Torture Tuesdays

Well, my sister is married (yay!) and now it's back to reality of being a student nurse.

Last week was really hard. It was my first week of my Adv Med-Surg clinical (on Wed). But prep the night (Tuesday) before was BRUTAL. This semester we have lecture in the morning and then head over to the hospital to get our patient assignment for the following day and begin our work of gathering assessments, lab work, meds, & medical, family and social histories from the charts to be able to form our working care plan for our patient. I started my prep work at home around 4pm...and I worked all night. I think I got about 90 minutes sleep (!) before getting up to head back to the hospital. I was perky and alert for clinical, but started fading dramatically in post-conference! I skipped going to the gym as that seemed impossible. I went home and piddled around hoping I might get a second wind (yeh, right!) but I think it was about 5:30 and I decided to take a short nap...that short-nap lasted 10 hours! Woke at 3:30am, completely disoriented with date/time. I also found I had been sleeping with my bedside lamp on! So tired. I got up about 4 am and worked on my evaluations of my expected outcomes and cleaned up some of my working care plan-- all of which was due by 3pm on Thursday afternoon. Realized about 30 minutes before I was to leave for lecture that I had not done my clinical evaluation (of self)...so I decided to wait and do that AFTER lecture since I would have plenty of time.  

After all that, I ran home, packed bags for what I'd need for the wedding weekend and then headed over the mountain to get started on last minute wedding stuff. Silly me, I stayed up until 4am (!) working on our unique table identifiers for our guests. Then Friday morning I was up again early to head over to wedding site to continue working on getting stuff done in time for rehearsal. I was feeling pretty nasty as I had not had a shower since Tuesday morning (prep day) when I had showered after my aquatic class before lecture. I'm embarrassed to say that I never got a chance to shower or change before the rehearsal. I was so disgusting!! Stayed up late Friday night too working on lighting project for the dance floor, and then got up early to drive back to Charlottesville and back (about 90 minutes) with wedding clothes (yes, left them behind!) just to meet up with nephews and brother-in-law to set up chairs at the ceremony site. I did find a window of time to get my first shower on Saturday morning and wonderfully I got to take a second shower an hour before the wedding! Whew.

EVERYTHING went really well and came together in some cool, even unexpected ways! It turned out to be a BEAUTIFUL day (as planned, of course)! Two weeks prior we were looking at the possibility of two hurricanes...but one hurricane dumped early (all week) and the other went out to sea.

I focused really hard to get some good sleep the last couple nights. Made it to the gym this afternoon after Psych clinical...and now I'm preparing for another prep day tomorrow :(  Not looking forward to it. REALLY hoping that things will go much faster this week. I CANNOT afford to be a zombie the rest of the week, as next week I've got tests in both my lecture classes and will be needing to study all weekend, rather than sleeping!

If I'm going to get up and go to the gym in the morning (aquatic class) I had better get to bed!

Cheers.