That all of my whining and crying about Stats paid off - I got a B. I have never been so happy to get a B before. I just as easily could have failed that course. I crunched some numbers before I went into the final, in regards to my weighted average. Conservatively, I expected a C. Even ambitious estimates predicted I would get a C+ or B-. I must have ROCKED that final to pull off a B. I am SO THRILLED!

Do you know what this B means?? It's an entrance requirement to the Master's degree. "Must have B in Statistics". So I will NEVER have to take stats AGAIN!!! *promptly forgets about z-scores and regression lines*

I also got a fancy letter in the mail in calligraphy type from the Faculty of Nursing (very professional, thanks) congratulating me on First Class Standing for this past year. Not much to brag about considering all my peers' Facebook statii reading "So-and-so made Dean's List!"...

Oh well. It is a small victory, and mine own.

Now that Stats is over, I am taking a correspondence class (starting July 1, web-based) to cut down some of my lecture time next fall. However summer is officially a break for us and I technically don't HAVE to do any more school work. I just want to. That class appears to be all papers and I'm quite excited to just go at my own pace for a change, however fast or slow that may be. And follow my own schedule. Big party this weekend? Cool, I'll just schedule my final for another time.

Lord help me, I'm a little excited to be cooped up in a musty library surrounded by nursing research, with no deadlines to keep.

I have a big summer planned. It technically already started. I spent a gorgeous sun-soaked weekend with my boyfriend. We went on a beautiful long bike ride through the park trails and splashed in the fountain to cool off. We then headed out to my friend's lake house and had a great party and lots of time with beers in hand, just loving life.

I am leaving on a 3-week trip to Thailand on July 13. We are going to see and do all kinds of things. I just got my updated passport a few weeks ago. Then, when I come back from Thailand, I'm going to be all ready to move into my fabulous new condo. No, I didn't buy a house. I'm renting this one too. But it's at least a million times nicer and better than the one I've been living in since last September. This current one is mousey (REALLY mousey), moldy, gang-infested, and rife with electrical problems. Not to mention the sketchtastic neighborhood. I can hardly wait to move. In fact I just bought a ton of boxes from U-Haul to get started. So on that note... have a great week everybody!

[Photo Credit]

Wow, I can't believe it. I was up until midnight studying last night. I was using some old practice exams and several of my friends called me up in disbelief because the questions were SO TRICKY!! I finally crashed and then woke up at 4 AM in a panic (after dreaming about variables, yippee) and studied some more. Eventually at 6:30 AM I passed out on my notes for an hour, worked through a few more notes, and then went to write the final.

I was SO STRESSED. I was pale and shaky (not helped by my lack of sleep, I'm sure), and just about in tears before I went in to write the exam. I mellowed out to Aqueous Transmission on repeat while en route to school.

Oddity of the week: While I was walking up to the door, I spotted a strange basket thing on the sidewalk. I got closer to it - it was a baby's carseat. With a baby in it.

I looked around and there was NO ONE in sight.

Just... a baby.

This was about 6 minutes until my test.

I zoomed into the school office and told the bewildered girl that she had to go and do something with the orphan on the sidewalk because OMG I had a final to write.

Last I saw of her, she went out to try and figure out where the baby came from.

The sidewalk was parallel to a small parking dropoff for a daycare so my assumption is someone loaded up the car and forgot the baby...... :S

ANYWAY, I went in to write the exam, and to my IMMENSE RELIEF it wasn't impossible. I mean, it sure as hell wasn't easy. It was still one of the hardest tests I've ever written.... but I was able to answer all of the questions (right or wrong, at least they had an answer!) and I finished in time with about 10 minutes to review my work.

Big shoutout to my amazing man who hooked me up with his copy of the textbook, study solutions guide (infinitely useful!!), and even a full-featured calculator that shaved precious minutes off of my calculations and showed the whole entry line so I could easily double check my inputs!! Better yet when he stayed up till midnight to help me study and offered to come over before work this morning too <3

Immediately after handing it in, I burst into song and we went out to relish the gorgeous afternoon with beers and pub food on a restaurant patio. Management was kind enough to give us a free round of "Crispy Crunch" shots. Tasty!

That's Mental Illness, not myocardial infarction, except those are pretty common too.

One of my oldest, bestest friends, who actually completed half of her nursing after-degree and quit because she hated it, may very well be suffering from major depression. She's one of the most amazing people I know. When she feels like herself, she's funny, SO intelligent, adventurous, and free-spirited.

I spent an hour on the phone with her this afternoon talking about nothing much and then we started talking about her life and where she is with it.

She's not happy or remotely satisfied with her choices and she feels like she's 'running out of time' to pull her shit together. We're the same age. This same conversation has been happening for years. She's opposite of me - where I went globetrotting after high school, she went straight to university and took a degree in something that doesn't interest her, hoping she'd find herself. She still hasn't.

Anyway it started with a regular girlchat and morphed into me using my psych skills on her. She expressed fear and doubt about whether she was ever going to be happy and questioned the validity of seeking medical help. I told her in no uncertain terms that antidepressants and mood stabilizers were just one small piece of overall therapy. They would help her feel well enough to start seeking ways to get more from her life. They would provide the boost.

I then heard her out and repeated parts of her narrative back to her to really emphasize some of the self-defeating thoughts she was having. We then discussed how regular exercise might really help her feel better. I really promoted some of the AMAZING psych programs I've seen while I have been on my clinical rotations.

I finished the conversation with this:

I care about YOU. I could give a shit whether you stay in school for the rest of your life or never step foot in a classroom again. I don't care whether you go be a carpenter or a business executive or a drifter. All I have ever wanted is for you to be happy and it kills me that you haven't found that.

She agreed to seek help.

I still consider her a suicide risk if she doesn't get help soon. If there's nothing else in the world that I learn from nursing, I am grateful that I learned just enough to help my friend feel hope.

Mental health issues are everywhere, people. Don't sleep though your Psych classes.

Well, sometimes.

I really do apologize for the dearth of posts in the last couple of months (wow, has it really been that long?). I was/am still dealing with some personal stuff that I'd rather not air on the interweb but school-wise everything is going very well! We finished off the second semester in mid-April and I did decently, still hopefully in the running for a second year scholarship although I lost my tenuous grip on Dean's list. But I'm okay with that - the semester was intense!

Oh wow, our last class in Physiology was very exciting! Note to future students - do not plan to have a 3 hour class on Friday from 2 to 5. It feels more like a 6 hour class. She was about 6 or 7 months pregnant and I'm sure she was as glad to be done as we were. She was a great prof, really knowledgable, but she had the most unfortunate monotone voice. I ended up being conditioned to fall asleep at the sound of her lecturing :)

The Micro test was the hardest of all the finals. I studied like I'd studied for her previous tests but unfortunately she amped the difficulty like 35% for the final. It was really hard and I came out of there feeling like I'd been punched in the gut. There were short answer questions on there that I didn't see coming and unfortunately a zillion questions on the actions of antimicrobial drugs. Luckily I "diagnosed" the short answer infection correctly as malaria and was able to answer all the related questions semi-correctly. Yup, it was a challenge. Of course, going through the class had me convinced that I either previously or currently was infected with any number of terrible organisms. Like diptheria or rubella! Scarlet fever anyone?

Psych, Communications, and Nursing 175 were just more of the same as last semester. Kind of fluffy, no real hard knowledge required. Nursing was mostly regurgitated factoids from Potter & Perry that anyone who had been awake during clinical should know - what is the proper positioning of the BP cuff? Where can you clamp the Sp02 monitor? Mrs. Brown looks like she's about to keel over, what do you do? And some of the more tricky memorized parts, such as bed positioning and the according names.

I actually enjoyed Communications more than I thought I would. I didn't really learn anything - does anyone actually have moments in those classes where they're like, ohhhh, now I understand human behaviour? The prof was a lot of fun and very spot-on in her statements. She also refused to play politically correct so we got to hear some really good stories about life as a nurse in a hospital and running a nursing home. The best part about that class was that I made some really good friends who have been pretty much awesome in helping me out with my personal life. Heart you guys! To celebrate the (almost) end of the first year, piles of nursing students went out drinking and dancing. We did a lot of fun things together in a week that will forever be known as Nursing Students Gone Wild, Parts 1, 2, and 3. I'd have to recommend that to every student as a way to end the school year! It felt so good, after a month of locked in the library studying for hours, to let go and just be 24 again. Or 19, in most cases :) One night I got a lot of free drinks for a variety of reasons - first, I got socked in the eye by a guy giving his friend a vigorous ILOVEYOUMAN hug, and all my friends ordered him to buy me a drink immediately, and thereafter mostly by guys trying to get with my beautiful, and single, friend Tina from our clinical group. Not that it worked but I appreciated the gesture! ;) We also tried out our nursing student pickup moves. These must be as old as time. We'd tell anyone who would listen that we were first year students and would subsequently impress them with our brachial-pulse-finding skills, and tell them they were experiencing tachycardia. Even if they weren't. More free drinks for Tina and I. There you go, you learned it from UgRN first :)

On May 5th we started our third and final semester of Year 1. It was a condensed Psych 105 class that was the follow up to Psych 104. 3 hours a day, 5 days a week, 3 weeks long. Actually, I just wrote the final exam a week ago.

Boy, do I have a story about this instructor. Maybe it's a requisite that psych instructors need to be batshit crazy - you tell me!

So on the first day I sat in the front because I was kind of late and the class was packed. So I sit within "saliva distance" of this very enunciative man and listened to him regale the class with tales of his residency in gynecology and how NOBODY should go into gynecology as it is clearly the worst field imaginable.

Nursing students present exchange uncomfortable glances.

So, okay. He's a physician who left medicine to pursue psychology. I could see it, and at any rate if he didn't like labia that was his own problem.

Then he proposed that we change the class time from 0900 to 0830 because, and I quote, "the lineup is shorter at Tim Hortons and I'll have a better chance at getting a parking spot." Uh, right. Well I have a problem with that because I work evenings from 2-10 and any half hour in the morning that I get, I'm going to cherish. Also hanging out downtown for yet another half hour before work isn't really appealing. Also I don't drive, I don't give a rip about your parking spot or your coffee, and this just might be the most self-centered thing I've ever heard a prof say.

"Does anyone strongly oppose this change?" (Note use of the words 'STRONGLY oppose'. Because minor opposition will just have to suck it up, princess!)

Nursing students present exchange uncomfortable glances.

Then, suddenly, a hand shoots in the air! A single, stalwart hand that, yes, strongly opposes self-serving suggestions by college professors whom we are paying to listen to!

I look up. OH MY GOD IT'S MY HAND! I turn bright pink but I keep my hand up. He looks at me with contempt and suddenly there's more hands out there. Yes, more evening shift workers who don't want to come in earlier and make their days even longer. Whew!

"Please step outside so we can discuss your excuses, uh, reasons."

We then form in a semicircle of determination while he goes through us, one by one, trying to discredit our reasons for not wanting to change the class time. Because the class time on the roster is the one we signed up for, we say, and because we work late to put ourselves through this class. Not that we should have had to defend ourselves at all. But I was still bright pink from being the Class Dissenter.

"Can't you change your shifts?"

Uh, WHAT? Change our shifts so you can get coffee? The shifts I planned around this class? Can I get a hell no?

Thus was the start to our semester.

More epic tales of Dr. Uncongeniality to follow :)

I had heart palpitations yesterday. You wouldn't even have needed a stethoscope. I think the prof could hear my heart beating from the front of the room.

and watching "17 Kids And Counting" in a state of morbid fascination.

I went to see my friend today for the first time after her surgery. She looks like death. The surgeons made a large-ish incision beside her right breast and apparently one on her back, which I didn't see.

Today I got a phone call from an old friend. She and I are still pretty tight, although we don't talk much. She's been going through some depression for a while now. She called, very upset, to talk about her recent visit to the psychiatrist. As she talked, I couldn't help but wonder if she was actually trying to get better. Seems to me that maybe she is buying into her own hype and believing she is a lost cause. I have never been severely depressed so I hesitate to pass judgement. In my opinion, I think being forcibly removed from her safe shell will "shake her up" a bit and she can see what she is going through from a new perspective. Got me thinking though, about how people need to take some ownership in the treatment of their own problems. You take an alcohol abuser, a smoker, someone overweight. No one is going to get magically cured in spite of themselves. You can't put down the bottle or melt the pounds off with absolutely no effort on your part. I was reading a fitness mag earlier and every other page was an advertisement for some new miracle pill, promising to shrink your body while you ate chocolate cake or were sleeping. I think (I hope) that we can see those ads for what they are, but I also think that the same attitude applies to other points in life. Why work for something when you can get something/someone to do it for you? I worry for her, but mostly I'm sad for her. It's heartbreaking to see someone lose their sense of self and lose the will to take it back.