Nurse Sean (dot) com

Today I was over at my parent’s house. I had a great time! My Grandmother has arrived from out of town, and my Sister, brother-in-law, and nephew were there as well. My nephew is about 2 and 3/4 years old, so he is just a big giant bundle of energy. I’m pretty sure he could happily run in circles for hours!

It really hit me hard that I wouldn’t be able to be with them tomorrow morning. All the talk was centered around my nephew opening up all his presents, and how fun it will be to watch him be so excited! I guess the reality is that for the rest of my life, Christmas will just be a bonus. Some years I will have it off, and other years I won’t.

My Grandmother was a Registered Nurse, so we had fun “talking shop.” I love hearing her stories of how things used to be done. Some things haven’t changed at all, and others are completely different.

Oh well, I’m just going to eat some lasagna, watch some Christmas TV, and go to bed…listening, of course, for the sounds of Santa on the balcony.

Sean

P.S. Does anyone out there have a livejournal account and know how to go in and make all the entries private? If not, I’m just going keep my livejournal deleted. Going through and doing each post individually will take WAY too many hours. My parents now know I keep a blog there, and honestly, I have no desire for them to read what I wrote in some of my posts. Yes, I know, I have broken the number one rule of blogging…never write anything you don’t want certain people to see…because you never know who will find you.

*sigh*”

I’m going through some serious post-semester angst. Does anybody else experience this? I’m so used to being busy seven days a week that when I get a few hours with nothing to do, I start to go completely insane. I’m fidgety, I keep just wandering around the house looking for something to do, I feel like I have oodles of energy to burn. This tends to fade after a couple weeks, so I will soon be able to stare at the tv for hours like a zombie with no problem.

Fortunately, I’m working an evening shift today and will be able to burn off some of that energy. Of course, knowing the nursing profession, I will burn off too much energy and will come home barely able to walk, think, or do anything at all really. Some days I’m surprised I even survive the walk home.

But what’s better than that moment that you get home an collapse on the couch with a remote control and nothing better to do. That is until you realize that you’re surrounding by mess and the kitchen is full of dirty crap.

One of these days, Richard is going to go on strike and stop doing all the work he does around here. Then I’ll be screwed! I take as many opportunities as possible to let him know how much I appreciate what he does.

Anyway, I’m bored of blogging. It’s time to wander the house looking for something else to do.

*sigh*

Today was a good day! I finished all the post RN certifications needed to work as a surgical nurse in my city. This means central line care, PCA programming, direct IV administration, TPN etc. It feels so good to finally be able to do these skills instead of having to rely on others to do them for me.

I am just a bit sad to be finished. After three full days in the classroom, I started to befriend my classmates and have fun. But, it’s time to get back to the real world of my unit.

Speaking of my unit, I was able to be a bit of a hero this week. I spent the final three months of my degree working on a urology unit. So, when one of our patients started to have hematuria yesterday, I felt right in my element. I was really the only person who knew how to deal with the issue. So, I was right in there irrigating the catheter for clots, and continuous bladder irrigation was set up later on. It felt good being the “go to guy” for this stuff. That deserves a pat on the back for sure!

Well, I’m off to play on my new Xbox 360. I have had it for a week now. Yup, I’m in love!

Saturday at 07:30am I finished my last shift as a nursing student. I officially became a nurse with a degree and a temporary license (pending my writing of the RN exam).

What was stranger than anything occured while I was working my first shift as a real nurse on Monday morning. About five minutes into the shift, two eager nursing students introduced themselves and told me they would be with me for the day.

I was verifying doses of medications and supervising nursing skills that less than 48 hours earlier I myself needed to have varified and supervised. I was teaching, checking charting, and giving advise.

It was just so incredibly…..surreal…..

I have been a bad bad bad bad blogger. But who can blame me? I’m in the final throes of my nursing degree and I just don’t have the time. Today, I walked into the university and plopped down my final project of my final practicum of my Bachelor’s Degree in Nursing. It was a nasty project, as evidenced by the necessity of a table of contents. You KNOW a project is too long when it needs a table of contents. It was sixty-six pages in all.

Yesterday in the mail I received my license to practice nursing in Alberta. It is a temporary RN license pending the results of my Canadian Registered Nurse Examination. We have a horrible system here in Canada. Our test is hand-written and includes long answer questions. As a result it takes months to mark everyone’s exams. That means, I won’t receive my official license until April-ish (I think). Unfortunately, they won’t allow us to use the term RN. We have call ourselves Graduate Nurses (GN) until our licenses are permanent. So, there’s many months to go until I can write those magic letters.

My last shift as a nursing student is Friday 23:15 to 07:30, then I report to work at 07:15 Monday for my first shift as a paid, full-fledged nurse. It really doesn’t seem as exciting as it sounds. I have been working almost full time as a nurse since May. Sometimes it was paid, sometimes it was as a student. In the end, Monday will just feel like another day with pretty much nothing different.

I decided to work on the Surgical Oncology unit that I worked on during the summer. While it isn’t my favorite unit in terms of coworkers or patient load, it will certainly offer me infinite learning opportunities that I just couldn’t get otherwise. I also have other units emailing me from Calgary and Victoria trying to “woo” me. Seriously, if anybody likes the idea of people begging them to work for them without solicitation, become a registered nurse! We don’t have traditional interviews where managers ask us questions…instead, we get sales pitches

Anyway, I really don’t have much to say. I have just been completely enveloped in clinical shifts and writing horribly lengthy papers. Hopefully, as my life picks up, I will have more to talk about in my journal….not to mention more time!