First year of nursing school: complete. Early December: a long, welcomed, winter break ahead. Although with the holidays, travel, my little girl’s third birthday and catching up on plenty of things that were neglected during the first semester, I barely had a chance to refocus to plunge into the second semester, but January 22 arrived and the whirlwind started again. 7:50am Pharm: my first class. Then, a flash of studying, papers, exams, quizzes, memorizing, reading, care plans, clinical sheets… the next 14 weeks were off and running faster than you can say, “Pharm grades are up!!!” on Facebook. The [...]
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I’m done. It hasn’t quite hit me yet, but I’m graduating from JHUSON in 9 days. Seems like yesterday I was learning how to take vitals signs and freaking out about sign-offs, but I made it. We all made it. Now comes the truly difficult part–finding a job. To the incoming summer and fall students, I say welcome! It’s tough, but you’ll make it. A couple pieces of advice: 1. Always keep tupperware in your locker. There’s always food around the SON building (and the School of Public Health–they even have smoked salmon over there on occasion) 2. Take [...] Welcome to the first post of a new Simulation blog site! We look forward to building a learning community of interested readers and contributors on the topic of developing consortiums for effective health care simulation centers. We have seen that simulation pedagogy, while a relatively new area of health care education, is taking hold across the country and the globe. Health care educators and administrators are anxious to pursue the diffusion of this new innovation to improve the quality and safety of health care for patients. Our goal is to publish at least two posts per week covering a [...] It’s been a while since I’ve written. Well, actually, according to the admin, there was a bug that permanent deleted some of the blog posts (which includes one of mine). When I am able to lift my head out of my books, I will plug in a much better blog entry. I broke the law. My crime, in California it’s illegal to answer a cell phone without a hands free device, but when I saw area code 410 appear on my caller ID, that law was meaningless to me. After telling my passenger, “*Bleep* it’s Johns Hopkins,” and managing to answer the call without dropping my phone, I heard the words that I had been dreaming of…Acceptance! To say that I was stunned would be an understatement; truthfully, I had given up hope. It’s been over a month now since I received that fateful call and I think that it [...] On April 3rd, 2012, my world was shaken. My family needed me and I needed them. I booked a one way ticket to Miami and called up a friend (and fellow ABSN student) to help me get through this. She was at my door in 10 minutes, re-booked my plane ticket (I apparently booked one for May 9th because my head was a mess), helped me pack, brought me to the airport, and tried to get me to eat some dinner. This amazing friend was the reason I was able to be back with my family in a matter [...] On the walk home the other night I noticed that there is a bunch of construction taking place on the west side of the Capitol. It’s sort of ironic to see construction on a building that supposedly represents our freedom at a time when it feels like our government and, (more often than not) our ideals are falling apart. At the risk of sounding dramatic, it sometimes feels like on the good days we are taking “one step forward and two steps back”, and on the bad days, we seem to be in a perpetual state of deconstruction. It [...]  Our group in front of the Gatineau clinic Eight public health nursing students, one grad student and I spent a busy week of work in Jérémie Haiti at the end of February. It was a wonderful week of learning for the students and a great opportunity to provide needed nursing services to a vulnerable population. We went to a variety of sites in the southwest corner of the country, in and around the town of Jérémie, in the southwest corner of Haiti. We participated with the Haitian Health Foundation, a public health organization that provides very impressive community-based public [...] When I decided that I was going to go to Hopkins for nursing school, I made a deal with myself that at some point during my two years here I would go abroad. I wanted to use the nursing skills I was going to learn in a country that needed help and I wanted to do it while I was in school. I didn’t end up going with school to Haiti, but this past spring break I was fortunate to volunteer at a trauma hospital in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti for one week. All thanks to my great Public Health Clinical [...] I reported to the Labour and Delivery unit for my first twelve hour shift of my Transitions clinical at Tawam Hospital in the UAE, and found that not only had they already assigned a locker to me, they had decorated it with my name and a cartoon version of me based on my Hopkins ID. I shouldn’t have worried. No unit that decorates a locker for you in advance is anything less than welcoming. I dove right into the “United Nations” of the Tawam midwives. Many aspects of the unit are the same as what I’ve seen of L&D [...] There’s no way to pretend that you’re still in the United States when you’re walking down a hospital hallway surrounded by men in dishdashas (ankle-length, collarless white robes) and guthra (men’s head scarves) and women wearing the all-covering abeyya (a full-length black robe) and shayla (headscarf). The United Arab Emirates, where I will be doing my 8-week Transitions Practicum, is an interesting mix of the modern, traditional, Westernized, and Arabic. It seems incongruous to me to see the traditional Bedouin robes and guthra paired with a Bluetooth, but there it is, and it’s a combination that’s everywhere. Mid-way through our orientation, during a quick break between an HR presentation and getting [...] This was a tough week to say the least. I heard many call this week “hell week.” But the hardest part – an Adult Health II midterm on Monday then a Peds or OB midterm today – is all over. Part of me wants to party, and as I am two seconds away from texting out a mass “lets go to Brewer’s Art” text, I realize… we still have clinical tomorrow… and Friday. I guess I have to wait until Spring Break to have any fun, but it’s only a few days away! Late last week I ran into [...] |
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