- How tired we are of the "fluff" homework assignments. Just how many papers and readings on history of nursing and cultural sensitivity do we need? Do we need to make a 50 slide PowerPoint on the different "theories of change agents" or an entire paper on how low lighting and noise helps calm the patient (Never would have guessed! ?
- How burned out emotionally, physically and mentally we are, especially those of us who are trying to work, raise a family, are older (with a lot less stamina) and overwhelmed by the amount of work in nursing school
- How you will be close to many of your schoolmates because you're going "through the trenches" together. They remember that horrible instructor, that first case of explosive C Diff, the nurses who didn't want you on their floor and the time you saw a bone biopsy and had to sit down before you passed out.
- How many times you will question whether you made the right decision going to nursing school and the times you'll get to hold a patient's hand and share a laugh and realize that you did the right thing
- How frustrating it is to check off 7 of the 12 "Select All That Apply" answers and miss it by just 1
- How often you will hear, "Yeah, it was correct, but it wasn't the most correct"
- How frustrating it can be to have one instructor teach you how to do something and have another instructor chastise you for doing it the same way
- How you will start your first day of nursing school with a spotless lab coat and five 400 page reference books and will end your first semester with handwritten cheat sheet notecards in your stained lab coat pocket
- How awesome it feels to get that hospital badge your first day of clinicals and how you happy you are to take it off for the last time the last day of clinicals
- How a lab bag can literally swallow up nursing supplies in a matter of minutes
- How you will never again think nurses are overpaid
- How often you will question whether you were ever really smart (You were valedictorian of your high school class, right? When did you become so dumb?!)
- How you look back from your last semester and see the first semester students having the same struggles you had and seeing that you've come so far since then
- How nursing school is exhilarating, frustrating, exhausting, interesting, boring, overwhelming, bonding, sad, funny, exasperating and fulfilling and you imagine being a nurse will be just like that.
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