Over the river and through the woods.

So I have come to the end of one of the longest, most exhausting weeks of my life.  Successfully.  I made it through my lab testing with (mostly) flying colours.  The parts I was dreading and was so sure I was going to flunk, I aced.  But in the end, I made it through the classroom part of this nursing boot camp I'm currently enrolled in, which seems widely considered to be the worst part of this 6 month slog.  Thank you everyone for all your well-wishes and prayers and good vibes.  A special mention goes to my girl Tracy.  I don't think I'd have made it this far without all her help and support. 

I realized throughout this process though, that I have shockingly little faith in myself.  Everyone around me seemed to be quite confident I'd do well and get through, but the entire time I kept thinking to myself "Oh God, I could fail."  Not the far more positive and plausible "Oh God, I could actually do this."  I have no idea why.

Today was code blue simulation day, where in groups of 6, we practice going through the motions of an actual code situation.  The simulations consist of 5-6 RN's, a respiratory therapist and an ICU physician.  It's run as a real world scenario on a patient simulator (which costs tens of thousands of dollars, and actually has pulses and breathes and talks.  Freaky).  It was amazing.  I've always been apprehensive of codes or being directly involved in them (I've had patients code before, but once the code team shows up, the ward nurse is basically relegated to a go-for role), but I loved today.  I loved the pace and the tension and the excitement.  It kind of makes me think I should consider doing my practicum in MICU (because they run the code team), even though I don't come from a medicine background....Jump off that bridge when I come to it I guess....

Tomorrow is clinical orientation (I'm starting in SI!! Woo!!), and Saturday is sleep-14-hours-straight day.  I've got some biiiiiiiig stuff going on :)

An amusing sidenote I discovered this week for those of you that use Blackberrys (-berries?) When you text a non-Blackberry user the hug emoticon on your phone, it shows up like this:

({}) 

Make of that what you will.

I don't think Jimmy Fallon is funny.  He sure seems to though.

We got to watch this video as part of our code training.  These are way more widely used by the military in the field apparently, but we do use them on occasion.  Kinda gross but super cool:



"Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts" - Winston Churchill

My head is like Sputnik.

It's 11:25 pm and I've just returned home from lab practice for my demos tomorrow.  Today was supposed to be the day I had in the bag, tomorrow was supposed to be the day I allowed myself some slips.  I slipped today though.  Kinda hard.  It messed up my confidence for the whole day.  I'm not a "performance art" sort of individual.  I start running through my demos and I freeze up and blank.  There's a certain kind of despair you feel in moments like that that simply doesn't compare to anything else.  In the past week and a half or so, ALL my nervous ticks have come back (pulling at my hair, ripping the ever loving out of my cuticles, drinking inhuman amounts of Coke), all my physical stressiness is present (for some reason my eyelids get super raw, I'm all headachey when I almost never am, my posture is all wrong and tense).  I just keep telling myself when we turn the corner to clinical things will get better.  And that corner is Friday.  I will update then, assuming I'm not hanging from the rafters by then.

Thanks to everyone for the messages of support/encouragement/love.  I'm so blessed.

Halfway up the mountain...

[Note: Much of the following content could be construed as offensive to delicate sensibilities.  Please proceed with caution.]

So I've made it through the 1st month of the critical care course relatively sane and with all of my lives intact.  I know, I'm a little surprised too.  It's been really intense, and we've lost quite a few people from where we started already.  It's unsettling for those of us still left standing.  I have a decent amount of post-secondary education under my belt, and I can say honestly that none of it holds a candle to this, volume OR complexity-wise.  So much of what I learned in nursing school when I did my degree much makes more sense now than it ever did before though.  And for those of you that may still be unaware of this, your body, the one sitting there absorbing this, is doing amazing and incredibly complicated things to keep you alive right now.  Right at this very moment.

I'm going to try to keep this next point brief, as I know it's a drum I bang frequently.  Being a vocal supporter of participating in the democratic process as I am has compelled me to vote in every election I've been eligible for since I was 18.  I've always done so enthusiastically and without reservation.  But this provincial election, I can honestly say I truly don't WANT to vote.  I'm still going to, but I really, really don't want to support the ludicrous shenanigans that constitute the political discourse in this province.  We seem to swiftly be moving toward American-style "politics" where no one has an actual platform or any ideas, but boy do they have funding to take out adspace pointing out all the faults they can conjure up about any other horse in the race.  I'm frustrated with the childishness and I'm frustrated with the re-zoning that's given me an MLA I know nothing about now.  This election was/is the NDP's to lose, and they sure do seem to be working hard towards that goal, somehow legitimizing that erratic crackpot Hugh McFadyen in the process.  His crap about hallway medicine, his pie-in-the-sky idea that he's somehow going to stumble upon a secret cache of thousands of nurses and hundreds of doctors, his idea that tracking sex-offenders with GPS devices is going to make this city a safer place when it's not even close to the top cause of our crime statistics (though still horrible obviously). 

*For the record, the problem with the nursing shortage is a from-the-ground-up one, not one that will be fixed by throwing out a few thousand work visas to foreign-trained nurses. That's a temporary band-aid, not a solution. (This is in NO way a criticism of international nurses, I promise).  Overhauling nursing education is the key to fixing this problem.  There is most definitely enough interest in the profession, but rather than expanding programs and improving accessibility, there are now only TWO nursing programs in the city where there were 4 only a couple of years ago, and the resultant wait lists are the major discouragement to people wanting to enter the field.  You don't need to hire 2000 nurses Mr. McFadyen.  You need to make the educational process miles more accessible.

Moving on...

In an expression of opinion that will surprise no one who knows me, I came across something yesterday that not only enraged me, it made me feel absolutely sick to my stomach. As many of you know, and many of you probably don't, I work at the largest hospital in the province.  It's actually comprised of 5 hospitals (general, rehab, women's, children's and psychiatric) plus research centres and a campus of the University of Manitoba.  Because of the size of the hospital and the number of professionals working there, the breadth of services available there is truly astounding.  One of the veritable thousands of these services is pregnancy termination.  From time to time, and only EVER in nice weather (you'd be forgiven for thinking abortion is only a sin in the summer, go ahead and terminate in -40), there will be the occasional anti-choice demonstrator in front of Women's.  Usually 1 or 2.  It's distasteful but whatever.  Yesterday (Sunday) I was driving past Women's on my way to St. James, and there was an actual hoarde of them.  Like 60 or 70.  Covered in sandwich boards and ignorance.  On the boulevard, on the curb...soooo much self-righteousness. My first impulse was obviously to roll down the windows and tell them all to go eff themselves, but apparently giving them a reaction only makes things worse.  My second impulse was "I should find out where they all go to church and show up there wearing big signs judging THEIR choices."  Someone should really (and just as a stunt obviously, no child actually deserves this) go up to these people with a high-needs baby and say "Here. Go raise this child yourself since you felt my decision to terminate this pregnancy was erroneous and sinful."  See how fast the Christian charity flies out the window then.  Assuming you know what's best for someone else, and in these people's cases, someone else you've never met and know nothing about, is arrogant, ignorant, condescending....I could go on.  I'm also going to go out on a limb and assume none of these are attributes the Bible endorses.  You're free to have these opinions, just keep them out of the faces of people who have enough on their plate already.  And P.S protestors, it was Sunday.  They don't do abortions on Sunday.  Likely you were just annoying new mothers and women with cancer.  Bra-vo.

To finish up, I love, love, love how this man says heroin.

And this here I need to watch asap.  As soon as I can find it anyways lol.  What happened to Mike Meyers' career???

Thanks for hanging in there with me.  I know this was a lot of volume!

"Happiness can only exist in acceptance." - George Orwell