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

People of the internet, weep for me.  Tomorrow I go back to nursing school.

It’s basically like when Piper voluntarily surrendered herself to jail.

Except there’s a lot less free time.

***

I’m really good at putting my head down and getting through rough times.  It’s like a super power that rubs off on you when you grow up in England.  But taking breaks is harder for me.  The stopping and restarting does a number on my morale and makes the finish line feel farther away.  Psych is coming up for me next, and my coworkers all cringe when I tell them I’m in psych this semester.  It is not confidence building.

In better news, I did complete my second (and final for my RN) pharmacology class this summer.  It was a nail biter, and I was getting a very high B up until the last two weeks of class.  Then I was getting a very low A, which was terrifying in its own right, and it all came down to the final.  I figured that would be fine.  Finals generally seem to be grade bumpers/status-quoers, not grade droppers.  Not this final.  This final…well, here is a picture I took of our professor as she proctored the exam:

(Note to lawyers: I clearly did not violate anyone’s copyright here since this is an actual picture from the classroom.  Similarities between my classroom and a Game of Thrones battlefield are purely coincidental.)

You know how they always say that if you are taking a test and it doesn’t feel like it’s going so well that you should flip to the back and tackle it backwards?  Well, I opened the exam.  I did the first few questions.  I felt less great about those questions than I would like.  I was like “no big deal, it’s just a backwards test day.  that’s what I’ll do.”  So I flipped to the back.  Nothing is quite as confidence boosting as the few brainless medication calculations that close out each exam.  Calculator and pencil ready, I read the first math question.  Huh.  We’ve never had a question worded like THAT before.  Okay, that’s a fluke.  Second math question will be like the ones we’re used to.  Oh.  It’s not.  Well, that’s fun.  Let’s leave that for later.  Move on to the first CONTENT question at the back of the exam.  That will do the trick.  Oh.  Okay.  So that’s how you’re gonna play it.  I understand now.

I walked out of the room thinking that I would be very satisfied with a B.  I laid it all out on the field, and, if Simone Biles could be happy with her bronze on the balance beam, I could take a B in pharmacology.  Maybe it would be great in the long run, 4.0 ruined, I could stress a little less.  I thought back to a wonderful conversation with a classmate in the first few weeks of the course, when I couldn’t seem to dig myself out of that high B.   “B stands for ‘you could have done BETTER’ ” I told her.  “No, B means you have a LIFE,” she said.  “You went camping and on vacation and have kids and a job.”  “Uhhhh, that doesn’t even start with a ‘B’ ” I countered.  And then it was like the baby Jesus himself gave her the next line, it was so inspired. “A B stands for BALANCE!” she announced.  And it was so perfect that we had to stop arguing to bask in her genius.

In the end, though, my lucky earrings that have come through for me for over 15 years, worked their magic once again.  I can only assume that my soul now belongs to some sort of deviant underlord, because I did surprisingly well on the final and kept my 4.0.

(And you thought watching the Olympic games was exciting.)