Did I REALLY sign up for this??

That's right, it's the FINAL COUNTDOWN!!! I mean can you even say that without singing that song? TWENTY EIGHT days until my LAST assignment is due!!!! Wooooooofreakinghoooooo!! Honestly, I could NOT be happier that this time in my life is almost OVER!!! No more school for me EVER!!!!!! Of course everyone is all like, "Yeah you say that now but you'll go back and get your DNP"...um NO! No I won't. I have NO inclination, nor desire to go on in schooling. Of course this is a personal decision based on where I am in life, not anything against getting the DNP. If I were younger I would probably go ahead and pursue this but at my age I just don't think it's financially feasible for me to continue on. While I think the DNP is on the right track, at this time I don't find the DNP to be very useful to actual practice. The DNP is too paper/theory/research heavy and in my opinion those things should be reserved for the PhD. If advanced practice want...

It's getting closer and closer. Only 4 1/2 more months of graduate school left and then I will be FINISHED with school forever!!! This semester I am in Adult. I have to have 240 clinical hours and 240 patients logged by the end of April. I'm severely lagging behind...as of right now I only have 116 hours. I probably have more patients than hours but I'm not even sure about that. All I know is the next month and a half are probably going to be pretty hectic. I am doing clinicals at two different sites, one is a family practice and the other is a walk in/urgent care clinic. I have to admit, I am LOVING the walk in clinic. As I may or may not have said, I'm not sure that family practice is my forte. There are so many illnesses, and I just don't know that dealing with everyone's multiple chronic illnesses is for me. I love the fact that in the urgent care clinic patients are coming in for one one thing (usually). They come in with their specific symptoms, you ...

Let's talk children. In my last semester I had Peds and Policy. To be honest I wasn't really looking forward to my Peds rotation. Although children have never really been my thing, for some reason they always seem to love me. I think I was worried about the fact that I still don't feel that sure about all of the disease processes of the adult body, much less the diseases of little people. Hindsight was that I shouldn't have worried. Of course that's hindsight on basically all the classes I've taken. I have found that I've needlessly worried over each and every class for nothing. Up until this point I have gotten straight A's, well except for that B that I completely eeked out in Patho (man was that a stressful semester). Another tidbit of advice, if there are FB pages set up for your school then go ahead and join them, they're a great place to get information. On the flip side of that though, DON'T visit them too often, and DON'T let everyo...

So I was just reading back over my last post (which got several comments thank you very much!!) and I noticed that I totally skipped posting a single thing about my Women's Health semester. Of course to give myself some credit, the summer semesters are JAMPACKED with information all into two little months. So to go back a little I'll just say I LOVED my WH clinical. I can't tell if my love stemmed from actually loving the rotation or if I was just loving actually "practicing" as a NP! My preceptor was THE BEST! Seriously, I have been so blessed so far to not only have to go on a full out man hunt for my preceptors (no you don't understand how hard that is) as well as how great my preceptors are. In WH I thankfully had an "in" as I have been friends with the office manager of an OBGYN's office for over 16 years now. When the time came she was more than gracious and helpful to me and I'll love her forever for it!! Speaking of which, now that I ...

So tomorrow starts my fourth semester. Although I am excited (and quite a bit nervous) about starting clinicals, I have to admit that I'm still sad that my summer "break" is over... Normally on the first day of a new semester I stalk the website & wait for all of the information to come up. Then I sit down & put all of the due dates on my calendar and start obsessing over all of the information that I have flooding my brain. But guess what I am choosing to do this time instead? Take my girl and go to the lake. Yep, you heard me & guess what else? I even thought about really rebelling and not even taking my laptop, but then sanity hit. So, even though I am taking 4 teenage girls on a small camping trip, I will still be taking my laptop & checking in with school. I mean I'm not totally crazy. I know I'll at least have the "introduction" post due, you know, the major stuff right at the beginning. We will only be gone 2 days, so I'...

Can I just say how MUCH I am loving my tiny break from school? I have a few days to feel like a normal person again. No constant thoughts running through the back of my brain about what assignments I have due, what paper I have to write, what quiz I need to be studying for, or did I miss an assignment, was that quiz this week or last week, wait there was a quiz??!! You get my point. These few weeks have given me the recharge I needed to plunge back into the thick of it, especially since summer semesters are particularly brutal. Trying to squeeze 17 weeks worth of content into 10 weeks is no joke. Thank goodness I'm only taking one class though. Well, one class, one clinical. Believe it or not I actually went and bought some books to read FOR FUN! Man I miss reading for fun...I love reading. Right now I'm reading two books and although I know I probably won't finish them before the semester starts back (I mean there is still work and my child and of course several season...