SCHOOOOOOOL’S OUT FOREVER! (Okay maybe not, but that song is very relevant right now hahah). It feels so good to be out right now! Quick recap of my day….

Woke up at 5:30, got to school around 6:30, chilled at Marian and Paige’s place with Mikhail until test time, took the final exam, was slightly sad to find out I got 84% after checking my answers in the answer sheet our professor let us check after the exam. Went home, was about to take a quick nap when Marian said she’d give me four of those Cinemark movie tickets to pick up her brother at the airport and hang out with him till 1, so basically how could I resist? She was basically paying me in crack right there LOL. Ate at Millbrae Pancake House with the nursing fam Marian, Cristina, Kate, Mikhail, plus Tommy. Went home, I was supposed to nap from 2:40-3:45, ended up waking up at 6:30 but said FUCK IT since school’s out! Took care of my household obligations and now I’m here hahah. Gonna go out and drink with the nursing cohort later today, life is good! Oh yeah, and I checked my grade in the class I just took the final for and saw I actually ended up getting 86%. Checked my final grade… 87.85% which rounds up to 88% which stays a B+! I mean of course I wish I got an A- like I planned before the final, but at least I didn’t drop! I was so freakin’ happy to see that grade hahah, so I’m at two A’s and a B+ for the semester. I’m literally awash with emotions at the moment lol. The only downer is that my wrist is still injured and I keep hearing this clicking in my surgically repaired knee and I have no idea what it is. I hope I didn’t redamage anything, but there isn’t really any pain or swelling so I hope that’s a good sign. Even so, I’m on such a high right now, 90+ days of pure bliss! I’m so relieved this semester is over and we’re about to be Junior 2’s!

For everyone else still taking finals, keep grinding!

In approximately 48 hours I will be completely free for the summer. I’m already almost in summer mode lol. I need to ace this last final in order to bring my grade up to an A- and I’m hoping I can pull it off. When I get out of that final though FREEDOMMMMMM! I’m already planning an all day movie hopping extravaganza with 6 movies the following day that starts at 9 AM and ends at 11:20 PM hahahaha. Just two more days of hard work for 90+ days of leisure, I’ll take that deal any day of the week! Good luck with finals everybody!

So it’s the night before our big HESI exam (yes, the exam is on a Saturday morning, fuck nursing school lol) and I’m super duper worried. I’m basically in the same situation I was last semester where for my assessment class I had JUST hit A- range with a low 90% and then I bombed HESI and had to settle for a B when after the Final my grade remained at status quo. This semester has been a real grind in this community/mental health class but I JUST brought my grade up to a low 90% again. I tried to study as hard as I could this time, but sometimes I feel like I’m hitting diminishing returns. I just hope I can keep my grade up because I don’t want to be anywhere near that 75% borderline going into the Final (by the way, anything below 75% in the class is failing). There is no way in hell that I’m repeating any semester. I’ve worked too damn hard to let some shit like that happen. I can do this… I can do this…

This is my one post of the day because I haven’t posted anything all day! (Can’t even remember the last time that’s happened!). My queue ran out and I haven’t been online at all today because I was at clinical and studying all day! Well… almost all day, I started watching the Warriors game when I noticed on nba.com that they were down double digits without me watching and I said to myself “MY TEAM NEEDS ME TO WATCH!!!” It paid off, they won! But that fourth quarter… ugh… that was some of the sloppiest shit I’ve ever seen in my life in a playoff basketball game. We were lucky to pull that game out. Anyways, I’m not going to say I’m putting myself on Tumblr hiatus because the last time I said that I was on here even more than I usually am LOL. I’ll probably only check once in a while because I have to put myself on lockdown until May 13th. HESI exam this Saturday (which means I’ll miss Iron Man 3’s opening day *sigh*, I’ll save it for Saturday night), final on 5/13, and I’m not sure if my other professor is still doing a take home final? We’ll see about that. I’ll check in from tim to time to maintain my sanity, but other than that happy blogging everybody!

On the USF nursing FB page someone asked about a final for a professor I had last semester and how it went. I seriously wanted to respond “I went in pretty confident and then I took the final and it completely and utterly destroyed every fiber within me. I went to from an A to an A- and barely held on for dear life to that grade. Good luck!” LOL.

I reallyyyyyy don’t want to put my clinical partner on blast, but she is really frustrating me/pissing me off right now. So we have a case study and our health teaching outline due on Tuesday and she isn’t answering my texts, calls, or emails. We couldn’t work on the case study at all last week because we had a quiz and presentation on Friday. I took the rest of Friday off because I needed some down time and she had ROTC all day. So Saturday I start the Google Doc for the case study and fill out most of it. I email her and say just fill in what you got from the case study interview, clean up where you think I messed up, and we also need 2-3 NANDA interventions (I already did one). It’s been 24 hours already and she barely even touched it! So I’ve been spending the past few hours filling out the rest of the case study because our instructor said last week to get in a rough draft to her ASAP (oops) so she can tell us what we need to fix. And the thing is, I don’t want to send our instructor the case study without my partner looking at it because I want to know if she’s okay with what I’ve written and I’m pissed off that I basically wrote the entire report by myself.

And while all this is happening I can’t help but think that something terrible happened to her because she’s been pretty reliable this entire semester. Plus, she’s had a track record for trouble this semester as well, a laundry list of misfortunes that includes losing her iPad (which she luckily got back), losing her bus pass (which she got back and promptly lost the same day…), she got into a HIT AND RUN with the driver speeding off and leaving her in the middle of the street with a concussion, and just recently she tore a ligament in her ankle doing a mud run. So while I’m kind of irked right I can’t help but wonder if something terrible happened to her again because she isn’t the type to blow off school priorities. She literally told me “not to worry” yesterday but right now I am FREAKING OUT, WHERE ARE YOU MARIA????

I feel like registration becomes more and more stressful the further along we get into this nursing program. It’s honestly like a game of chess. “What days to do you want to go to school? What clinical instructor is good? What time is the clinical? What time are the classes? Who said they were signing up for what block?” A million freakin’ questions and variables thrown in the mix and the thought that you won’t get your block is so freakin’ stressful. And I say it’s like a game of chess because I swear people be trying to throw smokescreens and say “Yeah I’m signing up for block 4…” when in reality they’re trying to throw you off the block they REALLY want hahaha. 

Thankfully I got into a block with most of my homies (sorry you didn’t get your block @mszt0nyparker =[). I feel bad because once again just like last semester they had to abandon their previous block in order to get into one that I could get as well lol. Thankfully I got into the same block because literally like 2 minutes after registering the block I eventually got into went full up, zero spots open. I’m glad I don’t have to worry about this shit for another 7 months lol.

Soooooo… tomorrow I can’t go to clinical tomorrow because our case managers won’t be at the site and instead I have to do make up work, which ordinarily would suck except… I GET TO WATCH MOVIES! =D This is like a dream come true lol.

I basically get to watch a film that deals with some kind of mental illness or disorder. There was a specific set of films that I could choose from but it stated in the syllabus that I could also ask to watch different films as long as I got approval (which I did!). So I basically need to pick two of these films and do a write up on both of them to account for the 6 hours of clinical time lost. Here are my options:

- A Beautiful Mind (Schizophrenia)
- As Good as it Gets (OCD)
- Adam (Asperger’s Syndrome)
- Speak (PTSD)
- Matchstick Men (OCD)
- Lars and the Real Girl (Delusional Disorder)
- Reign Over Me (PTSD & Depression)
- Stranger Than Fiction (OCD)

My clinical instructor said to “try to watch a film you haven’t seen before if possible, but I know this will be difficult for you” LOL! My instructor knows me so well haha. I think she just said that because she thought I might just do the write up and not watch the movie, but I don’t think she understands how much I love movies and any excuse to watch a movie is a-ok with me! I’ve actually seen all of these movies before but I’ve been looking for an excuse to revisit most of them as I haven’t seen a few of these in several years. I think it would actually be more beneficial to watch a film I HAVE seen before because then I could focus more on the mental illness of the characters instead of getting caught up in the plot of the film.

Okay, so which film should I choose Tumblr?

Our professor’s powerpoint earlier this week looked extremely blurry due to the projector being messed up. Kat raised her hand to ask if our professor could turn off the projector because it was giving her a headache and making her nauseous and everyone laughed. I wanted to yell out “Don’t laugh! That’s not funny! That’s my life! That’s what it looks like when I’m not wearing glasses! AHHHHH!!!” lmfao.

So I had my second of three days in the adolescent psych ward last week and I have to say that I reallyyyyyyy wish we spent an entire semester here because it is so fascinating. 

So that day there was this “magic lady” who came by and did a magic show for us. By the end of it I suppose I was looking real chummy (did I just use that word? lol) with the patients that I looked like I was one of them because Megan, the USF senior doing her capstone at St. Mary’s, asks me “Did the magic lady know you were a nursing student and not a patient here?” and I just kind of sat there dumbfounded and was like “… I have no idea” hahaha. 

It’s weird because just sitting down and speaking to these kids, you would NEVER know they had any kind of problems because they seem like - and for the most part are - regular kids. The only difference is that they’re in here and we’re out there. Similar to a point made in Silver Linings Playbook, it just makes me wonder how many people are hiding their emotional pain and struggle with no real way to getting it out in a healthy way.

For example, there was this young girl in there talking to me about how awful middle school is for her. I wanted to just say “things’ll get better” but that’s not the “technically” correct “nursing” thing to say (because you don’t know for sure if it will get better and that’s making promises you can’t keep), but that’s really what I wanted to say. Middle school was HORRIBLE for me, basically the worst years of my life. It never got so bad that I was 5150’d (involuntarily held for 72 hours due to danger to self, danger to others, or being gravely disabled), but it was pretty freakin’ bad. I was able to cope with it relatively well but it was honestly tough coming to school sometimes. I didn’t realize it at the time but in the bigger picture of my life, middle school didn’t mean shit. I wish someone at the time would have said “Hey, all this bullshit you’re going through? It’s not going to matter nearly as much as it does now. I know it seems like life or death right now, but it’s going to be so small when you grow up and look back.” The reason I don’t say that outright is that I don’t want to demean what they’re feeling right now and say it doesn’t mean shit, I just mean that in the long run it won’t seem so drastic even if it does feel that way right now. 

This shit really gets to me because while I may not have been pushed to the brink of hurting myself or others, I know what it’s like to be bullied. I was fat, wore glasses, had braces, and was a nerd, I was practically wearing a flashing neon sign that said “BULLY ME” when I was younger. I may have had the resiliency to put up with all that bullshit, but I can’t assume that everyone has that same willpower or support systems to cope. I don’t know if I’ll ever get into psychiatric nursing in my future, but I hope that whatever I end up doing, I can help out adolescents in need.

nursingstudentcat:

I have been attending my mental health clinical rotation this semester and “interesting” is an understatement!!

THIS IS SO TRUE! lol