Last Minute Life

After last semester, I was so determined to not wait til the last minute to prepare for this semester. Yet, here I am, 2 days til Critical Care bootcamp.....with a ton of stuff to do, and I still take the time to put a moisturizing/protein mask on my hair and watching the movie remake of Bewitched. And Mike and I have a fun night planned with my friend and her boyfriend. But I am not panicking, I am saving that for tomorrow night. :)

I am feeling motivated, don't get me wrong, but I guess I feel I have a whole semester of stressing ahead of me, I don't want to spend my last 2 days of pre-semester freedom stressing, even if I do have a ton of work to do.

I am busy trying to contemplate what to do with my Capstone. If we want to be placed in a speciality area, we have to have our resume updated and our letter of intent written by Tuesday morning. The thing is that I wanted to get to have a couple of days atleast of critical care clinical to see if this is an area that speaks to me. I could either love it or hate it. And I don't want to regret my decision to NOT request ICU or ER, and then find out that I LOVE it. Especially if I love it even more than L&D. But then I don't want to request ICU or ER or L&D and find out too late that its not a good Capstone experience.

Let me back up in case I haven't explained about what Capstone is. It is our last 8 weeks of our nursing program where we have no classes, no exams....its all nursing shifts with a preceptor. 8 weeks of 24 hours of nursing. It is an opportunity to learn, and really put all that we have learned to use. In clinical, we have limited time on the floor, and our opportunities to perform skills are limited. So, capstone hopefully is our chance to come into our own and gain true experience.

I know that I have felt the strongest connection to L&D, and the TCU babies in Peds with their trachs and vents, and g-tubes, and loved NICU the day I got to observe. I have felt bored with med surg because I never really got the patients who had a ton of stuff going on, and just felt like a pill pusher. I want to have the best capstone experience that I can, and be able to learn as much as possible. And I am scared of requesting an area that I either 1- Can't have because they don't allow students in that area for their capstone or 2- proves to be a bad capstone experience, even though I really love that area of nursing or 3- getting stuck in a boring area that I hate.

I just wish that we would have had a chance to experience critical care before having to decide this. :(