Nursing Science 20

This is the beginning of week three for Charlene's second RN course. She's taking NS20, a real toughie. If she thought NS10 was bad, they're trying to bury her in NS20. More and thicker textbooks, more paperwork, more and involved details, more meds to learn. Yea, she's gotta know what pills are what, the dosage, what they are for, precautions, warnings, etc. After just two full weeks, I think she has to know more than an MD in training. Study is the name of the game. Morning, noon and night. We see her but cannot talk to her. Charlene is one of those who doesn't multi-task well. Actually, not at all. Her focus is on her studies and she absolutely cannot talk to us while that is in progress. If the house was on fire, terrorists were attacking, a runaway bulldozer was headed toward the house, we'd have to run to her study hall (it moves throughout the house), raise our hand, wait for her to finish her line of thought/writing and they calmly explain that she has five seconds to get out of the house and away from danger. Just the way it works and we've gotten used to it. Her hour long baths, which used to be for R&R, now include textbooks. Since I've been off work for the last 2 weeks (and two more to go), I try to help out where I can with such things as laundry, cooking, cleaning, taking Nic and Trav to and fro school, dishes, watering plants and yard. Man, woman's work is never ending! Sometimes I think, "I can't wait to get back to copier guy work".

Charlene is into Nursing Care Plans, doing her second one in as many weeks. In her college classes, she's working out of a different hospital (now at St. John's in Oxnard) and has had to learn all new computer programs to access patient care. It takes an extra twenty minutes to get there instead of the usual five minutes. Her instructors are very good, very approachable and very helpful so there's one good thing. The Nursing Care Plans are a royal pain in the butt. She's got to pick a patient, find out everything about that patient, find out all the meds the doctor has prescribed (and tell why), recommend all the hospital care necessary to help this patient get well. We're talking gobs of pages of technobable that even I don't understand. Her Care Plan from last week was 26 pages long, filled with writings, circles and arrows and lots of paragraphs and all sorts of mean, nasty medical stuff. Every week, another Care Plan. It takes about three days of all her time to do them. And that's in addition to the 23 hours of classes she also attends and then do that homework and study for those tests. Throughout her two month summer break , she had a required list of homework/reading assignments to do daily. School work for two months of no school. What a drag! No rest for the weary. I don't know how she keeps it up, week in, week out but we are all very proud of her.