December 21st, 2012!!

Welp.  School has been extremely stressful as of late.  Nursing school is supposed to be stressful right?  You wouldn't believe the stress my school has been under.  I invite the thought of regular nursing school stresses now.  Oh what it would be to just stress about school work, tests, and that ever coming NCLEX. 

My nursing school is shutting down.  This, that, and the other... they were told to shut down this coming September.  Where did that leave the poor students that were supposed to graduate December, three months later?  Oh.  They told us that we were going to be finishing school at Ameritech College- graduating in May 2013 instead.  Yes.  My reaction was have at least three melt downs, freak outs, and cry like a maniac.  December is everything I've set my sights to for a year and a half of my life.  It's what I've worked so hard to get good grades for, so that I pass all of my classes and can start 2013 as a Registered Nurse.  But they wanted my to restart 2013 as a student again?  I don't think so.

Well, long story short, the students in my cohort took the liberty of emailing the nursing board of education (the ones who make the decision about closing the school) to figure some things out.  We talked them into allowing us students to come meet with them and we told them our story.  We told them how hard we have all worked for this graduation and how dedicated we all were to our education.  We reminded them how close we were and the fact that all we would have left to take was our NCLEX review class and our preceptorship.  We got just about everyone in that board room crying and well... we got them to say yes!  Yes, I get to graduate as planned.  Yes, my hard work in school has paid off and I will be graduating in 5 months with a nursing degree ready to take my NCLEX exam to make me an RN.  Yes, the countdown to December 21st, 2012 begins!

I'm going to repost something I posted a while ago.  It's a passage from the book My Sister's Keeper.  It's what someone says about the nurse that is taking care of them one day.  It's something I have always remembered since I read the book, it's what helps get me through nursing school and what got me through this stressful few months of figuring out when and where I will be graduation.  The Lord is sure looking over me to get me where I'm at now.  

Quote by Sara (mother of Anna and Kate, who has AML)

"An oncology ward is a battlefield, and there are definate hierarchies of command. The patients, they're the ones doing the tour of duty. The doctors breeze in and out like conquering heros, but they need to read your child's chart to remember where they've left off from the previous visit. It is the nurses who are the seasoned sergeants-the ones who are there when your baby is shaking with such a high fever she needs to be bathed in ice, the ones who can teach you how to flush a central venous catheter, or suggest which patient floor kitchens might still have Popsicles left to be stolen, or tell you which dry cleaners know how to remove the stains of blood or chemotherapies from clothing. The nurses know the name of your daughter's stuffed walrus and show her how to make tissue paper flowers to twine around her IV stand. The doctors may be mapping out the war games, but it is the nurses who make the conflict bearable."

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My Sister's Keeper

I love books. I tend to like reading the less known books instead of the Harry Potter/Twilight fascinations, but I'll admit I've read those too. The ones I rant and rave about though are different. My new love is My Sister's Keeper. Most people have heard of it due to the movie made about it, but let me tell you..IT IS NOT THE SAME. The book is completely different and passes the movie in greatness by light years!! Everyone should read this book. There are some things in the book that I have to quote and put in here because I love it so much and the author has a REALLY great way of saying things. So, here are my obsessive parts of the book that I've read probably a million times.

Quote #1.. Said by Anna (Sister of the girl in the story who has Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia) Anna isn't sure what religion she is and where people come from or how they get here. This isn't the happiest quote on her opinion of how we got here but the author is amazing at describing this!! Also makes me so grateful to have the gospel in my life and to know the truth, especially in hard situaions like Anna is put in.

"If there was a religion of Annaism, and I had to tell you how humans made their way to Earth, it would go like this: in the begining, there was nothing at all but the moon and the sun. And the moon wanted to come out during the day, but there was something so much brighter that seemed to fill up all those hours. The moon grew hungry, thinner and thinner, until she was just a slice of herself, and her tips were as sharp as a knife. By accident, because that is the way most things happen, she poked a hole in the night and out spilled a million stars, like a fountain of tears.

Horrified, the moon tried to swallow them up. And sometimes this worked, because she got fatter and rounder. But mostly it didn't, because there were just so many. The stars kept coming, until they made the sky so bright that the sun got jealous. He invited the stars to his side of the world, where it was always bright. What he didn't tell them, though, was that in the daytime, they'd never be seen. So the stupid ones leaped from the sky to the ground, and the froze under the weight of their own foolishness.

The moon did her best. She carved each of these blocks of sorrow into a man or a woman. She spent the rest of her time holding on to whatever scraps she had left."

Quote #2 Also by Anna... Love that girl Anna!

"When you are a kid you have your own language, and unlike French or Spanish or whatever you start learning in fourth grade, this one you're born with, and eventually lose. Everyone under the age of seven is fluent in Ifspeak; go hang around with someone under three feet tall and you'll see. What if a giant funnelweb spider crawled out of a hole over your head and bit you on the neck? What if the only antidote for venom was locked up in a vault on the top of a mountain? What if you lived through the bite, but could only move your eyelids and blink out an alphabet? It doesn't really matter how far you go; the point is that it's a world of possibility. Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut."

:)

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