Hello, My name is Evelyn and I'll be your student nurse today.

School is absolutely insane this semester. I thought there was a lot of work last year... well this year it has doubled at least. It makes me laugh when the profs assign hours and hours of reading and memorizing and work and then they hand out supplemental assignments for us to do in our spare time! Who the hell has any spare time!? I barely have time enough to shower let alone do extra readings.

But regardless of the work involved, I am loving it this year. We've started clinicals and I am really starting to feel like a nurse. I currently am at St Mary's on Thursdays from 6:30am - 2:30 on the Neurology/Trauma floor. I've had two very different patients so far. My first was an older man with a bit of dementia who had back surgery in August and the wound keeps opening back up.I actually was asked by the Neurology surgeon to assist him with a procedure. Awesome! My second patient was a younger man on a business trip here who had a traumatic brain injury from being mugged in Canal Park. I got to do all the prep work involved in discharging him. Also awesome!

The bad part about clinicals is that on Wednesdays after 2 I have to go to the hospital and preplan. Basically I am copying everything from the patient's chart that I can. It takes about 2-3 hours. Then I take that info home and have to look up all the diagnoses, lab tests, and medications and learn everything there is to know about them. All in all it takes about 8 hours. Seriously. The first preplan I did I was up until 2am working on it and then up at 5am to go to the hospital! There is a reason college is for young people. My old body just doesn't function well on less than 8 hours of sleep! They say it gets easier and less time consuming as time goes on, and true enough, last week I was only up until 11:30. Tonight I am shooting for 10pm.

I also got the most amazing news last week. The government (yes, our very own US Government) every 2-3 years offers a scholarship to the most needy nursing students in the country. They basically pay for 2 years of your tuition and other educational fees and give you a monthly stipend to cover housing, transportation, and books with the deal that you work for a medical facility for 2 years that has a nursing shortage (which is basically all of them). It's huge. This year there were about 3000 qualified applicants and only about 100 and something are picked. I was picked!!!!! I applied last spring and had been praying ever since... I cried for about 1/2 hour when I got the news. I thought my financial aid person was going cry too (only 1 other person at CSS has ever gotten this). I had been so worried about the mass amount of student loans and the fact that I don't have as much work years as the typical graduate does. Plus I have been putting off things like having my teeth and furnace cleaned because money just was too tight. All those worries flew right out the window and now I can just focus on school! And get my teeth cleaned!!!

I know some of you had been sending your own prayers for me for this scholarship, and I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. This is truly a miracle for me.

Okay, I really have a paper that isn't going to write itself....