I almost forgot to mention the great wedding up in the mountains of Pittsburgh! What a great time. Other than my brother Steve pissing me off as has become a recurring trend, it was a relaxing and fun getaway, away from computers and TV's and more just being outside and enjoying the incredible scenery. Me and the bros played golf before the wedidng and that was a lot of fun. My sister-in-law took this pic of me....I thought it was a good one.

I haven't written in such a long time. Part of the time I've been busy, but for the last month or two, I really haven't been.

The third semester of classes ended in a few all-nighters. One day was by far the worst I had in the entire program. My group for one class had this big presentation to do in front of the class the same day 2 other major projects were due. That day and the week before it, I got to see how some women react under the gun. It was not a pretty sight. I suppose that's some of what I have to look forward to, since I'll be working with lots of women in the years to come. Other than that, the semester was very busy, quite stressful, but compared to 2nd semester and the drama of the bitch Peppermint Patty trying to fail me, it was not too hard.

My fourth and last semester is now officially over, although I do have one day of preceptorship left. This semester has been a cakewalk compared to the previous three. It’s this semester where the profs pretty much leave you alone and you start to feel detached from classes and being a student. So this semester I’ve mostly focused on trying to figure out where I am going to work as a nurse.

I started off doing three weeks at Shands to see what it was like there. You hear so many conflicting stories that you never know how you’re going to feel about a place. I think this is because some nurses rationalize any bad feelings about where they work away so they can feel better about being there. I think Shands is one of these places. They seem to try to put as many patients with a nurse as is humanly possible, and then some. The ratio of patients to nurses on the med surg floors is 7 or 8 to 1, and up to 10 at night. They also have a lot of LPN’s working there. And while some of these LPN’s are very good and may as well be RN’s, there are some that have no business being in the medical field. Overall, the attitude of the nurses there towards their work is pretty negative, and this mood often pervades the floor. All of this adds up to the hospital being a very scary place to be as a patient, and a very risky place to be as a nurse in terms of keeping your license, and your sanity. Add to all this a crazy, scary, and sad incident on only my second day there, in which one of my patients ended up in ICU and then died later that night, quite possibly due to a medication error caused by a faulty IV pump. These are all reasons why I now see Shands as an absolute last resort for me to start nursing. Kind of like Rufus Payne was for me when I was looking for a teaching job, and I reluctantly took that job. And look how that turned out.

So for the last month or so I’ve been precepting at St. Luke’s on the liver/kidney transplant floor. This has been a much, much better experience. The staff there has been very agreeable and cooperative, and I feel like I fit in well there. They have no LPN’s at all, and the staff seems to like the hospital, the job, and contributes to an overall good feeling when you are there. The patient to nurse ratio is a very understandable 3 to 1. I liked it enough that I interviewed to work in transplant with the nurse manager yesterday. The interview went well. I knew already that it was pretty much of a token interview, since she'd already asked my preceptor and the other night nurses about me. And of course they said I was a stud :-) We spent more time talking about where I would work than if I would. She's the manager for both heart/lung transplant as well as liver/kidney, and although I was technically interviewing for heart/lung, she wants me to stay in liver/kidney, where I'm doing the preceptorship. She thinks one of her liver/kidney nurses is about to resign and wants me to take her spot. So she's going to call me in a week and give me a better idea of which unit I'm going to be in.

That means I'd start the 19th of July. Which is perfect since I would be getting back from a week-long trip to the outer banks with my parents, brother and sister in law on the 16th. So I need to decide when I'm going to take the NCLEX....before or after orientation. For orientation, which is 3 months, they put you through all kinds of classes that would help on the NCLEX. So I'll see how comfy I feel with it later and decide.

One thing that’s made the end of this year of nursing school a little less pleasing is that I don’t really have anyone to share the good feelings with. At least not in any kind of a romantic way. I certainly know there are plenty of women I’ll be around here soon, although there are no real prospects I’ve met at St. Luke’s, but I guess I thought I’d at least have some sort of a relationship going by now. Isn’t that something I’ve been thinking since I was like 25? I just keep telling myself that life could be a lot worse and to be patient. It does feel better to know that I’m about to start a decent job in a career which I doubt I will ever have to leave.

Oh and here's a nice pic of me starting my first-ever IV. It was from my first semester, but anyway....