Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Revival

Well, I certainly haven't updated this blog in a long time. Are people even still reading? Well, there has been many, many changes since my last post in Fall 2013 (and even more since the one before that in Spring of 2013, when I was still recovering from coming home after being abroad in Israel.)

School!
I'm in my last semester of my undergraduate degree! Yippee! The countdown on my phone to graduation reads 61 days! I'm so excited - and nervous! I have been successful in each of my clinical rotations. I've loved pretty much every one of them - except intensive care. That was definitely the most difficult of all my nursing classes, and I am definitely not made out to be an ICU nurse!

The picture to the right is when I got to observe IR (Internal Radiation, I think) place a stent in a lady's artery! They use x-rays to see the placement, so we all had to wear radiation protection.

In January, I did my senior practicum - 90 hours of clinical time working with an RN in a field we were interested in/got assigned to. To my delight, I was assigned to an RN working in labor delivery, so I got to spend January delivering babies, reading fetal monitoring strips, and working with laboring women. I loved every second of it! - and missed it when it was finished! I'm hoping to end up with a job in labor/delivery, although I think I'd be happy with postpartum at first. I've developed quite a passion for expectant moms.

First day on L&D in January!
When I was doing my practicum, there was one mother who I had been with during her labor, and she started pushing about 30-45 minutes before the end of my shift. I decided to stay later to make sure I could be with her when she delivered. However, when the doctors did their rounding, they decided, due to a few factors, to go ahead and take her in for a C-section. When they made this decision, I let the mother know I was leaving, told her she was in good hands, and left, as I was expecting another twelve-hour shift the next night. I felt frustrated about this for days afterward, because she had only been pushing about an hour and a half by this point. The RN I was working with and I were just about to have her change positions, but I couldn't work up the guts to tell that to the doctor when the RN wasn't in the room. Several days later, I encountered that nurse in the nursery when I went to help when my preceptor wasn't assigned to a mom. She helped me debrief about it, and explained that the baby was "sunny side up" - coming out face upward, which is backwards from most babies. Not only that, but the baby was jammed all sorts of strange into the birth canal, leading to a rather difficult cesarean, where they had to push the baby's head back up in order to deliver. I felt a little relieved that the cesarean was helpful for this mother, but if anything, that delivery has encouraged me to pursue learning ways to prevent those things from happening. I don't want the laboring women I'm with to have to go through a cesarean just because we didn't do something so easy. For instance, with that mom, we could have seen the signs - she had a lot of back labor and an epidural that didn't quite cover it. We could have encouraged her to move around - rock while in bed, dance with her husband, pace the area next to the bed. We could have had her get on her hands and knees before the epidural made her lose all control. She could have done it. I know it. I'm afraid, however, that taking her in for a cesarean might make her doubt the ability of her body to birth a baby. It makes me so sad.

Work
Yes, I'm looking for work now. It's such a pain. :P However, it is going well, as I've applied two hospitals and already have an interview for one set up in April! I'm very excited. It's a little crazy though because I'm applying everywhere. I've applied in Harrisburg, PA, and I've applied in Leesburg, VA. Next on my list is a hospital in Virginia Beach, and two other hospitals in Harrisburg. I may even apply in western TN. We'll just have to see what happens. Of course, there is a bit more going on than just that too though...

There's more
A warm, September Friday afternoon, my wonderful boyfriend drove up to Messiah to spend the day with me. We had just made challah, the bread we make for Shabbat "dinner", and were waiting for it to rise when he suggested we build a fort. I was ecstatic about the idea, and we ran to his car to pull out stacks of collapsed egg boxes out of the trunk. Laughing together, we re-assembled the boxes and stacked them, leaving a crawl-hole from my suggestion. Finally, I sat down on the grass inside to rest, and Aaron tossed a tightly folded piece of paper at me from outside the fort before crawling in. On that paper was a sweet poem, one he had written years before. He asked me if I could see us making our lives one. I responded, "Yeah, of course," as we had been talking about this a lot recently. I wondered why he had given this poem to me. My literal thought was, "I wonder why he's giving this to me now? This would be a really good way to propose..."

We re-enacted it later in lieu of having friends creep on us during.
Then it hits me.

Is this what I think it is?

He crawled out of the fort, and returned clutching a tiny box

I gasped.

And then he asked me if I would marry him.

...I was so stunned I could only nod my head. I soon found my voice and wrapped my arms around him in delight.

So, I'm getting married! We've decided on June 2016, so we've got a good year and three months to plan and enjoy our engagement. It really has been quite wonderful to be able to spend time together with the man who will be my husband (!) without having to worry about wedding planning. Of course, we have worked on finding a place, but that has been a wonderfully slow process and we haven't needed to get stressed out about places not responding to us immediately and such.

So what next?
The countdown on my phone tells me that graduation day is only 60 days away! Two months from now, I will be graduating. So I'll be looking for a job before then and finishing schoolwork. I'll take my NCLEX in June, and hopefully start work after that. And it is a bit more complicated too because of course I'd like to be near my beloved, but we'll just have to see how that happens. :)

All that being said, I'm gonna try to revive this blog from the depths of the blogosphere. Who's along for the ride?

2 comments:

Olivia said...

It's nice to see you here. :)

I wish you well in your job searching and wedding planning! :)

Sarah said...

Wow! I still have a reader?! :D