And the Beat Goes On...

Wow. It has been a long, long time and here I am in the program. I would like to say that I'm diving in head first, but the way our classes are structured, it's more like putting a toe in the surf. At my school clinicals don't start until the second semester of your sophomore year, so we're going over nurse practice acts... theories... conceptual frameworks... you alseep yet? :) It's not a terrible way of going about things but I think that after 3 semesters of pre-req's, we all want some action. I guess we'll be waiting a bit.

The Heart of a Frog

I just re-read my last post and decided I need to lay of the caffeine a bit. I also realized that I had my most awesgusting (combo of awesome and disgusting. I'm trying it out) lab to date; the cardiac lab. It is two days until Halloween, so it's the perfect time to write about it. In somewhat similar fashion to the frog leg lab, we once again sliced and diced our little Kermits in the name of science. They were drugged and a good portion of their brain was removed, but the autonomic nervous system was still in high gear. being the not-so-natural amalgam of surgeon and mad scientist that I am, I LOVED IT.

I made an incision from the chin to the abdomen, cut through the ribs at either side of the sternum, removed the pericardium and there it was... a beating heart. I have heard stories of people performing a heart massage in which a person's heart is actually in your hands as you attempt to maintain circulation in cardiac arrest cases... This is nowhere near the importance of that procedure, but it was still pretty flippin' cool. We hooked up electrodes to the sinus venosus to test the effect of electric shock on pacemaker potentials and flooded the pericardium with an assortment of neurotransmitters and temerature controls to measure their effect on heartrate and strength of contraction. Truly great stuff.

Of course, you can't help but feel bad for the poor guy, getting ripped from his lilypad only to end up on a table in a physiology lab. I have a great respect for all things living and I did have a small pang when the experiment was over, so i did say thank you in my head to Jumpy McHop Hop before unceremoniously disposing of him. Have fun in that great big swamp in the sky, Jumpy. You've earned it.

Evolution

Maybe it's because I have too many thoughts zooming through my mind at once or I'm trying to find my direction in life, but this morning I sat and analyzed evolution. Not the evolution of species, but the ever-evolving pathway that we follow throughout our lives. If we consider birth to be our own personal big bang, the events following it, upon reflection, are truly spectacular. What drives us? To what point do we map our our goals and follow that road? While I sat on the deck, sipping my morning joe, I asked myself what I was going to do with the nursing degree I'm going to get. In truth, I won't have it for another couple of years, so all of this internal rhetoric is either me spinning my wheels too fast or the basis for a commitment to let life and experience take me where I'm supposed to be. I still haven't decided which one it is.

What I do know is that the culmination of the love, hate, hope, despair, joy and pain in our lives are all players in forming who we are and what we're going to do. Have you ever had a conversation with a total stranger that changed the way you thought about something? About yourself? When you take a step back, it is fascinating how these moments and vignettes help to construct who we are. I wonder what I will do with my BSN. I wonder how and if I will incorporate the ten years of corporate information technology experience I have. Will I want to stay clean in an administrative position or get dirty in the trenches? For now, I want to get dirty. It fits who I am at this point in my life. What will the future hold? I have no idea. But it's going to be one hell of a ride.

Occupational Research

Although I'm not in the nursing program yet, I have had some conversations with nursing students and have found that there are some categories of information that are missing in a bachelor's program. The one I'm tackling now is specializations.

We all seem to have our nursing compasses pointed somewhere before we even start school. This is great, it's based on our self assessments and interests at that time. I have been spending my first year trying to figuring out the finer points of some specialties so I can have a better idea of where I want to be. Personally, I have an interest in Critical Care/ED but hey, I haven't even started clinicals, so who knows what will draw me in once I get started. I do know that I thrive in a stressful environment (I learned that when I was teaching autistic/behavior disordered kids) and I want a higher level of autonomy and critical thinking, something I hear men in nursing tend to value most. (Not saying that women don't)

At any rate, There are websites out there that have some good information on them as well as links to articles and association websites. Two that I have stumbled across in my early Sunday morning travels is Discoverynursing.com and Allnurses's Nursing Specialty page. It is interesting learning about the day to day and required skill set and it's helping me understand what I need to either possess intrinsically or learn along the way.

The clock is ticking...

There's a palpable tension around my classes. It started earlier this week The deadline for nursing school applications is next week, so naturally everyone is beginning their pre-decision freak out. Personally, I don't blame them. It's a pretty tough gig at my school because for the spring semester, there are only 60 spots and over 300 applicants. The official GPA cut off is 2.9 (less than a C in any class is verbotten), but quite frankly the unofficial GPA requirements seem to be around 3.2.

I have no idea how they work it, it's supposed to be solely based on grades, but I have heard some inconsistent stories, so I'm not really so sure. I'm not personally worried, I've worked extremely hard and my grades reflect that, but it still makes you wonder if that pretty rug you're standing on could, in theory, come flying out from under you. That being said, I have a well worded tirade prepared if they don't accept my four-O.

College bureaucracy is the ugly side to higher learning. From what I hear, it's just the way it is. My intention is to keep my head down, work my ass off and get out of there before I have to deal with it. :)

The Frog Leg Lab...

I'm the dissection guy. I loved every minute of Anatomy. The body is as fascinating as it is disgusting. Well... much more fascinating than disgusting. We recently had a physiology lab in which we were to measure and record stimuli and the resulting action potentials using the gastrocnemius of a frog. Apparently, the humane way to accomplish this is to drug the frog so as to knock it out, then give it the ol' avada kedavra (first Harry Potter reference, not the last) with a cleaver.

As ok as I am with the harsher side of reality these classes afford me, I have to admit, I did not love being handed a still-twitching frog leg to dissect. But, like the trooper that I am, I did what I needed to do. It was a pretty cool lab after all and it is good practice for the cardiac lab in which we hook electrodes to a still-beating frog heart. I enjoy digging into things as much as the next guy, but there is definitely something unsettling when the "thing" is still moving. I'm the guy that has a hard time killing the occasional spider, so the reality that these poor little guys are dying in the name of science bugs me a bit.

I think the best way to look at it is that by learning all this, I will someday be instrumental in saving lives. I don't think that my viewpoint on the preservation of any creature's life is a bad thing, I think it's paramount to what I'm going to do. I guess I just need to focus on the bigger picture.

Well... Here we go.

I sit before you having just sent in my application to nursing school two weeks ago. I started school in January and finished the six pre-req's (a couple organic chemistries, anatomy, psych etcetera) at the end of the summer. I'm in the middle of physiology, microbiology and cultural anthropology right now. There. You're up to speed.

My brush with the fates this week...

For some reason, I decided to leave for class early the other day. I figured I would get to campus and study in the library before Micro. It seems to be the case that the fates did not want my morning to start out in this organized fashion. On the way, I saw a younger kid stopped at an intersection, standing over someone in the street. After pulling over to make sure everything was alright, I learned that it wasn't.

The kid (around 20) had just hit a man (around 70) with his SUV and didn't have a cell phone. I called 911 and tried to help as much as I could. The man was completely unresponsive and his eyes were swelling quickly. As I was sitting there watching him and holding him so he wouldn't move while calming the kid down and waiting for the EMT's to get there, I couldn't help but feel frustrated with my current lack of knowledge. I have my CPR certification, but beside that, I was powerless to do anything. I knew enough to know that he was in bad shape and had a severe head trauma based on the pattern of swelling in his orbital region, but that's about where it ended. I stayed until the ambulance came, made sure the kid was alright before he talked to the police and went on my way.

I truly think that the situations that are put in front of us are blocks in a big game of hopscotch. If you actually land on the square, deal with it and extract what you can, you can come out of it more focused and ready to hop hop hop along to the next one. This one reinvigorated my thirst for knowledge and desire to make a difference. I guess I needed it. Still, I can't wait until the day when I can put it all to good use.