Clean hands and coffee breaks

This week was my first week of NURSING SCHOOL, and fun, laughs, good times were had. But let me backtrack a little so I can complain about the bookstore/buying books. The Sunday before classes I came back to GV pretty early in the day so I could go buy all of my books in a timely fashion and not be a slacker on the first day. I went to Brian's in an attempt to save some cash money. So I walk in and think of what sections I need to go to to find my books. Being the five year old that I am I clearly go to the nursing books first, because after 3 years of pre-nursing hell, I'm pretty pumped for these books. I was quickly knocked off my excitement high. If you're wondering how many books I need, the answer is seven. If you're wondering if they cost over $550 the answer would be yes. Add that to my books for my three other classes and you arrive at my grand book total of about $700. It's fine, who needs $700 anyway?

If you aren't familiar with the GVSU nursing program it has a couple of parts. The first thing we have every week is seminar, this meets once a week on Wednesday mornings. I was pretty excited for my first seminar but also pretty nervous (How seventh grade right?). We already had a lot of stuff that we needed to print, read and bring to class. Since I clearly am not back in school mode after a week of glutenous life on a cruise ship, I was less than thrilled to already have work to do. But I decided to not start off the semester by being behind on the first day, I sucked it up and read everything. I basically learned to not be late to anything...EVER, to be comfortable being examined half naked by people of the opposite gender, and to do all of your work (good advice for a group of students who needed 3.7 GPA's to even make it into the room). The professor teaching seminar is Dr. Washburn, who has been my advisor since I was a freshman and I think she is super nice, but everyone else tells me she is sort of a bitch. So I'm waiting for her to dramatically peel off the mask, super villian style, and turn mean. I guess we shall see. We essentially did nothing in seminar on the first day.

Thursday and Friday are my lab days, and by days I mean mornings because my lab is from 8-11am. This means I need to leave my apartment by about 720 to be there on time, aka before the sun is awake. After spending what seemed like several hours navigating the Nursing 315 Blackboard site, I learned that we had about 100 pages of reading to do for this week. Now you may be wondering "I wonder what kind of awesome nursing skills did you get to learn the first day?" Answer: How to wash my hands. I guess I should let me preschool teacher know that she failed me. But to be serious, I really really loved my first two days of lab. There are only 16 people in each lab so I feel like I've already gotten to know over half of the class already. On the first day we did the cheesy introductions game, but it was so different in this class than in any other class. Everyone was really outgoing and seemed comfortable and I think we are going to have a great semester together. My class has already bonded over our love of coffee breaks. I've met a few girls that I know I'm going to be good friends with by the end of the semester. The second lab we got to do practice taking each others temperature, pulse, respiration and blood pressure. It was really fun to actually be able to practice things that will actually be pertinent to our careers, instead of memorizing amino acids, chemical reactions, and fifty types of bacteria. After so many years of that, its great to actually be directly working towards our goal. So here's to being one week closer to being a nurse.

PS I picked up my uniforms this week, brought them home and tried them on like a second grader on the first day of school.