Oh . . . the things I dread

So to give you a little bit of insight into my weekly schedule. The week starts out on Saturday and Sunday preparing by reading up on all the procedures and skills we will be learning in Monday lab. Then we take a pre-lab skills quiz online on Sunday nights. The weekend is filled with reading on stuff I just can't believe that I will be doing. The on Monday we are taught the skills, Tuesday we practice, and on Wednesday we are tested on them.

I have already mastered personal hand hygiene, bedpans, baths, ambulating people (moving them for the laymen). And this week we are learning to put an NG tube (nasogastral tube fyi). Yep that's right I am learning how to stick a long piece of tubing up someone's nose, down their throat and into their stomach (making very sure to get the stomach and not the lungs). Leading up to each Monday we watch tons of videos on each procedure. I watch these wondering how much they have to pay someone to be taped getting an enema or a catheter. At this stage we are still practicing on Manikins, but I can't believe that I will eventually actually be doing this on a person in as few as six weeks from now. After all those times people have told you not to stick stuff up your nose . . .

So if anyone wants to be a guinea pig let me know . . . just kidding . . . I think they let us graduate right from the manikins right onto the patients in the hospital. I am however, looking for as many people as possible to practice heart rates and blood pressures.

The First Tank

So this week, the second week I had a moment of crisis . . . or a few rolling moments of crisis. The fatigue of running all over the place constantly, not being able to keep up the housework became really overwhelming. It had nothing to do with the academic work or anything like that, just the taking care of ordinary business in the middle of un-ordinary life. Comforting though to know that I will soon feel that this is ordinary life.

The true blessing was in the comfort of community. Today I was feeling totally better since having great encouraging conversations with Janet, Joyce and Jessie (that's right people, most of my best friends have names that start with J). And then after my long day of classes I went right to the pool to watch the kids swim lessons and relieve Jessie. By time we got home it was dark, snowing and I had an hour to get ready to go out with the girls. In the car Cayden asked me if I had seen my surprise. I told him I had not and where was it. All he said was "at home". To my amazment . . . when I arrived home the three above mentioned friends had cleaned my home from top to bottome (yes, people that is 2000 sq. ft of hardwood floors:). I crumpled into a bunch of tears knowing I am indeed going to make it through these years with such an amazing community around me.

And to top the evening off, I went with a bunch of girlfriends for an intimate dinner at Jessica's house to be with our friend Roberta. It was an awesome evening of sweet harvesty soup, wine, fine cheeses and chocolates! And to top it off wonderful conversation and refocusing of my heart and soul. I came home at 1am inspired and sure I can conquer the next week. What a gift of amazing women in my life.

Awesome Birthing Documentary

This weekend I slipped away from the hubby, the kids and the studies to go inspire my further studies by watching a prescreening of "The Business of Being Born" in Chicago. It was really presented as a discovery of this whole other world to medical birthing options, and yet it did point out the times when medical attention in birth is necessary. I would highly recommend you see this. Here's the website to get more info http://www.thebusinessofbeingborn.com/ For those Chicagoans there is rumored that this will be showing at The Music Box sometime in February. For me it was yet another boost in knowing I am heading down the right track.

Getting down and dirty . . .

Well the 15month decline into nursing, nursing, and more nursing has begun as 43 of us showed up for duty on Monday at the UIC College of Nursing. This is an accelerated program of very distinguished scholars from all over . . . all eager to start their first day of meeting the manikins, bedpans, foley catheters and bathing techniques of everyday hospital hygiene. It was a grueling week, starting of with many technical glitches on Blackboard (for those of my friends unversed in modern education, Blackboard is the technological, communication hub of every class now . . . yet another cost to you to print out handouts that they post of the web -- I think I may have already worked through 3/4 of a ream of paper) and ending with two days of 7hours of lectures. Our class gathers after hours on a Google groups where the fine points of the days are worked out together, like did anyone understand what that syllabus said, or does anyone yet understand what we are supposed to be doing for this 8credit hour class? And some of the more mundane questions . . . which are the best all white shoes to buy for clinicals . . . and an all time favorite what bar should we hit after Friday class. But mostly this week it was about survival and the hope that if we get this far in we can go the distance. It was a week of much doubt and confusion, but also spotted with moments of how friends and family will develop out of this thrown together community of sorts and how we may one day not have to fake that we know what they talking about . . . we actually will feel more a part of the powerful heritage of nursing.

Birthing of a Midwife

Today in the midst of the first week of class we were asked to share when the moment we decided to become a nurse was. For many this was a journey of sorts, for me I can remember everything about that moment. It was a middle of the night conversation with my hubby about where life was headed and what I wanted to do in life. Our son was turn 3 and our daughter 1, and I was beginning to be ready take on the real world again. Then he asked the typical “what if there were no barriers” question (I’ve been life coaching for five years you would think I would have thought of that one on my own). And the first thing that popped in my head was I would be a midwife. It was there in our first salt-box home in Rhode Island that I embarked on this journey into midwifery.

Of course, I took it relatively slow researching and deciding to take the Nurse Midwifery track instead of the Direct Entry point, mostly from the standpoint of wanting to provide more opportunities to educate others on the ideas of healthy, natural birthing to be exposed to some of those principle and to be able to educate from partially within the system rather than from across the street. So I began by taking a introduction to nursing class at a local community college in RI. From there I applied to two graduate entry programs, and due to prerequisites had to wait a year. During that time I figured out that I was not as bad a science student as I had once lead myself to believe and I became more confident in my abilities to handle it academically.

I then applied and was accepted to UIC a second time and was very excited. Throughout this time I became trained as a DONA certified doula and had several birthing experiences, and it continued to affirm my decision.

I know that in many ways the next fifteen months of become an RN is merely the on-ramp to my areas of passion. But am totally on board for being right where I am and learning and growing through this process. And I am looking forward to the actual Midwifery aspect of it going forward, but I am also excited to learn all sorts of tricks of the trade and prepare myself for the future.

I am also doing this with the load of a young family and that has posed many a stressor. But each new open door has also provided just the right people, care and loving for my kids and I will have to trust that to be provided throughout this journey, because they really are the most important investment of my life.

I want this to be a clarifying time and I want to see more of myself unlocked and revealed. I believe that there are so many skills, talents and gifts that are going to only be sharpen and honed by my new learning and I am waiting to see the merging of who I have been and who I am becoming. It will be challenging and exhausting, but I will forage ahead.