Getting into the groove

Whew!!! What a week!! This week, I managed to:
1. Get through my first pharmacology exam
2. Get through my first nursing assessment exam
3. Turn 29
4. Make my lab partners dissolve into fits of laughter in the middle of our eye exam.

Yes, it's been a full week. It was also a very stressful week because on Thursday and Friday, I was taking tests.

I'm going to be really transparent for a second and say that I have never really felt smart and have never really understood why people think I am. I've always been disciplined and focused but I haven't always done well in school. But when you decide to do something like nursing school, there's no messing around. You'd better do well and get it, or you could kill someone. It's a sobering thought. Even though it's only been 2 weeks, it's becoming more and more real that being a nurse is a HUGE responsibility. Only really careful and frankly, anal people should do it. I fit that bill beautifully :)

Anyway, this whole week I was trying to catch up on my reading and really hammer out the information that was going to be on the tests. We were all nervous. Our pharmacology teacher had basically told us that if we've been A students, we need to be prepared for Bs. I wasn't feeling that at all. But all I could do was study as much as I could and pray for the best. We had a review session on Tuesday morning and I left there completely panicked. I felt like I didn't know anything and I saw many sleepless nights in my immediate future.

On Wednesday we had our HEENT (Head Eye Ear Nose Throat) lab and we had to do full physical exams on each other. We had to do in depth eye, ear, nose, mouth and neck exams. It was so cool. Except when I was using the opthalmoscope, (the thingy that eye doctors use to check the back of your eye) I totally had it backward. So the light that was supposed to be shining in my patient's eye? It was shining directly into mine and so I couldn't see a thing. "Why is this light so bright? I can't see anything"! I looked at it again decided to turn it around and see what happened.

oh.

Thank God for lab and practice. Imagine doing that with a real patient?! Mortifying.

On Thursday I spent all morning reviewing for the test that was at 1 o'clock. Oh yeah, and it was my birthday. Someone else might have been depressed spending their birthday underneath 100 books but I was perfectly content and too stressed to care lol. I went to take the test and I actually left there thinking, "That wasn't so bad..." The grades will be coming out soon so we'll see if my impression was accurate. After the test I went to the library to study for my assessment test that was today. I spent a few hours there then came home and studied some more. Happy birthday to me.

I woke up early (4:00 AM. ouch) to get some last minute studying done and then went off to lab. We did the neurological system today and got to do tons of neural system tests. Of course, I had the only lab partner with no reflexes so I was trying that for 5 minutes and got nothing from her. She was a good sport, though.
The test was right after lab and it was fairly painless. The teachers posted the answers outside right after it was done, which I thought was plain mean. "I definitely don't want to see those," I said as I made a bee-line for them. From what I saw, I did okay.

I came home and now I'm deep inside my bed, watching a movie, not doing one blasted thing till tomorrow...when I have to start studying for the the next two tests in a week.

Oy.