big bang

School is off to a bang. Seems like this semester has already been forever long ... it's only been a week. *sigh* I'm not partial to starting off with a bang. I like to ease into things. This goes for swimming pools, rivers, lakes, the ocean, and baths. I like to slowly approach these situations, allowing one small part at a time to acclimate to its new environment. Once I'm in over my head, I tend to speed up a bit. This business of getting thrown into the deep end of classes right from the get-go is definitely intruding upon my comfort zone.

Pharmacology might become interesting if the instructor ever runs out of anecdotes regarding his wife's ill health. Apparently he is married to a medical marvel. I think this poor woman has every possible disease known to humankind, and probably a few that haven't even been discovered yet. The other instructor for Pharm merely reads the powerpoint slides to us at mach speed. Seriously, she sounds like an auctioneer. I wouldn't dare raise my hand to ask a question for fear of hearing "SOLD! to the confused-looking girl on row three!"

I think Foundations class is interesting, but I'm so distracted by the professor's haircut that I'm not sure. The first day in there I was having trouble focusing on the material because in my head I was picturing a new hair style for her. Currently, she sports a very harsh page boy, as in Capt. Kangaroo. I think if she kept the page boy, but angled it along the line of her jaw, it would be much more flattering and less distracting. Today, I couldn't stop picturing her as a cartoon. All that aside, I really like her and the class material. This is the Stuff Of Nursing.

Foundations Lab is fun in a sadistic kind of way. This class makes me feel like I'm in elementary school again. Friday morning (8AM!!!) we worked math problems, as in dosages & calculations. It's just evil to expect me to do math at that hour. The way the instructor was teaching this was completely backwards from what intuitively made sense. Fortunately, R was sitting beside me and offered up huge amounts of help on the conversions. We went from math problems, to making an occupied bed. I am the Queen of making occupied beds ... oh yeah! Then we went into this whole confusing tailspin called The Nursing Process. I was lost. But then I was found for a moment. But then I was lost again. I worked on this stuff today with E and K, and I think it's sort of starting to make sense ... maybe. I am kicking ass at the actual hands-on stuff of nursing, but some of the other stuff is currently alluding me. It seems to all come down to semantics. For example: apparently you can say things like "headache secondary to car accident" but you can't say "headache related to car accident" because in this universe that's just WRONG. However - and here's the tricky part - you CAN say something like "headache related to brain ooze". Why? Because you can do something about the brain ooze, but you can't change the fact that the car crashed.

The other class is online. Another wretched online class ... arrgh. This one is called Nursing Theory & Research. And so far, I am not loving it. It's just piles of useless busy-work. But apparently it's all the useless busy-work that sets the baccalaureate nurses apart from the rest, or at least that's what they keep telling us. Somehow I have a difficult time accepting that anyone out there in the "real" world away from university-land is ever going to care if we know the theories of nursing that were put forth by folks who have been dead for at least fifty years.

This past weekend I spent all day Saturday helping set up evacuation shelters with the Red Cross. For whatever reasons, approximately 500 folks from LA came here to escape Hurricane Gustav. Seems like they could have gone somewhere closer to LA, but maybe they wanted to make extra sure they were completely out of Gustav's reach. I loaded hundreds of cots, blankets and care packets onto a truck and then unloaded them at the shelters. Oddly, I had a good time, but only because of the company I was keeping. Conversations with A are always weirdly interesting and funny.
On Sunday, I played volleyball for about 3 hours outside on a sand court with 10 other of my fellow nurse nerds. It was fun, but very hot. I almost accidentally clocked Smarty-pants girl when we went for the ball at the same time ... that would have been bad. Smarty-pants girl is tiny. Her head is about the size of a small cantaloupe. If my fist had hit her melon instead of the ball, she would have been compost.