I'm now in my seventh week of nursing school. It's hard to believe that seven weeks have already passed. The classes are great, the content is fascinating, and the skills are challenging. But the most impressive thing to me since I began has been the people. I feel like I have sixty new friends and ten new aunties. The friends are my cohort-mates. Everyone is such an amazing person: the average age is 28 and many of us are married, some have kids, and many others are still single. Everyone has been abroad, worked with the poor, or done some other incredible life experience and we have so many rich perspectives to share with each other. The clinical instructors and professors are equally supportive and rich in experience. It's been a really positive social experience. So much so that I sometimes forget that we have exams and such. There is no competition for grades and our teachers won't tell us class averages or other details that would make us want to compete with each other. It's great.
We haven't done any exams or tests on any real people at this point. All of our clinical experience has been on each other or on fake simulation people (which is pretty awesome). We've learned to take vitals and to do a head-to-toe physical assessment as well as how to give injections and other types of medicine. In pharmacology we study families of medicines like "opioids", "insulins", etc. In pathophysiology, the content is hard to put into order because the human body is so complicated, but it looks like we kind of take it system by system. We're also being trained to "think like nurses" which is quite a difficult thing to teach. But we have practiced a lot of what is called things like "therapeutic communication", "motivational interviewing", and "health promotion". We do things like write reflections, have discussions, and hear from guest speakers. Although it is an arduous process, I enjoy the case studies because we get to pull questions from a real case and choose what we want to investigate, but in the end we all end up with all the knowledge when we share it.
It's not all rainbows and roses and some people are more easily frustrated than others, but all in all I think that I chose to go to a really wonderful school and that I got blessed with wonderful cohort-mates and instructors--people who really truly care deeply about other people.
