Hello everyone! It is week eight of nursing school for me, which means I will be sharing another raw update. Can you believe the semester is halfway over?

As always, I have learned so much in the span of eight weeks. I will say that we have learned so much now, I feel as if I know nothing! I have to constantly remind myself to take a deep breath and not be too hard on myself because I am only first-semester.

Registration is coming! This means, Second semester fears are starting to set in. The second semester course-load includes: Med-Surg I, seven weeks of Peds and seven weeks of OB.  In my program we have several opportunities for seniors to come speak with us. Well, during that session I was doing everything I could to not break down. They were saying second semester is the worst, and you will be miserable. They also said if you want to do Peds, you will hate children afterwards, because our Peds instructor sucks. I am horrified and dreading next semester.

Week seven was horrible for me, I did do well on my second Health Assessment exam which was great, but my weekend was not so hot. I hit a point of exhaustion and ended up sleeping through my alarm and missing my hospital volunteer shift, this is the second time that has happened to me and I am thoroughly embarrassed. I am already hard on myself and whenever I mess up it does not help. At this point I am struggling to maintain any self-confidence, because I feel like what little I did have is gone. That is the reality of nursing school that many people online fail to talk about, you do go through a slump. I also ended up being super late to work because of my super drunk neighbor, which was frustrating.

Alright, moving on to week eight, which I was hoping would be a better week. For one, it was a three-day week because fall break was Thursday and Friday. Monday I had my second exam for Pharmacology; it went fine, I at least did better than the first exam. Tuesday, my program had a panel of nurses event; however, I did not go because I was tired. On Wednesday, I had my second Foundations of Nursing exam. I did fine on that exam too. I did not score the letter average I wanted, but I feel at peace. This is very odd for me, because I care about academics, but since I’ve been in the nursing program I am really concerned with whether I know my stuff or not. Exams are a part of it all, but I feel that I know my content well and at this point that is enough for me. I am secretly hoping my grades will follow throughout this program… Does that make sense?

Week 8 was our hospital orientation for clinical! We are only in clinical for about three weeks this semester, but I am hoping to learn a lot from it! Our orientation was very brief, just a fifteen-minute tour of the floor. I am terribly nervous because it seems most of the patients on this floor are elderly. For some reason the elderly make me nervous, because they love to vent to me. After orientation we had to meet back on campus in the Sims Lab for IV Day. I will be honest, while learning everything about IV Administration, I was hit with my first overwhelmed feeling since I started the program. I felt really dumb because I was struggling to tie my tourniquet! I am hoping to get more practice in on the fake pads, this might help me some…

Anna