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Friday, February 21, 2014

Worst Spring "break" ever

I'm almost beside myself with frustration, stress and worry. This was supposed to be our spring break -- reading week. We have a final exam in psychiatry at 9 am upon our return on Monday morning. And we have a huge research paper looming in nursing research. So those were my two goals for this week...study and research/write a paper.


Instead, we're faced with 9 chapters of reading, innumerable Youtube videos to watch outlining various procedures and countless websites to read up on. All this for a lab quiz, that is due at noon on the Monday we get back to school.


This has truly been one of the most stressful "breaks" ever. Add to that, we're having some major issues with our oldest child, going through the agonies that are the start of the teenage years. The stress of that factor alone is almost unbearable to me. I'm not sure how that's going to play out in the coming weeks. But I will reach out for professional help if we need it, as this issue may be bigger than I can currently handle with my child (see, I've learned something from my mental health class!)


It's 4:15 am, and I've been up since 1:30 am, studying, simply because I can't sleep.


I'm really not sure, honestly, how I'm going to get through the next 6 weeks, without blowing my GPA that I've worked so hard to maintain at the A level, and keeping sane.  I truly just don't know.


The GPA is really important to me, for several reasons. One, it feels good to have marks reflect what I think I'm learning. And perhaps more importantly, it helps me get the consolidation placement of my choice -- certain areas of nursing, such as the NICU, L&D and Emerg (which happen to be my top three choices!), are only open to students with a good GPA.


In the big picture, if a student/new grad truly wants to get into one of those areas, they can eventually get there. However, being an older student, I'm well aware that my career time is much more limited that the new grad straight out of high school.  It's really important to me to get into an area that I love, as soon as possible, instead of wasting time getting there.  I've wasted enough time already getting into this field...I don't want to waste any more.


I'm going to try to go get some sleep now.  I've seen what serious sleep deprivation can do to the mind, during my psychiatric clinical rotation, and it ain't pretty.  And I'm not talking about "beauty sleep"!!!  I'm talking about the visual and auditory hallucinations.

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