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!