Where is Mandi?

Buried. Buried alive, kicking and screaming, beneath a heaping helping of clinicals, projects, papers, and other craziness deemed by my esteemed professors to be important to my education. This, our final semester before we are turned loose on the "real world," appears to have been designed to kill us. If you live, then you get to be a nurse.

The bulk of the work this semester is "self directed" learning, meaning that we set our schedules directly with our preceptors. This is a test - a test of organizational wits. Nursing students are organized by nature - we have to be. Clinicals at all hours of the day, labs, papers, class, clinical prepwork, it all eats up monster amounts of time. Ask any of my classmates to see their organizer, and you'll be handed a full size dayplanner, complete with neurotic, color-coded highlighting and dozens of mini post-its clinging to every page. But this semester is the ultimate time challenge. We have three separate clinicals; nursing management, community/population based, and home visits. We are assigned three separate nurses within the community, and we have to coordinate our schedules with each of them. And somehow we have to make it to class, and for most of us, work as well. Egads.

The saving grace for me this semester is that my assignments should be fun. For my management clinicals, I will be working with the nurse supervisor at the Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge. It will be interesting to look at health care within a government system. For my population project I will be setting up protocols for and coordinating hearing and vision screenings for a small school district that has been without a school nurse for the past few years. My home care client is a high risk pregnant woman who I will be working with before and after her delivery, providing resources, education, and whatever she needs as she transitions into her new role.

So where won't Mandi be much this semester? On Blogger. Blogging is my favorite way to decompress after a long or stressful day (and god love the handful of you who show up to read the thing), but unfortunately it's also time consuming. I hope that my blog won't go the way of my kitchen, my eyebrows, and all the other things that have been neglected as of late, but at the moment I just don't know. But -- thanks for coming by, and I'll be around whenever I can.
:)