Hello World, You Terrify Me

I wrote a "History 225: The History of British Columbia" final exam today and, with the completion of a 3 page essay on Japanese Canadians, internment camps and "The Iron Chink" officially finished my four year long Bachelor of Science in Nursing. It seems fitting to me that a program with so very many useless courses should end on such a note.

It all seems a little anticlimactic to me. I've been in school, just out of school or about to head back to school for as long as I can remember. I actually have almost no memories from before I was old enough to be educated, although I do remember trying to get my little sister to eat dirt when I was pretty darn young. It's taken me 5 and a half brutal years to get through this program. I've almost quit so many times that I'm pretty sure my friends got tired of hearing it. I've written so many papers on so many things, from the ethics of force feeding meds (for the record: not ethical unless the person is legitimately crazy) to the leadership styles of Hitler (charismatic) and Obama (transformative) that I think I could actually write papers in my sleep now. I am so used to spending all my time finding ways to not do school work that, now that all my time is my own, I'm a little freaked out.

That freakout, however, is minor in comparison to the one that is coming, very, very soon in my future. Because, as anyone who has seen my bank balance will tell you, I gots to get me a job. Like yesterday. Luckily, I just finished nursing. I could, probably, get a job starting yesterday, even if I didn't apply for another week. Finding work is not my issue. My issue is that once I start working I will be on my own, actually responsible for people's lives. Up to this point I've either been a care aide (fewer ways to immediately kill people) or a student (lots of people watching your every move). Now, according to a program that made me take 4 courses titled "Self and Others" I am a fully grown nurse, raised from my infancy of making hospital corners on beds and interviewing healthy families to a young adult, perhaps with much to learn, but able to function on my own assessing unstable patients and administering blood products.

I don't feel like a young adult. I feel like a gawky teenager. I'm all legs and my decision making capabilities aren't all there yet. I long for independence but, in every tough situation find myself screaming "I need an adult here!" I'm the 13 year-old who's braces have been removed too soon. Sure they were awkward and uncomfortable, but I'm not totally convinced my teeth will stay straight without them. Is that too many mixed metaphors? It makes sense to me.

I'm starting to panic guys. Other careers you get out of school, you take an entry level job and if you fuck up, even massively, it means something like your boss' airline tickets not being booked or a shipment of files going to Tanzania instead of Toronto. You work your way up the scale and, unless Daddy owns the company, earn the right to have any responsibility at all. In nursing they educate us, tell us at the end of the program that we really don't know enough and "all the best learning comes from the real world" and then hand us a patient load of 8 acutely ill post-op hips. I've started to have nightmares where I over medicate all my clients, someone codes (their heart stops, for the non-nurses) and then I sit down to cry only to find out that I've sat myself on a bed of used syringes. This is my life.

I know that it's probably all going to work out. I (sorta) know what I'm doing, and I'm applying to a hospital with a great, supportive mentorship program for new grads. I love the work I did during my preceptorship and I'm applying to work there too, as a casual RN. I only have to work long enough to make the money for an airline ticket and some spending cash and then I can pretend to be irresponsible again. But still, this is too close to the real world for me. I almost miss the bagel store.

Conquering the Mountain

Awhile ago B, her friend A and I did the Grouse Grind. For those of you who don't live in Vancouver the Grouse Grind is like the outdoor stairmaster from hell. It's somewhere between 3 and 5 kilometers depending on whether the person you ask is a tour guide (3) or someone who just finished the hike (5), and it's STRAIGHT UP. Really. No joke. It takes a fit person an hour or so to get to the top.



As you hike up this massive hill, cursing yourself for:

a) deciding this is a good idea

b) getting drunk anytime in the previous 2 weeks and

c) eating anything, ever,

you start to notice something. People are passing you. And not just a few crazy fit people. I'm talking lots of people. Some of them look about 80 but have the calf muscles of Nepalese sherpas. Others RUN past you up the hill, barely breaking a sweat while you begin to seriously contemplate going on all fours just to pull yourself up the next set of stairs. Just as you are beginning to harbour feelings of homicide towards those that can run up this thing you will look up and see the same person that ran past you 15 minutes ago running BACK DOWN THE HILL.



This happened to us as we climbed up the hill. And as the guy who had passed me back at the quarter ("We're not seriously only a quarter of the way up, right?") mark ran back past me at the 1/2 way ("I hate stairs. And nature. And you.") mark I turned to my friends and said "Dont' people like that just make you want to trip them?"



The thing is I kinda miscalculated how far voices travel in cool, damp westcoast air. Also, I may have possibly been breathing too hard to control the tone or volume of my voice. I'm pretty sure that he heard me because as he ran past he looked at me with a shocked expression on his face and gave me a whole lotta space on the stairs.



What DOES make me a bad person is the joy that I got from the looks on the faces of the two old folks that shared our gondola down the mountain afterwards. 40 people, 38 of whom just did the Grind in one gondola car? Those old fogeys didn't stand a chance.

Mille TheNurse Has Taken A Facebook Quiz and her result is: Confused

I am tired of Facebook quizzes, I really am. It used to be that I would sign on to my Facebook page and be greeted by pictures and updates from my friends, actual information that I might actually care about. Now everytime I open up the ol' FB my entire wall is covered with endless quizzes taken on topics I don't care about by people I sometimes just barely know.

Now, I'm all for taking stupid quizzes to amuse yourself/procrastinate/zone out boring classes, but do you REALLY have to put them all on display? I know our culture is getting more and more self absorbed and most people have an inate fear of being forgotten but I'm not 100% sure that this is that way to go.

Just for illustration purposes I went back 24 hours through my wall posts. In that time this is what people have found out about themselves:

-5 people are prego- 1 of whom is a boy. Not totally sure about the science behind that one.

-2 girls should name their first child Vanessa, 1 should name hers Sara (apparantly she will be a tomboy)

-Someone's Filipino name is Esperanza (don't worry, I still like you, even though you did a quiz)

-3 people are passionate kisses, one is a lip biter.

-Someone has schitzophrenia. That one might actually be true.

-1 guy is the element light and the periodic element Neon, Hitler, the pink Power Ranger, Codename V, chocolate ice cream, a rainy day, an oatmeal cookie, England, a member of the Psi Delta Fraternity, a beer bong, Conan O'Brian, blue, heavy metal music and an elephant.

I just don't get it. Add to all the quizzes the endless "Favorite 5 lists" and "Fan of" postings....does anyone have a private life at all anymore? I just learned through a friend the other day that if someone in a relationship changes their relationship status to single, FB changes the other person's status too. That means its possible that all the people on your friends list will know you've been broken up with before you do. How effed is that?

I want to know what drives people to answer and post those quizzes.

(You will all please ignore the fact that I just ranted about oversharing on a blog, the homeland of self-indulgent public displays of emotion.)

Dear 2009: 2008 Still Wins (But You're Doing Better)

Dear 2009,

So, my last letter was a little harsh. To be fair to me, being with you up to that point had been 2 months of icy chill. You didn't warm up anytime soon after that either. You taunted me with a bit of warmth and sunny demeanour and then snatched it away. I have to say, '09, that until recently I've still been pretty upset with you.

You may think I'm being unfair but really, you made liking you difficult. Do you realize I haven't sat in a class 5 days a week since my ill fated relationship with '07? After that ended I ran away to Asia and '08. It's actually kind of impressive that I stuck around you as long as I did. Especially when I think of the people I had to hang out with. '09, your friends suck. How did you manage to find so many stupid people and put them all in one class? While I will admit that there were one or two winners in there the majority of them would have benefited from a good 10cc of air IV. The friends that I brought with me from previous years were really the only things that kept me going.

But things are finally starting to look up for us I think. There is maybe, just maybe, a chance that we can pull this relationship out of the nosedive that was the first 5 months of the year.

You've really come through with this move thing, first off. Who knew that there was a nursing job that I would like THIS much anywhere in the world? While it might not be everyones cup of tea talking down people that do so much crystal meth their brains are so fryed that you have to trick them into taking their pills in the manner you would a five year old (come on, they taste good!) I really love it. I guess you knew me a little better than I thought.

And living on the coast is working out pretty well too. You've really started to come out of your shell '09. Partying in downtown Vancouver, getting so drunk that we get lost on the way to the beach, chugging gin and grapefruit pop out of a 2 litre bottle while sitting on a log and watching the sunrise? That's something I never saw us doing together. I mean, sure, you still have a long way to go to catch up with '08, but you're really starting to hold your own now. You're starting to let me stretch my legs a bit and it's making all the difference.

So, '09, I think it's time I cut you some slack. Sure you were boring in the beginning, but at least I got to spend a lot of time with Treesh and Meg and Robin before I had to take off. And maybe all we did was go to the gym and pretend to pay attention in school, but at least I got fit out of the deal. Maybe you just knew what I needed at the time. I still don't understand why you ever thought Tian was a good idea though.

Keep things headed in the direction they're going now and I might stop wishing that you were last year. Someday.

Millie

Confidential Smonfidential

Over the past two weeks many funny things have happened to me. They've caused me to bust a gut laughing and, as I like you guys, I'd like to share them with you.

But I can't.

Nursing is the kind of world where things happen that people don't want their friends and family to find out about. For (a totally made up) example cute old grannies go loopy post surgery and spend two days in a "gerichair"- basically a big highchair that only Houdini could wiggle out of. Respectable, stable, adult people defecate in their clothing, projectile vomit from one end of a room to the other and go so cucko for cocoa pops on morphine that they have in depth conversations with their bedsheets. People yell, scream, curse, bawl like babies, throw tantrums like teenagers and basically act in a way that would, in any normal situation, have other people doing the "don't look at the crazy person" eye shuffle. Alot of the time it's annoying, as crazy people take up way more time than the totally sane ones. But sometimes it's so freaking funny, I just want to share.

But I can't.

One of the major ethical things in nursing is confidentiality. It's not as simple as it seems at first. I mean, there's the obvious stuff. If Joe Brown comes into the hospital with a raging case of genital warts and I let it slip to Mrs. Brown that she may want to be getting some testing done herself, that's a big no-no. Pretty basic. But it gets a lot more intense than that. If I am at a coffee shop talking to someone I work with and I happen to mention that I know one of my clients has got the crazys big time and the sister of another patient overhears and recognizes me as a nurse from that facility and now knows that someone on her brothers ward is a psychopants and freaks out and takes her brother off the ward......yeah, that's a breach of confidentiality too.

It's not really fair. I know that it's important to protect people's privacy and stuff but really, what am I supposed to gossip about? When I was travelling I had no such boundaries. What I saw, I could blog. Even when I was in school I mocked the heck out of people on here. But now I'm on my own. I'm the only student in the whole facility and since I like my preceptor and don't yet feel confident enough to make fun of the rest of the staff the only thing left to gossip about is the goofy clients we have.

But I can't.

If I can't talk about things like (hypthetically) watching someone making an apple bong to smoke their medicinal marijuana and then, when stoned and forgetful, eating the apple and asking why it tastes so weird, what am I going to blog about? Is this the end of Millie?

Ewwwww

Today someone's toe fell off in my hand.

IN. MY. HAND.

I love my job

Disclaimer: I actually do love this job. And, disgustingly, doing dressing of the sort where there is the potential for toes to fall off. But it was still gross.

Nursing: Killing Perfectly Healthy People Since God-Knows-When

I took one of two pharmacology exams I have to pass in order to be a nurse today. It was open book (yay!) and written by my least favorite instructor. Below are two actual questions from the two exams. Don't worry, I know not everyone that reads this is a nurse, so I'll explain.

1. What IV solution would the nurse most question giving to a woman on potassium-sparing diuretics?

a) Normal Saline
b) D5W
c) NS with 40 meq K
d) water

Ok, here's the breakdown. Normal saline is just what it sounds like. Normal. A-OK. D5W just has some extra sugars in it. As long as she's not diabetic it's also par for the course. I would be seriously cautious giving normal saline with added potassium (K) as the meds she's on makes your body hold onto potassium like an OCD hermit holds onto tupperware. Apparently that was the right answer. Which at first makes sense. Giving extra potassium makes your body do fun things like have major seizures. Not cool. The only thing that makes this 100% wrong is that you also have the option to choose d) water. Giving extra potassium= possible bad things. Giving WATER through an IV line makes this happen:

That's right. Injecting water into the blood stream makes your red blood cells swell up and BURST. Your blood sees the water and guzzles it, frat party style. And then dies.

So, of course, when the world's smartest teacher (from here on in referred to as TWST) announced that the answer was C I put up my hand and asked why it wasn't D. Her reply?

" We wouldn't use tap water"

Oh good. We may make their red blood cells explode, but at least we won't give them sepsis. I feel better.

That was on the first exam. The next gem is from today's.

2. A mother asks an RN who gave her child a vaccination "How do I make her feel better?". The nurse should answer
a) "Don't be so weak, she'll be fine."
b) "Put a cold pack on the injection site"
c) "Give her baby aspirin"
d) "Put a warm compress on the injection site."

Ok, this one isn't QUITE as stupid. But still. I'm thinking that in response to "How do I make her feel better the nurse should, perhaps, answer "What is the matter". Because C (the official correct response) may make a slightly swollen injection site feel better, but it's not going to do a whole heck of a lot for anaphylactic shock......sorta a majorly scary adverse reaction to being vaccinated. When I asked TWST what I was expected to make of this question I was told

"It's right there in the question. She's got a swollen injection site."

I copied the question word for word. Does anyone else see any mention of a swollen injection site in there? I didn't think so.

You know what makes me extra lucky? I, and I alone, have TWST for a practicum instructor. Think of all the individual attention. I can't wait.