Did I REALLY sign up for this??

Me & my fam (not sure where my hubby is in this pic!!) Me & my beautiful daughter, as you can tell this is from her SC Yep that's right people, IT IS DONE! I know it's been three months since graduation but hey, I've been decompressing!! Actually I still am. Last night I was laying on the couch with my daughter watching Christmas movies & I looked over at her and said, "I'm so glad that I'm not doing homework right now" and she goes, "Yo u're still not over it huh?" hahaha!! No I'm not!! 6  Six (APA wouldn't let me type the number 6 haha!) years of nursing and nursing practitioner school still has me traumatized!! But I digress. Let's talk about NP school. So here goes with some tips and insight that I promised. 1. Every semester you get the syllabus and trust my you will FREAK!! Now trust me again, STOP IT. The syllabus ALWAYS looks worst than what it actually is. Yes there are 50 bazilli...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Summer is here, well I mean not officially, but close enough, and this summer means school is back in full force. Of course by full force I mean part time. In one way I'm looking forward to the fact that I'll only have 2 classes at a time to focus on, which hopefully means I'll make straight A's. On the other hand though, I wish I was able to go full time, like in nursing school, and get it over with! Another 2 1/2 years...sigh. The good thing about this time around though, is how AWESOME clinical is going to be!!! I am soooo looking forward to my clinicals, all dressed up in my white coat and professional name tag! Guess I need to do some shopping before then huh? Going straight from nursing school into nursing, I haven't really had the need to stock up on professional clothing. I went from jeans, sandals and tennis shoes, to scrubs and tennis shoes. And of course there's the ever present bun that I wear, definitely going to need to get my hair did before then!...

I know I have been MIA for quite a while now, I suppose that's what working 4-5 days a week will do to  you, but I'm back and with good news, I WAS ACCEPTED INTO MY MASTER'S FNP PROGRAM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  WOOHOOOOOOOOOOOO!!  Can you tell I'm excited?  Doing the happy dance, doing the happy dance. Ok, to be honest, I've known this for a while, but since I don't actually start school until June, I didn't see any point in rushing to put it on here, but since June is just 3 short months away, and registration for classes start April 3, I figured it was time!! Well, that and I'm working in rehab today so I have a little time to kill :D  So, the deets. I am going back to the same school that I graduated from with my BSN. This is a RODP (Regent's Online Degree Program) where they assign you to a home school and lucky me I was assigned back at my alma mater, so thrilled! Like I said, I start in June. I am planning on attending part time, which equals 2 classe...

DONE with my ER rotation!  As a matter of fact that means I'm DONE with clinicals period!  Woohoo!!!  Friday was my last real clinical in nursing school.  I worked 6 twelve hour shifts in the ER & I can truly say that I would feel 90% comfortable going straight to the ER from nursing school.  Besides the actual trauma codes that come in, I feel like I could easily handle what goes on in that ER straight out of nursing school.  I thought that I would LOVE ER, and I did to an extent, but what I really found out in this clinical was that I just DON'T KNOW .  I don't know exactly what I want to do yet as far as being a nurse, and honestly I just don't think I would really LOVE any nursing job. I know that I want to be a NP & therefore nursing positions to me don't really hold a great appeal. That being said, I don't know yet 100% what dept. I want to to work in, and what I really came to realize is that I don't think I'm going to kno...

So yesterday was my first day of Peds, the clinical I have been waiting for since I started nursing school was finally here.  To say I was nervous was an understatement.  I was TERRIFIED, and honestly I have no idea why.  Maybe because it was the tiny human population?  Maybe because it was VANDERBILT, maybe because I didn't get enough sleep the day/night before.  Maybe because my best friend was no longer with me in class?  Honestly, I don't know why I was so skittish but seriously I felt like I could cry at least 3 times that day.  Ok, here's a recap of how it went & why it was so terrible & wonderful at the same time. Worked 7p-7a Saturday night.  Slept on Sunday until about 1:30 then got up because I knew I had an 36 strip EKG assignment due on Tuesday & I knew I wouldn't be able to do it Monday since I had Peds clinical.  Worked on my strips for as long as I could but then I was just totally exhausted by 6 pm.  ...