1st Year of Nursing School *Part 1

I'm officially into my second year of nursing school, with only nine months and three rotations to go. All through my prerequisites I questioned myself whether I would be good or smart enough for nursing school.And yes, although nursing school is no joke and takes a lot of your time, effort, and dedication I have come to the conclusion that I am both good and smart enough.

Let's start at the beginning. I've mentioned before that many times I have felt upset with myself for not going to college right after high school. But the more I move along through the program the more I am convinced that this was all part of God's master plan. I eep thinking that maybe if I would have done nursing school at 18yrs old I'd probably would have failed. I'm not trying to be negative about it or insinuate that I wasn't smart enough. I'm simply saying that I wasn't as dedicated or as prepared as I am now. 

Nursing 1, which was Fundamentals of Nursing, was fairly easy for me. I like to think that this was due to my employment at the hospital working as a nurse aide. I was familiar with many of the topics, safety, infection control, and protocols parts of it. Nursing concepts, care plans, prioritizing not so well. Familiarity to the other topics made a lot of it seemed like common sense and I say that only because that's what I dealt with a work. The style of nursing questions and taking Pharmacology at the same time as nursing as was the most difficult part of this semester. 

Clinical for nursing one was also pretty straight forward for me. It involved a lot of taking vitals, giving baths, and toileting patients which was what I did on a day to day basis at work. Now, collecting information, assessment, passing medication, and constantly being put on the spot when giving said medication, charting, and relating nursing concepts was something I as not used to. That took a lot of time to get used to. 

My assigned unit was a cardiac floor consisting mainly of med/sug patients with some sort of cardiac problem, step-down patients which is simply patients that require a higher level of care but not high enough to be on a critical care unit, and it included a section of either 8 or 10 rooms exclusively for patients who had just had open heart surgery. These patients would be there several days being closely monitored and then be moved to another room out of the open heart area. It was a great experience from beginning to end. I had the opportunity to insert foley, give meds and hang IV with my instructor or a nurse, give injections, etc. the list goes on. 

The best part of this programmed is that it is part of a hospital so the clinical experience are amazing!

I don't want to make this post super long so stay tuned for part 2 of my first year in nursing school. 

To be continue...

Summer 2017 *Highlights

* Trip to Ocean City, MD in June and August. For the June trip my childhood best friend and her little family joined us. In August hubby's sister was in town from California with her husband and children and they wanted to take the trip to OC since it had been years that they had visited and so we tagged along for that one as well. As always, it was a well deserved beach getaway.

* Steven graduated from the fifth grade and finished his last year in the program El Systema where he played the Viola for three years and taught himself to play the guitar. It was a bittersweet moment as that marked both the end and the beginning of a new stage in both of our life, Steven entering the preteens/middle school years as we embarked on being the parents of a teenager wagon.

* We had great baseball season. We made it to the championship as well as the All Star games and although we did not win in the All Star games it was such an amazing experience for all the kids. I am kind of looking forward to next season :)

* Hubby and I celebrated six years of marriage. I still can't believe that we are where we are today after all of our problems shortly after marriage. God is good y'all, God is good. 

* After two years of not getting our family pictures we were able to do so over the summer. I love to freeze certain moments in time to look back on as the years moves on.

*I successfully completed my med/surg rotation in nursing school. There's more to this story so make sure to stop by and read about my struggles in nursing school thus far, which will be blogged soon.

*Weddings, birthdays, pool time, gardening, grilling, and several camping trips filled up our summer agenda.

*My little cousin came from the Dominican Republic to play in a baseball tournament and after it as over he stayed with us until late August. He was able to come with us to OC and experience summer here in the sates. He was very quiet and reserved and it was like pulling teeth to get him chime in a conversation so I really hoped he enjoyed his time here. The boys and him got along really good, specially AJ. I'm sure he went home and had tons of stories to share about my little crazy family :)

*I am proud to say that as of August 2017 I am an official USA Citizen!

This was definitely a busy summer, or at least it felt like it.