"Graduation"

Thanks to the solitary efforts of Mikey B. and family, we had a graduation celebration on Saturday. It was pretty spectacular. Picture an unassuming Veterans of Foreign War Hall in Brooklyn full of nursing students, tables with purple tablecloths, a buffet, an real open bar with real veterans serving drinks, and a two-man-band in the corner.




We were all excited about the results. Even Emily (she's just pretending she's not in that photo). She rounded up the Puerto Rican in the room and pulled off a little dance par-te between the tables.

While I was off partying with the chicken wings...



and trying on other people's Manolo Blahniks. They were lovely when Kara pulled them out of her purse, but as soon as I put them on I felt my heart beat faster. TACHYCARDIA, friends, tachycardia.


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Last Day of Class!

Roughly 15 months ago, I boarded a Jet Blue flight in Portland with 2 overweight suitcases and landed in nursing school.


My first nursing friend was Emily. This was back in the dark days before we had ever had a clinical, and months before we became roommates.



Now we're practically done. Looking back, here is my short list of things I will miss (read, not bring with me into my new life as a real nurse) about nursing school:

-Purple polyester scrubs. Above you see Emily ironing on her NYU patch. The patch I will really really miss. Especially since I only wore mine for about 3 months.

-Studying nursing interventions for 100 of the worst illnesses and then fearing that I have contracted every one of them.

-Class in a Regal Cinema! I have to hand it to our dean for arranging free admission to the Union Square Regal Cinema for 95 nursing students every Wednesday in order to attend "class" because NYU ran out of large classrooms. Yeah, I saw a lot of movies that term.

-Practicing inserting foley catheters, drawing blood, and suctioning tracheostomies on a dummy. It was fun, but it's just not the same thing as doing it to a real person that can squirm and yelp.

-Signing "student nurse" next to my name on patients charts.

-Power point.

-Remembering the answer to a test question based on an episode of ER that I recently watched.

There are many more things I will bringing with me. For instance, beans n' beer nights, my beautiful black littman stethescope (stolen from work and gifted by my mother), a love of drug handbooks, and all the nursing knowledge that I don't yet have.

Curtains Closing

The last week of nursing school begins tomorrow. It looks like I have been working very hard, but that was last week. This week is the savor-it-don't-stress-it week.

A few days ago I accepted a position as a registered nurse in a large, well-respected teaching hospital in New York. I am excited to become a real professional nurse and have all the responsibilities and benefits that come with it, but what I'm really peeing my pants about is not having to solicit myself anymore. No more interviews, no more buttoned collars, no more thick cotton paper for my resumes, no more phone calls and faxes to overwhelmed nurse recruiters. It feels good.

There are other impending endings/beginnings. The dorm life experiment will soon come to a close. I used to romanticize this aspect of college when I went the first time and had to live in spacious apartments with full-sized kitchens, a double bed, and adults with normal lives as my neighbors. Well, maybe not the normal lives part. Anyway, another impression of dorms quickly replaced the imaginary one when I moved into a closet-sized place that looked like the set off of Dark Water (2005 Jennifer Connelly movie that I didn't see because the previews scared me so badly). 15 months and 3 dorms later, I'm pretty sure I'm done with this chapter.

Cold Toes and Other Sensations

Friday evening I walked home from school around 8:00 in flip flops. It was December 1st and 71 degrees (that's 21 celsius to all you non-Americans I imagine are reading my blog). The temperature fell 30 degrees that night and by the time I went to work at the pharmacy on Saturday it was cold enough to freeze an uncovered pinky toe.

Life is changing almost as quickly. Today as everyone held their breath at the first sign of snow flakes, I arrived at my first job interview for a registered nurse position. In the interview, I was asked who my favorite nursing theorist is. Nursing theory may sound counter intuitive, but here's the thing: patients don't recover from a couple medications, an x-ray, and a blood test or two. It's not a math problem that works out if you have the right formula. A nurse's method of discovering the individual needs of each patient and deciding how to address them can hinge on strict science, on religion, on whim, or on nursing theory. And there are many nursing theories.

My answer to his question was Martha Rogers. When I watched an interview with her last year, her ideas about energy fields and unitary human beings went over about as well as my last horoscope, and I didn't see a way to apply it a clinical practice. I've since read more about Rogerian science and realized it's about a capacity to make changes. It's a positive theory. Unlike linear development theories like Erickson, with certian benchmarks of development (I hate benchmarks), Rogers considers life to be a process of continually repositioning oneself around unpredictable fluctuations in our environment. In a Rogers world, a nurse wouldn't assign a careplan for kidney failure, she would lend her energy toward helping the patient make individual choices about their health. All I know is if it were me in the bed, I would want my nurse to see more than a clogged artery, and ultimately when a patient leaves the hospital they will have to make their own health decisions anyway so why focus on the afflicted body part when it's the whole person that's doing the afficting. In the U.S., the most common causes of hospitalization are preventable or controllable illnesses. Nurses can't just pass out some pills and call it a day. So that's one theory.

A year ago I hadn't even finished a semester of nursing school and now I'm about to begin my career. The countdown continues: 14 days, 13 hours.