Quick Friday Update

I have the day off from clinicals today, so my week was basically done as of yesterday. (I had homework to complete and turn in today, which I did, but that was fine, it was almost easier done than said.)

Saba had emergency surgery on her remaining eye yesterday. The ulcer on her cornea was not healing and was in danger of rupturing, so the surgeon sewed a flap of conjuctiva over the cornea. It will hopefully allow the ulcer to heal without rupturing.  Since it was heavy duty surgery, they kept her overnight. But she is home today, doped up on some heavy duty painkillers and getting eye drops every two hours. But she is here with us and we aim to keep it that way.

In terms of school and clinicals: It was a week.

I'll soon be finished with the first level of the program. This past week, one of the instructors who teaches the second level came in to address our class and gave one of the most condescending talks I've ever had to sit through. It was all about how students fail out of the program and blah blah blah. (After a couple of minutes worth, I got the gist of it, so I pulled out the text for the online class I'm taking and started to catch up on some reading.) After a forty minutes litany of all the ways we were all going to fail, one of the women in class raised her hand and said, "Now maybe you can talk about what kinds of things we can do to succeed."

This past week our usual clinical instructor (not our classroom instructor, but the instructor who is in attendance at our clinical site) was gone and we had a substitute who was competent, awkward, generally lazy, and completely humorless--but not entirely unpleasant. So that was interesting. Two patients died over the week while we were gone.  There were two new patients in their beds by the time we got there. Another had a heart attack and was transferred to the hospital.

While talking about the possibility of getting the staff at the facility a kind of thank you gift, one of my fellow students pointed out that the nursing assistants (who take care of the long-term care patients and who make a shit wage to do it) spend their own money to buy shampoo and soap to use when they bathe the patients. So we're going to buy them shampoo and soap along with something else, maybe candy.

One woman in my clinical group told us about money being stolen from her bag while at the clinical site. Another woman in my group put down her stethescope and when she remembered, went back to find it gone. Everyone denied taking it.

We have to be at the clinical site around 6:15, which means that I get up at 4 a.m. on those days. I am not a morning person when it comes to being around others. (I'm fine if I'm working on my own.) I am not particularly gregarious in the morning and when my fellow students arrive and are chatty and happy, I start to get annoyed. There's another student in my group, a young man, who can commiserate. Normally he is very genial and friendly, but in the morning, he is withdrawn in a similar way to myself. We both drink our coffee and bide our time.

Next week is finals week and I have a final on Monday and another on Wednesday. Thursday I have a clinical day. Friday I have a group presentation to take part in, then I am done. I have two weeks off after that.

I'm not planning on doing anything special in those two weeks though I do have a list of things I would like to get done. Or I may just lie about and do nothing. We'll see.

And in other news:

And can you believe what this psychotic trump has done? I can't even with the idiocy of this man and his supporters. This fool consulted Vladimir Putin but not our own Congress before bombing another country. That says everything, doesn't it? Anyone who doesn't recognize what is happening to our country would have been the type to make a good Nazi, by looking the other way while Jews were being led to the ovens.

Some true patriot needs to put him out of our misery.