Needles and a Pen » Knitting, Sewing, and Nursing School

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  • Welcome to my blog!

    Hi! I'm Traci. I'm a Registered Nurse who loves quilting, knitting, cross stitch, and the great outdoors. In my pre-scrubs life, I owned Real Photography, and you can still see my old wedding and portrait photography site here .

    I've created a map that shows links to our camping/hiking/general family fun review posts that you can find here. It's pretty much the coolest thing on this site. Thanks, Google!

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A Cold and Broken Hallelujah / Nursing School Halfway Mark

We sat down to take the final, a little dejected, a little bitter.  This was it, our last test of the first year of nursing school, the big halfway mark.  There should have been more excitement, more oomph in the air.  Instead, it was a giant cloud of meh.  I leaned over to my nursing school BFF.  “You know that Jeff Buckley song Hallelujah?” I asked her.  “I feel like he really gets nursing school.”

Nursing school is not a victory march.

I have been struggling to write my “I survived this bimester post,” and thought about just skipping it this time, because I don’t want to be overly negative or rant-y, and every time I tried writing it, Nic would turn around in his chair and ask “What are you angry typing about?”  And I would say “I’m NOT angry typing!” And he would raise his eye and I would reread my words…HOW DOES HE ALWAYS KNOW WHEN I’M ANGRY TYPING?!  HE CAN’T EVEN SEE ME!

I am really excited to be a nurse next year.  (NEXT YEAR!!!!!  Now that we’ve been out of school for a few days that seems like a real attainable thing again.)  And I love learning about nursing and medical processes.  So I felt like maybe just leaving it alone was the right answer.  But then I remembered that when I tried to read about people’s nursing school experiences time and time again the blogger just stopped saying anything about school after the first few months.  So I want to check in on this halfway point nursing school truck stop.  I’m still working part time.  I kept my 4.0.  I only lost my sense of humor once.  (Side note: People should really be able to carry around benzo pens.  If someone is going into anaphylaxis and you stab them with an epi pen, you’re a hero.  You should definitely be able to see someone starting to spiral out in nursing school and pop them in the thigh with some lorazepam.  I feel strongly that this should be a thing.  I might make it my life’s work.)  For a few days there a lot of us felt so beaten down that it was hard to remember what it was all for or that becoming an RN is an actual attainable not-so-far-in-the-future thing.  So anyway, this is me saying that the check in at the end of Peds/OB sounds like this:

Hallelujah.  The cold and broken kind.