Necrotic Immunoglobulins and a Fish Humping A Tree

Nursing school is like the tree of knowledge of good and evil. You learn amazing things about life and preserving/restoring health, but you also learn the daunting array of things that could go horribly wrong.  Do my immunoglobulins smell necrotic to you?

As my time in nursing school comes to an end, I can’t help thinking about how absolutely spectacular and certifiably insane it all was.

On my first day in the health science building I found a riveting bulletin board game called “Name The Lesion!” I still don’t know the rules but I’m pretty sure everyone loses. Hard.

Studying the chapter on reproductive system conditions was like reading a picture book version of fear factor. A startling new terror was lying in wait with every turn of the page. Tumors and warts and oozing, oh my!

We learned about the schizophrenic immune system and how it can fight off wayward germs with pinpoint accuracy. Or maybe it’ll just decide to close off your air hole for fear that some unimpressive allergen might get in. Good plan.  Every single day, this crazy lovable system seeks and destroys mutant, would-be cancer cells. It’s amazing that any of us are alive at all really. What a psychotic superhero that immune system beast is!

During OB rotation we got to play with baby dolls.  That was awesome!  Except for that one baby doll whose blink-y eyes had been sharpied by a previous student I wish I’d known. A plush placenta was attached to the creepy atrocity by a dangly red rope, and the teacher would shove this wreck of a child’s toy through a fake pelvis repeatedly to demonstrate fetal positions during delivery.  For real.

Ah the good ole days! There were care plans, and skills tests, and clinicals and charting. There were group projects full of awkward demonstrations and smeared lipstick worn by costumed male nurses. There were simulations where the dummies could birth and breathe and die, then un-die, and die again some other crazier way. There were fake body parts with orifices into which we were instructed to shove all manner of tubes. It really was quite the Milgram experiment.

During our surgical observation we watched with enthusiastic, wide-eyed horror, and duck masked smiles as sterile power tools were put to use in ways you couldn’t even imagine! It was riveting and terrifying and utterly terrific! My excitement over those procedures made me question my moral fabric. Surely there’s something wrong with enjoying that sort of thing. But I watched my classmates enjoy it right along with me and I knew I’d found my tribe. Every one of us was twisted at the same strange angle, and that my friends, is what validation looks like.

*insert medical gang signs*

Sprinkled along the way, there were monumental, soul crushing, impossible exams. Some of the smartest people I know bombed those monstrosities at one time or another. It wasn’t about regurgitating partially absorbed facts from memory. It was all about critical thinking. They tried to teach us to use the tattered scraps of our smartness to manage complex medical problems and situations we’d never been exposed to before. Multiple choice? Ahahahaha NO! Try select all that apply. While all of these answers are correct, we’d like you to pick out the one that is MOST correct.  Facepalm!  My left eye still twitches when I see the word submit.

Nursing school has been one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done, but it means that much more because I had to fight for it. There were times when I felt like just another fish humping a tree, but in the end I flopped my way into the pond.  Let the swimming begin!

The Glittery Nurse