Holy Hand Grenade

If you are familiar with Monty Python, then you can imagine how things are going for me right now. I have a final and a show on the same day, and I'm hoping that I blow them both out of the water. Fortunately, I think most of the work has been done for both of them, and there's no class Tuesday so I have to be happy about that, right? Now I just have to make some other people happy and I'll be good to go.

[Insert Interesting Title Here]

Well, these first 8 weeks are almost over and I feel like I don't really know where the time went. What I can say is that it went a hell of a lot faster than I thought it would, but I guess 8 weeks really isn't that long. My first clinical with a single patient was easier than the rest in many ways, mostly because I didn't feel like I had to scramble to find things to do, but trying to find someone's radial pulse when their forearm and hand are swollen up to about twice their usual size is not easy, and I failed miserably. Aside from that everything went smoothly. I finally got to see some physical therapy, and it reminded me of when I got injured playing soccer or running and had to try to build up very slowly, but to a much more extreme degree. To see someone younger than myself really struggle with things as simple as extending your arm is a definite reminder that you shouldn't take anything for granted.

Return to the Blogosphere

It turns out that the largest Muslim country in the world isn't even in the Middle East, go figure. That's the just one of the unexpected things about Indonesia that seem to keep cropping up while researching the country. Also, fried rice is considered a national dish, and I could definitely eat it all the time.
Once again, there will be another adventure into standardized test land, but considering it's going to be about nothing but critical thinking it should at least be vaguely interesting to see what passes for critical thinking these days.

This might be inappropriate but...

While thinking about the various stereotypes of nurses it made me think: how many songs do I know that make references to nurses in a not so politically correct sort of way? Well, the answer was: a few. The ones that immediately sprang to mind are Night Nurse by Gregory Isaacs, The Nurse Who Loved Me by Failure (although I first heard it in a cover by A Perfect Circle), and, of course, the nurse song from Animaniacs.  So, if you're interested, check them out at the links provided: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpS3eFqhxSQ (Animaniacs - Hello Nurse), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6oYyG0KcvQ (Gregory Isaacs - Night Nurse), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWRDZwV8jGE&feature=related (The Nurse Who Loved Me - A Perfect Circle). I think you'll recognize the common theme here.

Clinically speaking...

My first experience was not nearly as rough as I assumed it would be, although it did reaffirm my feeling that getting Alzheimer's could be one of the most frightening possibilities of getting older. A physical decline is something I think I could deal with much more easily than the prospect of slowly losing your memories and even the ability to speak. My patient, fortunately, was very friendly and I could tell she wanted to answer all the questions I had for her, but every time I asked her a question and she responded that she couldn't remember it was hard for me to ask the next one because I didn't want to make her feel bad about it, but when she did remember she was happy to tell me everything she could, and if I helped her remember some fond memories that she hadn't thought about in a while then I feel like I did a good job.
In other news: studying for the midterm is serious business.

Maths and English

Once again, arithmetic is the bane of my life. That really pretty much sums up the whole of my mathematics adventures in life from long division to algebra to calculus. If only I'd paid better attention in somewhere around 4th grade I'm sure my life would be at least slightly easier now, but oh well.
In other news: I've been trying to think of interesting reminiscence questions, by which I mean interesting to ME, that won't cause some kind of nervous breakdown in my first clinical patient. At this point I've pretty much eliminated anything war related, and decided I'll try to stick to the economic, social and cultural aspects of life that have changed. Mostly because certain folks (i.e. politricksters, talking heads, and every other pundit) want to compare what we are going through now to the Great Depression, and, although I'll grant there are some similarities, I'm pretty much of the opinion that they are full of hot air and need to go down like the Hindenburg. For anyone really interested in the current economic situation outside of the malarkey being spouted on Fox News and CNN 24/7, and you have an hour to burn, I recommend this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jj8rMwdQf6k

You're only as old as the last time you changed your mind

I heard in a song once that "life is a series of serious choices." In quite a few ways this sums up why I decided to study nursing. When I started at FSU my plan was to go into MIS (Management Information Systems, i.e. computer network management). Unfortunately, I made the wrong plan, and for various reasons I ended up with a degree in Anthropology which I planned on pursuing a Masters or Doctoral degree in Ethnomusicology, which is the study of indigenous, and sometimes not so indigenous, music from around the world. Now, to me it is still a very interesting thing to study, but after graduating and working for a year and trying to figure out where I wanted to go to school I realized that I would be in school for probably another 10 years when you consider the amount of time I'd be spending in school and doing fieldwork. This seemed like a lot to do when what I really loved about music was playing it, and not necessarily playing completely traditional music for that matter. So I scrapped that idea and started thinking about what to do, again. Economics was the next in line at that point because it was a subject I was always interested in, but after seeing that what was being taught didn't exactly jive with what I thought about it, or with what kind of work I thought I'd be doing, I started to think a bit differently about school and mostly why I was going to school. Thinking economically it seemed like a huge waste of time and resources to spend more money on classes that weren't going to help me do anything productive after I had taken them, and after working in an office for a couple of years I realized sitting in front of a computer all day wasn't exactly the most exciting prospect for a life long career, even if what most people seemed to be doing was looking at facebook, wikipedia, or lolcats all day (ya rly!). I knew, in a sense, what I wanted from an occupation for a long time: something that involved thinking and physical activity, that let me feel like I had done something after working everyday, that made me feel like I was doing something good for people, that would pay me enough to not live in a cardboard box, and, especially with this whole recession thing, a job where I could actually get hired. I am also generally interested in the healthcare field, mostly because I see it as one of the biggest problems facing every industrialized country on earth. Considering the nursing shortage we hear so much about (http://www.aacn.nche.edu/media/factsheets/nursingshortage.htm) it seemed like being a nurse would be a good way to satisfy my aforementioned job criteria as well as learn something about the healthcare industry from the inside and maybe help rein in those exponentially rising healthcare costs in some extremely fractional sort of way (of course, as an armchair economist I do realize the power of aggregates). Hopefully, I'll be able to figure out why things like this: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/regional/item_SkzPo06w424s4Jf7BXzk2K happen, too.
For the specifics of what I want to do within the profession itself, well, I really don't want to say anything because, judging from the past, I'm sure it will change, but at the moment something involving surgery seems like it would interest me the most, but whether that would be a perioperative nurse or nurse anesthetist I can't really say. Working in the ICU or ER also seem like good choices for me, with the common string between all these being that I'd rather deal with something immediately life threatening rather than try to convince people that they should be eating more than eggs, red meat, potatoes, bread, and soda all day because, in my experience, it never works until they are about to get quadruple bypass surgery done, and even then it's 50-50 at best.