication modules and case studies for seminar also. I love the end of the semester when everything starts wrapping up! 15 days left of the semester, 115 days left in nursing school :)

The Dan in Real Life picture doesn't really have anything to do with this entry, but it came up when I typed "real life" and also it's one of my favorite movies...So it's a WIN.

The "I have bronchitis" edition

So I realized that in all of the freakishly prompt blog entries that I've written in the past two weeks, I failed to mention that I have been pretty much dying. I got a bad cold the last Friday of Spring Break, which was March 11, and it basically just kept getting worse for about a week. Then just when I thought I was getting over it, my awesome asthma kicked in and decided that I didn't really need to be able to breathe. So after about a week of wheezing, I start doing my nebulizer on Tuesday. Finally last Friday the 25th, after having a hacking, barking cough for a few days, I cave and go to the doctor to get prednisone. The doctor tells me that it's just asthma, gives me the prednisone and that's the end of that. Until it keeps getting worse. And the cough gets worse. And the breathing gets worse. Tuesday I leave work after 2 hours because I sound terrible. Luckily I have a great boss and work with people who are flexible and understanding. I call off from clinical on Wednesday since I knew I would feel awful, then I cave again and go to the Emergency Room because NOTHING that I am doing is helping me breathe and I'm starting to get worried. So I go to the ER and get 2 nebulizers with Atrovent, which helps a LOT, and a chest x-ray to rule out pneumonia. When all was said and done, they diagnosed me with viral bronchitis, which sucks because there is basically nothing that they can do. I got Tylenol 3 with codeine to help with my cough and let me get some sleep, and they told me to keep doing the breathing treatments and my Symbicort inhaler, and taking the prednisone and that it may take a while to resolve. Four hours for a whole lot of nothing. I guess the bright side was that there was nothing seriously wrong with me. I didn't go to clinical Wednesday or Thursday because A) I sound awful, B) I feel awful, C) I'm contagious, D) We are on a floor with people over 65 who are already sick. My clinical instructor was AMAZING about the whole thing (she heard my cough on Monday so she knew I wasn't lying), plus I have a note and my paperwork from the ER. She let me stay home and told me not to stress about missing the days because I was doing fine. That made me feel a million times better. So today is Friday, I still don't feel great, but I'm definitely on the mend. Still doing breathing treatments at least 3-4 times a day, which I gotta tell ya, I'm really ready to be done with since this is day ELEVEN of treatments. UGH. But my cough is improving and hopefully I'll be able to stop the treatments soon. I can't wait.

This definitely wasn't in the plans, but I'm thankful for a great clinical instructor, friends, family, and co-workers for getting me through this past week and a half-ish. Hoping to be back to (almost) 100% by Monday! :)

If you don't know what bronchitis does to your lungs, the pictures will give you a pretty good idea! Basically you feel like your lungs are full of crap and your chest rattles when you breathe. And you have a deep barking cough. It's really glamorous.