I must be procrastinating or bored

Yeah, yeah, I'm bad at updating. At least I'm not as bad as some people I could name... ;)

It came as quite a shock when I realized that it's officially November now. Halloween is over, I get to vote on Tuesday, as usual I will feel weird without a poppy on the 11th, and Thanksgiving will arrive before I even get a chance to breathe.

I'm sick right now. I started feeling yucky on Monday, but nothing too bad, just achy and tired. Then on Wednesday I was at clinical in a patient's room and I suddenly became very dizzy, nauseous, and felt like I was going to black out. Luckily, I was surrounded by nurses and they sat me down, got me some food and juice, and refused to let me get up for almost an hour. I was feeling pretty much okay after I'd eaten a little and rested, but my instructor let me take the rest of the day off, for which I am grateful. I went home thinking that maybe I'll catch up on some work, but ended up just falling asleep for 3 hours.

When I woke up, I had just had time to get dressed and get bored enough to call home to tell all about my fainting fit when a prospective medical student knocked on my door. Jordan had volunteered to put him up for a couple of nights while he interviewed at the med school. He was a nice guy, very geeky, from MIT, and a former Google intern. He was clearly not a medical student yet because he still had this bright-eyed optimism and excessive amount of energy. Jordan and I tried not to dampen his spirits too much with reality during the dinner conversation. Poor guy, he thinks he knows what's coming but he really has no idea.

Jordan and I had an interesting conversation about med school applicants after our prospie left. Apparently current students get to interview applicants and their comments are pretty highly valued during the admissions process. Jordan said that the majority of students have a canned answer for, "Why do you want to be a doctor?" which I would expect. The surprising thing is that if you rephrase the question to include a little more reality, such as, "You are volunteering to give up the next 8-10 years of your life to intense school, no sleep, and harder work than you've ever experienced. What makes that sacrifice worthwhile for you?" they have no idea what to say. It makes me wonder whether these people really know how brutal and pointless a lot of medical school can be, or if they were just not aware or willing to consider other options in health care.

I got to skip my second clinical day on Thursday in lieu of shadowing a home health nurse around on Friday. Thursday was instead spent in a combination of resting and shopping. I got myself a Zipcar and did all the things that I had been avoiding because I didn't have time. I even bought myself some snow boots and a tuque. Bring it on, winter, I'm ready for you. I also stocked up on soup to keep my cold-ridden self going.

Friday was my home health shadow. Sarah was very kind and drove me out to the agency office because I was in no shape to bike. I then followed my nurse around as sh met with a couple of little old ladies with minor wounds and caught up on some documentation. She couldn't get in touch with her other patients for the day, so just dropped me off at home around 1pm. I called Sarah to let her know she wouldn't need to give me a ride back home, and she asked me to come over and give costume help. She had a truly fabulous big floppy hat with ribbons and flowers on it and a long shiny purple dress that matched perfectly. I did what little I could to help her curl her hair in big bouncy ringlets and then went home to sleep for a while. At about 5:30 we got our first trick-or-treaters, Sarah and co. as well as another family with a pair of 2 year old blond twin boys. More trick-or-treaters followed pretty quickly after that, and we sadly ran out of candy before they stopped. I hadn't expected so many, but it turns out that a lot of kids get driven in to our neighborhood from the more dangerous areas of town. A lot of them didn't have costumes and were using their backpacks for bags. My guess is that was for financial reasons rather than the usual "we're too cool to get dressed up" reasons.

After candy dispensing, I started to get dressed to go to a Halloween party hosted by some classmates. I've stopped attempting to go to most of the class parties because they have devolved into loud and obnoxious groups of very drunk people, but this one was hosted by a different house and was advertised as being pretty quiet. Plus it was within walking distance and Sarah was coming with me. I had borrowed an amazing coat from the 70's and some equally amazing boots from Sarah, combined with a loud and obnoxious thrift store shirt and a miniskirt turned into something approximating a girl from the 70's. I made a valiant attempt at straightening my hair but it just wasn't going to happen. The party was fun, and not full of obnoxious drunk people. Although my favorite costume by far was the girl that came in a patient gown, covered in bandages, and with a foley catheter bag filled with tequila. I got home around midnight exhausted and immediately fell asleep.

Today has been lazy, I've just been cleaning up around the house, occasionally hacking up globs of green goo, and trying to get some rest. Probably should have done my homework, but it's Saturday and that somehow seems wrong. I'll probably still be trying to rest and recover tomorrow, so I can do homework then.

Oh, and before I go I should explain my decision from the last post. I've thought about going straight into graduate school and come to the conclusion that I'm not ready for that. This program is too fast to give us time to really apply all the things we are learning, we only get little tastes of applied nursing during clinical. I want to have the opportunity to be a bedside nurse for a while to figure out how it really works and have a better chance of focusing my graduate work on real life problems and potential solutions. Also, I've been a poor starving student for almost 6 years straight, I want a real job and some time to do the things I'm missing this year, like racing, dancing, and painting. And if I don't go to graduate school, that's okay too, since I'll likely make a better salary as a staff nurse than as nursing faculty. The main reasons that this decision makes my life easier are that I don't have to start working on grad school applications and I am much more likely to just come back to Portland in May. There's still a chance I'll stay in Rochester, but it's not real high.