The Week of Summer Break

So, my plan to update regularly every two weeks fell apart during the second half of the semester. The combination of springtime and more tests/papers left me with less to say. Or at least less time to figure out what and how to say it. Having gotten through the semester, pretty much all I've been wanting to do now is sleep and read Anne Lamott's new book and watch episodes of House (and rekindle my dormant crush on Hugh Laurie). I have also managed to plant a garden, embark on yet another stupidly ambitious knitting project that I won't be able to finish for months, see a Local Natives show with some friends, plan a sewing project and (hopefully) before the week is done, bake some bread to take when I go visit friends in Peoria this weekend. I also wanted to take some time to gather my thoughts at this point, one semester into nursing school.

Thought #1 - Nurses do more than you probably think. Unless you're a nurse. My time spent in the hospital has been pretty limited so far, but I have had some. And I have been watching a lot of doctor TV shows recently. And pretty much everything that you see doctors doing in those shows (except for the actual surgery stuff) would be done at least partially by nurses. Nurses have the vast majority of the hands-on time with patients.

Thought #2 - Nursing school is really different from majoring in English and history at a liberal arts college. Different, for me at least, in a nice way. My undergrad experience, though I'm glad I had it, made me a huge stressball for four years. I was reading ridiculous amounts of dense literature and having to come up with essays constantly and rarely ever producing something I was satisfied with. I learned a lot, but I found it extremely difficult. And although it could occasionally be very rewarding, it was not really a sustainable lifestyle for me. Going to grad school for academia, for example, would have made me crazy. Nursing school is easier for me to handle because the skills are so practical, and the interpersonal techniques are usually intuitive. Not that it's easy. There is a lot of information to learn. But the applicability is immediate and rewarding. And I guess as I've gotten older, I've starting placing more value on the things the are concrete. It's very reassuring to me.

Thought #3 - Public health nursing is very interesting to me. I'm still trying to figure out what it means, exactly. My ideal job would entail going to where people live and building relationships with them and helping them to manage and hopefully improve their health. I don't think I want to work in a hospital. I am much more comfortable being in the place where the patients themselves are comfortable. What I want to avoid is providing care in a place where everything is foreign to the patients and the health care providers have all of the control over the environment. I have an internship-like thing in public health this summer/fall where we do monthly (sometimes twice monthly) hour-long clinics for homeless folks and provide things like foot care, blood pressure testing, and vaccines. I've only gone to one of these so far, but I'm looking forward to more.

Thought #4 - I am good at math! There is kind of a lot of basic math in nursing. I forgot that I like math. That is all.

I think those are about all of thoughts in my stuporous vacation brain right now. This time next week, I'll be up to my eyeballs in pharmacology. Woo hoo!