Oh Dorothy Orem, why doth thou vex me so?

I feel a bullet blog entry coming on!

• My test this morning in Fundamentals was hard. More than one question about the formatting of nursing diagnoses, which I am not so clear on, and less than one question on the risk factors/outcomes/interventions for the specific nursing diagnoses covered in these chapters. I feel like my studying wasn't very effective for this test, and I'm not quite sure how to fix it. Perhaps I'll begin with an appt with the instructor, whom I love.
• Did I mention that I got Bs on both the developmental test that I was so sure about, and the Patho exam that I strutted out of feeling all confident?! pride do cometh and alla that.
• I'm trying to decide if I should go to the Health Action Committee meeting for PTA tonight. On one hand, it's been on my calendar for weeks to talk to one of the women on the committee who works as a school nurse about mentoring for possible ANS functions and personal mentoring type stuff. she's super cool. On the other hand, I have a thousand things to do tonight, and the meeting is sposed to run til 9pm. there's only so much I have to contribute to a conversation about peanut allergies in the elementary schools and making sure water is available in the lunch line. I can talk to the mentor lady anytime, I suppose. My main concern is that if I start skipping this meeting (only once a month) then I'll keep skipping this meeting. pish.
• Before I go to bed tonight, I have to make a casserole for a random family I don't know because I got an email asking for folks to participate in a dinner delivery service for this woman in the nursing program ahead of me who just had a baby, blah blah. number one - she is in a two-parent household, so I'm a little snotty about her need for provided food, but I can quickly see that's selfish/irrational since I was in a two-parent household when the kid was born and I would have been thrilled beyond measure for strangers to bring me a casserole. number two - stop volunteering for things. just stop it. number three - what the hell am I going to make for her, when my child and i have been eating veggie chicken nuggets, defrosted frozen peas and mac-n-cheese with spinach this week. I have this mental picture of Black Bean and Sweet Potato Enchiladas, with a batch made up for me, too. I just don't know if that's realistic.
  
• Three hours and ten minutes until my test in Disciplines. It's 40% of the grade for the course, and the only power-point presentation that the instructor has done was three slides long with a definition from Nightingale, Henderson, and the state board of nursing about how to define nursing. Do I need to get all detailed about the Henry Street Settlement? It's really interesting to me. Should I memorize who founded the ANA? Watson's ten carative factors? This is the course that sounds like a lot of words strung together to me. meaningless drivel is my first impression. True, with careful reading and synthesizing from other courses, it's getting more easy to understand and see the relevance. But distinguishing Rogerian nursing from Orem's self-care theory? The difference between a conceptual model and a theory? BLAH! bring on the sick people! Bring out the mannequins and the needles! Let's get to the good stuff. Oops, I'm exposing my occupation of Benner's novice stage of skill acquisition (person barely knows how to do something, is inflexible, and unable to apply said knowledge/skill appropriately).
  
• Going to supplemental practice lab for med administration tonight - which seems smart.
  
• Did not bring texts for Health Assessement (quiz at 8am tomorrow) - which does not seem smart. there's a test, a lab, and a pan of enchiladas between me and that textbook.

in other news, my lunch was not adequate. I'm off to get a latte and a scone.

Duck Rice and Croup

the kid celebrated his birthday, not with a hippy ritual in the gazebo of the rose garden walking around the sun and talking about what he's learned in his seven years on earth and hearing good things from whomsoever had gathered, but hanging out in the bedroom with me, watching movies with the humidifier running non-stop. The good news is that we only had one episode of really scary barking coughing gagging dash to the bathroom and crank up the hot shower and sit on my lap while i sit on the toilet and try to tell him that it's going to be okay and he should just relax and not worry so much about how he can't breathe. After approximately seven minutes of that hell, his coughing had stopped, and his breathing has certainly eased, and I left him in the bathroom to get my best diagnostic tool. My fancy new red Littman? Nay. My fancy new black laptop. While the screen got all foggy, and I started to wonder how long we could all spend in the bathroom without meltdown, I confirmed my diagnosis of croup (remembered from an incidence during infancy) and called the advice nurse. Because, of course, I am not the advice nurse. I am simply in the very first semester of nursing school. We haven't covered auscultating for abnormal breath sounds yet in Health Assessment. Hell, i'm just as likely to use the bell as diaphragm on that thing, or put the (very uncomfortable) ear buds in pointing to the back of my head rather than my nose. The advice nurse was quite helpful, very calm and my new best friend. She told me that no, I don't nec. need to make a Saturday appt for the kid, and that since croup is viral, the most common medication would be steroids to open the airway if the steamy bathroom (or head in the freezer, which seems rather cruel and not very infectious-control-smart) doesn't work in 15 minutes (which seems like an eternity when your kid is looking at you like 'Aren't you in nursing school? Can't you fix this shit, mommy?').

Had a very interesting conversation with the mom of one of the kids I invited to his birthday party (note to me: never invite more people than you are willing to un-invite the day before the event.) everyone followed the script: I'm so sorry he's feeling bad, please tell him that we hope he feels better soon, when will the party be rescheduled? But one mom added that her son was out with a bad bad cough several days last week. I casually asked if it got worse at night and came with a fever, which it did, and did he sound like a seal, which he did. Well, there's that mystery solved then - and I managed to not be an asshole (I hope) when I said that I knew it must have been circulating in the classroom, but that we wouldn't have the party so that it didn't go any farther. The kid's got one grandparent undergoing chemo for breast cancer that's moved to bone marrow and one recovering from outpatient biopsy of the tongue. not a good equation.

So, this weekend was a great chance to practice my study skills at home with kid. I have studying in the quiet room of the library down pretty well, but can't seem to get over the hump to reading or doing note cards at home. I whine about how I don't have a table to sit at and spread out my books - in 500 sq. ft of living space, I literally don't have a table. I whine about how the kid and I seem to always be on top of each other, how my usual distracted-ness (which I have learned will take up about the first 20 minutes of any study session) gets exacerbated by the cats or requests to play Thomas the Train on my computer or urges to get up and make a cup of tea or watch just a few minutes of whatever the kid is watching (hey, I like Wallace and Gromit!), ad infinitum. It was a little ridiculous this weekend because I have two tests and three quizzes this week - and have not spent a lot of time keeping up with the reading in either class. the tests I thought that I aced last week with minimal studying came back with good solid B's. damn this seven point grading scale!

Also got to figure out what would happen if I couldn't make it to lab - email the TA and pray the skills can somehow be made up. The kid's dad ended up taking him this morning, and then bringing him to campus after lab so the kid could see my classrooms and the library and then ride the bus back to the park and ride lot. I told the kid that we usually go to the library after class and he asked if we had to walk single-file. it took me a second to figure out what the hell he was talking about!

I'm a little sad that I missed my psych appt and my med eval to get some Wellbutrin answers. I hope that I don't chicken out on rescheduling those.

Last week at work, the chef made fried rice for the end of shift family meal. This has been a bit of a challenge since I decided to stop eating even the small amounts of meat that I used to consume at the beginning of the year. Usually fried rice is made with strips of various meat - and I can feel relatively comfortable that I can scoop around the meat and still get free food. But last week, we apparently had a couple of ducks coming up for expiration soon, and so the chef made duck fried rice. I scooped out a small bowl and started my search and avoid mission in the corner of the kitchen. Sam walked by and said, how's family meal? I shrugged and said it was a little hard to avoid the shreds of duck, but the rice was good. He was all - You're eating family meal tonight?! But you're a vegetarian now! and then his face softened and he got all calm and objective and says 'wow. you must be really hungry to eat that duck rice.' Sheesh - the guilt! I ended up eating brown rice with potsticker sauce and fried wonton noodles. I hope there will be a point that I will have cycled through all the times that I was accustomed to eating meat and worked out acceptable substitutes. Last Tuesday at Golden Corral, I realized that the brown gravy beside the mashed potatoes was probably verboten now, along with all the soups, and that delicious broccoli salad with the raisins and the bacon bits. I'm good with the meat analogues, and the overall concepts of nutrition within a vegetarian dietary pattern. I'm still a little leery of being 'difficult' to hosts - but had good practice last weekend, when i had to speak up at a conference with free lunch that consisted of a big bowl of pork barbecue, buns, apples, and bags of chips.

In other news, got to practice administering meds via NG tube today and gave a plastic butt an enema this morning. nice.

three things I love about the internets this week

One - Cut a hole in the box. (Come on, you know this isn't work safe!)

Two - Put your junk in that box. (Gay Love Rocks My Sea Goat Testes)

Three - Make her open the box. (found at Bitch, Ph.D.)

Seriously, this computer (and more importantly, the wireless connection I seem to be able to find everywhere) have been blowing my mind lately. I racked up a huge bill on my DSL account - didn't pay the bill for months to teach those bastards at Verizon a lesson - and when I finally did pay the balance to get my interweb turned back on, they said thanks for the $286 but now you'll need a credit card to reinstate your account. I don't, of course, have a credit card. So, for about a year now, I've been on dial-up. Dial-up means no big downloads (so no Youtube), and a lot of instability connection-wise (so I avoid getting on the computer when I didn't have a lot of time to devote to babysitting whatever I was trying to do). It also meant, for me, no pdf documents, because every time I'd try to open one, Adobe would jump in and try to do a lot of fancy updates, and my poor computer would freeze right the fuck up. So. It's been a whole new world for this big girl lately. blogs, youtube, time wasting games, in the recliner, in the bed, in the library! Whee!

I've been feeling a little manic lately. It's a shift from feeling like I can't do anything, I have no time and less energy. And I like coming from a place of "sure, that sounds great. let me see if i can work it in!" rather than being so eeyore about the world. But I'm scared of a crash, honestly. I'm also wondering if I'm trying to tie together too many things that are interesting to me, but not nec. related. I'm trying to yoke social justice stuff (with that US Social Forum event this summer and with a drive to finally get involved in war stuff) with health education/parity/accessibility stuff. I'm looking at my ANS chapter and the state board of ANS for opportunities to get good shit on my resume and applications, wanting to stay active in my kid's school (so bring ANS functions to that population), but also remembering that for the most part the kid's school has a lot of well-meaning rich white folks to help out already, and so looking at the city I live in and how to work there (but avoid being a well-meaning white girl trying soothe my own guilt about sending my kid to the neighboring richer, whiter, "better" school district). I'm also looking ahead to my senior year and potential Honors projects, wanting to lay the groundwork and do something I'm actually passionate about, instead of just enough to get the yellow cords at graduation. Ay. And did i tell y'all about finding about the group that trains health care providers (they have contracts for local SONs, PA schools and MD schools) to provide pelvic and breast exams!?! It sounds like the perfect action opportunity for any woman who has seen the Vagina Monologues and hooted and cheered about the cold ducklips. Wow!

had fun in skills lab this morning - we slung each other around in the lifts. It was such a weird experience to be dangling in a fabric sling from a big purple machine.

test today in LifeSpan Development, which I'm assuming will be pretty much a gimme - helping my mom through a master's in psych in eighth grade and listening to her teach as an adjunct for the years since are a major advantage.

test tomorrow in Patho, which I feel less confident about, but I've done a great job of acting nonchalant about it for the bulk of the weekend. taking a nap, dragging letters around and watching The Facts of Life, Season One.

In other news, I have a $50 gift card to target and I have no idea what I'll spend it on! Jeans? Tennis shoes? A rolling bookbag? Hell, I've spent down my fin aid nest egg for this semester to the point that I may need it for groceries!

really here

So, I'm starting to feel like I'm in nursing school. I went to my second nursing student association meeting today, and beyond promising myself to expunge 'um' from my public speaking if I ever decide to run for an office in this organization, I was shocked to figure out that I've been here a month already!

I still have no clue what the prof in Fundamentals is talking about (nursing diagnoses all sound the same to me - and apparently there's some difference between 'as evidenced by neuromuscular weakness on left side' and 'related to inability to use left side of body', though it's certainly not obvious to me!), but the stuff she says is starting to sound familiar. I still don't get it, but I know she talks about it every class! I really feel like the first lecture in that class should be totally reworked - I didn't understand anything of what she said, and it was apparently really important, because I haven't understood her since then. Thankfully, I think I signed up to be on the advisory board for this class - maybe I can bring this up to her then. She is hands down one of my fav. profs!

My big news this week is that I passed my first skills eval - hand washing, sterile gloving, universal precautions with gown mask and gloves, and vital signs !!!! SHEW - what a relief to have that done and done well, according to the teaching assistant. There was a lot of contention among the students that didn't pass those skills the first time - they had to come back later this week and re-do specific skills - crazy stress and lots of folks felt like the variation of TA's was unfair. I don't know - it's not Scantron, and there are specific little checklists to follow... but I did see at least two instances of TA assholery that would have just done me in. Pa-Pow! Apoptosis! I felt lucky that the TA evaluating me was the TA who teaches my lab section - so easy. I think, though, that I will sign up for practice lab sections with some of the other, scarier TA's so that if I happen to get them in an eval, I won't freak out as badly.

My other big news is that I made an A a B+ on my first exam! It was more general than I was expecting, but it feels like I studied the right stuff and knew the kinds of things she asked. It was in Health Assessment, where we talk about what you expect to find in physical exams of patients, and what various findings might mean. We go from head to toe, and this class has a big evaluation at the end of the semester, where we do a head to toe assessment on someone (which apparently takes a couple hours!). We have labs to practice that examination, and this test was over the lecture portion of the class. this A makes me feel so confident that I'm doing what I should be to handle this material. I also have a little more confidence that I can handle this seven-point grading scale! A 92 is an A-, but it's still an A! (Right?!!! Isn't it!!????) oh well, maybe she'll throw out a question that I missed, like the one about what fungusy fingernails look like.

Nice to have two successes this week, since I've got two tests next week. Development, which will be nothin', and Patho, which is making more and more sense as I actually read the book.

So. my dishes are dirty, and my laundry is in mountains. But I'm happy, and feeling good. I'm eating well and remembering to bring my lunch to school most days. I went to the kid's school last week and taught his class to knit - wow! I'm still reading with a couple of kids at his school each week as a volunteer. I'm singing with a chorus led by a woman who used to teach music at the kid's preschool - she's super cool and full of quotes by Rumi and Hafiz about the present moment and releasing attachment to thought. And I'm going to a conference of officers of other Association of Student Nurses chapters this Saturday. The kid is good and super excited about his birthday next week! This birthday really seems like a departure from babyhood/toddlerhood.

In the Beginning...

Bouncing around this afternoon, trying to gather a shitty day into a tidy package to be thrown away later tonight. belly is empty, head is full of all the stuff I should get done and thinking of N.'s advice to do something after class to de-stress before I try to study. sounds good - like get out of bed if you can't sleep within a half hour so that you won't associate the bed with tossing and turning and kvetching, but with soothing, silent sleeping. mmmm, sleeping. I worry, though (of course), that i'm giving myself an out, and that's the last thing this procrastinator needs - I used to tell myself I could read fiction while I ate lunch, and then I'd get up and do my chores, but instead, I'd keep getting up and get more food, and lunch lasted two more hours.

I started with the newsletter from my women's group, timed for Imbolc, which happens to coincide with the full moon tonight. There's a note in my WeMoon asking how I can honor this full moon in Leo (my sun sign), with the barest buds of Imbolc? To me, I think the answer is in all the stuff I've done in just the last few weeks - big changes that were tiny at the time, things that represent a lot of work in the past and microscopic shifts of perspective, and then bing, the whole knot falls apart in my hands. Finally figured out how I could shift the problem I had with arranging kid custody - I stopped ending the conversation when the kid's dad tried to sidestep. magic! Looked at this whole "Be a Good Person" thought spiral from a totally new perspective with a workshop on Byron Katie's Work - and realized that when I'm invested in how bad someone else sucks, I'm waiting for them to stop sucking to start Being a Good Person. poof!

so, anyway, newsletter, yada yada, good stuff, but I want a copy of that poem by Alice Lovelace. She performed it at the beginning of the Praises for the World concert/event in Atlanta a coupla years ago, and I can still hear her voice ringing. In hunting Alice on the web, I find Project South, which I need to know more about. These days, everything is spinning in terms of nursing school - can I work this into a project for an Honors class, can I take my Nutrition book to the elementary school and answer questions from the kids about why mama says some foods are good and some foods are bad for you, can we do some sort of Healthy Behaviors event at the school (with a much much cooler name than that). My disciplines class is really motivating me to think about why I wanted to do this, what I'd like to do as a nurse, and how many of the same reasons that I rejected nursing as a high school senior still hold true. I have this weird sense of pressure to get all those things wrapped up and eradicated before I graduate - gender roles bullshit, racial disparity in education from a myriad of causes, socioeconomic hierarchial limits. So, I'm reading this site in those terms - how can I get in with these folks and learn the stuff they're laying out, with the plans to apply it to prevention nursing, community health, equity of information kinds of ways. And, as always when I'm reading very carefully phrased mission statements and such - what is it exactly that they do?

So, on the eve of Imbolc, with the barest buds of spring, I know I've got another six weeks of winter (at least) and another three week Mercury retrograde period to get through before the action of spring really begins. I also know that the seeds I'm planting now are what will bloom then (hopefully), so I'm going to spend some time thinking about what I'm flinging out into the field.

I ended up with the last few paragraphs of this speech by Alice Lovelace, given this time last year about some stuff that's close to my heart (the role of artists for change) and something coming up this summer apparently that I want to know more more more about.
From Chaos to Clarity: The Price to Be Paid by Alice Lovelace

now, i will go do my Nutrition homework and start studying for Health Assessment.