The Abbreviated Week

I wrote this this past Wednesday:

We had a major exam this morning.

I find that I have a kind of...status, I guess (?) among my classmates because I have never used a test bank, have just been relying on my study skills and knowledge and have still been passing exams with decent grades. Turns out they all use the test banks. There's only a handful of us who haven't up to this point.

But I'll tell you, curiosity got the better of me and I went and looked at the test banks for the classes I took last term and there they were, all the questions and answers on the exams we took. Along with the questions for the national exams we took. It's insane.

Thursday:

I had simulation exercises at main campus. The first mannequin had a stroke, but what the instructor's didn't count on was how fucking difficult it is to tell that an inanimate object is having a stroke. Their faces are frozen into rictal grins, so you can't see drooping on one side. The techs who provide their voices are in another room and you listen to a speaker that is of lesser quality than the transistor radio I owned as a child so you can't hear slurred speech. They can't lift their arms or grip your fingers, so you can't measure strength. They obviously don't respond to painful stimuli. They can have dilated pupils, but once you check the pupils, if they dilate after, you wouldn't check them again without a reason (slurred speech, drooping face, etc.). The instructors were, like, how did you miss that the mannequin was having a stroke? And everyone was, like, because it's a fucking mannequin and I asked him to lift his arms and smile so that I could look for asymmetry, but, gee, he can't do any of that, so--?

It was frustrating.

The second scenario was CPR. Of course.

When I got home, someone from class texted me that the exam grades were in. I got a B. One other person I talked to got a C and the other two people I talked to were D's or F's.

Which brings us to this--Friday--evening:

I have been up for...let's see....nineteen hours now. I woke up just before 3:00 a.m. last night and it's 10 p.m. now and I want to be asleep but I can't sleep.

I woke up just before 3:00 and I couldn't get back to sleep, so I just stayed up and drank coffee and looked at youtube videos until 4:30, when I had to get up and start getting ready to go to the hospital. I got there at 6:30. By 7:00, we were on the floor seeing patients. I didn't have an assigned patient, but I helped care for a cowboy with a bad heart, a sharp nonagenarian, a Native American man in awful shape, awful, awful, awful shape and a woman with a wicked attraction to narcotics. It was a busy day.

My regular clinical instructor is on personal leave--her husband died, not unexpectedly, this past Sunday--and in her place we got the worst clinical instructor I've had yet. It sucks to go from the best to the worst. That's all I'll say about that.

I came home and had a long shower to try to rinse the day off. I doused my bloody clothes with hydrogen peroxide and threw them in the washing machine, and I ate my lunch, five hours late. I had a coffee and sewed. I'm working on a pillow-case (wonky log cabin blocks in warm colors with a border of black and white triangles. I sewed until my hand cramped up so bad that I couldn't untwist my fingers. I took an ibuprofen and sent some texts and emails. No napping for me.

When Dave came home, we fed the assorted animals and then went and picked up some junk food for dinner. I ate ribs and mac and cheese and then polished off a container of rice pudding and a chocolate bar. My brain was screaming for sugar. Or sleep. Or sugar.