Nursing School, Part #1
I thought I would try to write a report on nursing school every month or so to let everyone know what is happening.
First, the basics, so we can all get it clear: I live in Springfield, MA, on the first floor apartment of a house, and the second and third floors are occupied by four friends of ours. We pop in and out of each other's houses, so our house is kinda like friends, or a French farce.
My school is the Masachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences (www.mcphs.edu), which is based in Boston but has a campus in Worcester, which is about an hour from Springfield. On the first day of school I met Jessica, who I happened to sit next to on the first day, and she commutes from Springfield as well, so we study on the trips to and fro, which is very useful.
Nursing school is a lot of work. The day of orientation we found out that we had to read 5 chapters for the first class on Monday, and everything has pretty much proceeded from there.
There are about 80 people in my class, of which 8 are guys and maybe 8 are minority--it's a huge group of 20 something, slim, attractive, ambitious girls, and now that they put us in white coats there is an awful lot of sameness around. I'm sure they are all very nice, but I admit I can't tell a lot of the blonde ones apart :) Since I'll be spending every waking moment with them for the next year and a half, I'm sure I'll get to know them well.
Everyone is taking four classes.
The first one is Fundamentals and Skills, where we learn how to actually do stuff. It has a lab section. This semester we are not seeing any real patients. We are practicing our skills either on each other or (more frequently) on "mannekins," people sized dummies that have removable parts so that they can have lacerations, trachs, and male or female parts (or not). So far the hardest thing to do is take blood pressures--I need to practice that a lot more! And I learned a nursing secret. The reason it takes nurses so long to take your pulse is that they are actually counting your respirations as well. If you tell people that you are counting their breathes, they start breathing funny, so you have to do it in secret.
Pathophysiology/Pharmacology is the big scary class. We have class two afternoons a week, and we learn the pathophysiology (what can go wrong with the body) in the first one, and the pharmacology (what drugs to give to fix it) in the other one. This is pretty much the only class that everyone is studying for, and the one that has the most to learn. I've memorized the names and functions of about 30 drugs so far, and we get 15 more assigned every week. Ah memorization, how we love thee!
Essentials of Nursing is this weird class in which we learn floofy stuff, like the spirituality of nursing, and random stuff, like all the bad things you can do to lose your license. (Don't steal drugs. Or hit patients. Those are good tips.) The professor has a crazy Boston accent--when I get bored I start counting all the missing "r"s. One of the things we learn in this class is, supposedly, communication, which is ironic, because that professor is the one who sends out the meanest, least effective emails, assuring us that we aren't going to understand the next class, and she already knows that, but we can at LEAST make an attempt.
History of Nursing is taught by this adorably mousy little professor who discovered at about age 50 that she had been oppressed her whole life. She is trying to get the students to read nursing theory, but everyone is too busy reading for patho/pharm to pay any attention. It's probably just as well--I've been doing the reading, and nursing theory is really very bad--most of it has only been written in the last twenty years, and there hasn't been any pruning of the bad theories. One of the major nursing theorist believes that nurses work with their energy bodies and create a pyramid of energy going up into space. No, seriously.
So life is good. School is pretty much as I expected--lots of work, lots to memorize, lots of science people who are interested in memorization and not so much understanding. I'm doing reasonably well in my classes, learning how to study better for the kinds of questions they ask, and (I think) learning enough that I'll be able to do a good job when I finally see patients in summer.
First, the basics, so we can all get it clear: I live in Springfield, MA, on the first floor apartment of a house, and the second and third floors are occupied by four friends of ours. We pop in and out of each other's houses, so our house is kinda like friends, or a French farce.
My school is the Masachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences (www.mcphs.edu), which is based in Boston but has a campus in Worcester, which is about an hour from Springfield. On the first day of school I met Jessica, who I happened to sit next to on the first day, and she commutes from Springfield as well, so we study on the trips to and fro, which is very useful.
Nursing school is a lot of work. The day of orientation we found out that we had to read 5 chapters for the first class on Monday, and everything has pretty much proceeded from there.
There are about 80 people in my class, of which 8 are guys and maybe 8 are minority--it's a huge group of 20 something, slim, attractive, ambitious girls, and now that they put us in white coats there is an awful lot of sameness around. I'm sure they are all very nice, but I admit I can't tell a lot of the blonde ones apart :) Since I'll be spending every waking moment with them for the next year and a half, I'm sure I'll get to know them well.
Everyone is taking four classes.
The first one is Fundamentals and Skills, where we learn how to actually do stuff. It has a lab section. This semester we are not seeing any real patients. We are practicing our skills either on each other or (more frequently) on "mannekins," people sized dummies that have removable parts so that they can have lacerations, trachs, and male or female parts (or not). So far the hardest thing to do is take blood pressures--I need to practice that a lot more! And I learned a nursing secret. The reason it takes nurses so long to take your pulse is that they are actually counting your respirations as well. If you tell people that you are counting their breathes, they start breathing funny, so you have to do it in secret.
Pathophysiology/Pharmacology is the big scary class. We have class two afternoons a week, and we learn the pathophysiology (what can go wrong with the body) in the first one, and the pharmacology (what drugs to give to fix it) in the other one. This is pretty much the only class that everyone is studying for, and the one that has the most to learn. I've memorized the names and functions of about 30 drugs so far, and we get 15 more assigned every week. Ah memorization, how we love thee!
Essentials of Nursing is this weird class in which we learn floofy stuff, like the spirituality of nursing, and random stuff, like all the bad things you can do to lose your license. (Don't steal drugs. Or hit patients. Those are good tips.) The professor has a crazy Boston accent--when I get bored I start counting all the missing "r"s. One of the things we learn in this class is, supposedly, communication, which is ironic, because that professor is the one who sends out the meanest, least effective emails, assuring us that we aren't going to understand the next class, and she already knows that, but we can at LEAST make an attempt.
History of Nursing is taught by this adorably mousy little professor who discovered at about age 50 that she had been oppressed her whole life. She is trying to get the students to read nursing theory, but everyone is too busy reading for patho/pharm to pay any attention. It's probably just as well--I've been doing the reading, and nursing theory is really very bad--most of it has only been written in the last twenty years, and there hasn't been any pruning of the bad theories. One of the major nursing theorist believes that nurses work with their energy bodies and create a pyramid of energy going up into space. No, seriously.
So life is good. School is pretty much as I expected--lots of work, lots to memorize, lots of science people who are interested in memorization and not so much understanding. I'm doing reasonably well in my classes, learning how to study better for the kinds of questions they ask, and (I think) learning enough that I'll be able to do a good job when I finally see patients in summer.