Did I REALLY sign up for this??

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...

I know I haven't posted in 500 years, but I promise I'm still here....and I'm still in NP school. Thankfully I just finished my HARDEST, most stressful semester of all of my nursing school career. This past semester I took Advanced Patho & Advanced Assessment together. Can we say, BIG mistake?? Why didn't anyone tell me how time consuming and hard these classes were? I mean yes, I realize that we're talking Patho & Assessment here, but still, a little warning would have been nice. The funny thing is, I thought I was making the best choice. I mean it was between taking Patho & Pharm together or Patho & Assessment, so naturally I thought I was making the right choice, I mean wouldn't you think so? Well, guess who was wrong, big time?? Me!! Unfortunately, Pharm was WAY easier than I thought it would be and although assessment wasn't hard persay, it was EXTREMELY time consuming. Between the discussion boards (DBs), the write ups, the quizzes, th...

Christmas is over but I am still basking in the break and the fact that I have no school until January 18th. Sometimes I feel so burnt out, like if I were to just stop going to school tomorrow I would be ok with that...but then I get floated to Med/Surg and I'm like "HELL TO THE NAW!!" I seriously don't understand how floor nurses, especially Med/Surg floor nurses do it. I just couldn't see myself being a floor nurse for 30 years. There is NO way. Not too long ago I read a statistic that said the majority of new nurses were burning out and changing careers within THREE years of becoming nurses. That's crazy! Three years just barely gives you enough time to be wet behind the ears! But I can believe it. In my hospital alone I have seen almost a complete nurse turnover of the whole hospital. That means that every unit in my hospital has had major turnover, and that's not just older nurses, I'm talking even brand new nurses have left within a year of ...

Second semester of graduate school is going along swimmingly. So far no snags. True to what everyone suggested, I am so HAPPY that I chose pharm this semester instead of patho. Everyone in my program that I've talked to has said that patho is a beast, and I just couldn't afford that this semester. Thankfully, I heeded what everyone said and I chose pharm, which has been surprisingly easy. We just recently took our midterm and I only missed three, not too shabby. As I said in my last post, I'm also taking research as well. Another blessing. Everyone said with research it all depended on the teacher, and again, THANKFULLY I got a GREAT teacher! Something else that's different about this semester is the time. Starting my program in the summer I just assumed that every semester would be as jam packed as the summer, but it's not. The regular semesters are nowhere NEAR as packed together as the summer semester. Of course they're trying to jam 4 months into two months ...

Yep, you heard me right, one semester down, and only 6 more to go! So, there were a few changes that I had to make in order to get all of my semesters in line and in making those changes I went from 8 semesters to 7, which means instead of graduating December 2017, I'll now graduate in August of 2017. I know it's just one semester less, but that's 4 months sooner and that makes me excited. So on to how this first semester was. First of all, I took two "easy" classes. I had Nursing Theory and Advanced Roles. While I disliked Theory very much, I felt ok about AR. Also, with summer being an abbreviated semester, it took a minute to get used to so many things being due all at once. Since my school is online there are discussion boards that have to be done every week. Usually there were 2-3 topics due each week where we had to post an initial discussion and then respond to at least 2 of the classmates postings. This was fine. The only real pain was that the postings ...