Officially, I have about a month until graduation. In reality, I have 10 days, 3 clinical days, 2 journals, 1 poster project and presentation, 1 final paper, and 1 clinical group lunch left until I have completed all of my requirements for this program! I can't believe how fast the last 2 years have gone by. When you start, it feels like 2 years is FOREVER....but its goes by quickly, and honestly TOO quickly. I have never wished for time to slow down more in my life than the last 2 years. You think 10 hours to get certain things done is plenty of time, and then after what seens like maybe 4 hours to you, you realize you are out of time. But I guess that is just life, it is just more obvious in nursing school because there is a grade attached to it.
I have 3 twelve hour days of my Capstone left. 3. 3! I have really liked getting to be in the ICU for this rotation. While there are aspects that have been very difficult for me that I won't get into, I have LOVED the variety of what I have gotten to see. Intubation, extubation, rectal tubes, drains, every kind of line you could dream of, drips running through 3 different infusion pumps into 3 or 4 diffferent access sites, therapeutic hypothermia, ventilators, removal of care and death, code blues, gastric tubes, tracheostomies......I was almost bitten, even. This is what I have been waiting to see all along as I made my way through nursing school.
I don't know everything there is to know yet, and I still have a long ways to go before I will be a confident nurse on my own, but I am ready to start working on that chapter of my life. I am really, really, REALLY tired of having my hand held. Not that I won't ask for help when I need it, but I want to be the one managing my patients' care, not just doing stuff when my preceptor tells me to do it.
In other news, I finally get to go see my family in TN a couple of weeks after graduation. I miss Nashville, and I am happy we get to go when the weather will be warm. Sure, a beachy-tropical-drink-drinking-while-getting-a-tan kind of vacation is what I need, too.....I haven't see them since before I went back to school. Mike's promotion, my school, my new job last year at the hospital, plus some other things have gotten in the way. I am sad that my family won't be able to come up here for my graduation, but it is something I've just got to accept and move on. I would have loved to have my family and Mike's family all there, but the most important thing in the end is that I am graduating after 3 long years of pre-requisities and nursing classes, tears, sweat and hand cramps.
When I had to leave EIU after my sophmore year, I thought I would never get to go back to school. Especially after I moved up here and had to work 2 jobs to support myself until Mike and I moved in together and got married. I was worried I would just be the life-long receptionist who got talked down to by doctors and new-grad hygienists as if I'm not a smart person because I "just answer the phones". I was just never content with that, as I know I am a smart person and was capable of so much more. I teared up after I had gotten my acceptance letter and then I saw them setting up for that term's graduation because I knew in 2 years I would be walking there myself.
