sparrowSN

I also have to have health insurance to be enrolled at state university. It's for all students, not just nursing students. My school offers the Blue Cross/Blue Shield plan at student rates and will charge through your student account. This translates to your student financial aid covering it (if you have enough aid). It's $534 per semester in Montana for this plan. I'm not sure what state you live in, Blue Cross is okay in Montana and pretty good in Oregon as far as what they coverage. You also might look into working enough part-time at a hospital that would provide health insurance as part of your benefits package (many facilities are looking for nursing students to be nurse assistants and will be flexible with hours). Although, I will tell you that I could not work the second year of the program because of the class load. A person above posted that your husband doesn't sound very supportive of your career based on your comment that he wants you to quit school over this. I'm also concerned for you about this reaction. I'll be graduating in May and trust me, it gets a LOT worse than insurance coverage while you're going to nursing school. If he's already asking you to bail, you might need to have a long talk with someone who's married and has already went through the nursing program or one of the nursing faculty in order to prepare your marriage for what's in store for you. It is an experience that could make or break your marriage. There are two students near divorce in my class and three that quit school to save their marriage. Hopefully, your husband will get the honor of pinning you at your pinning ceremony when your finished. Good luck! You can do it as long as you can see it happening!

I've come up with an answer to the whole nurses eat their young theory. Be too big to swallow!! Or too much to swallow. That's sugar and spice and all things that would make someone sick and make you want to spit them out instead of devouring them. Or being smarter than your instructor and answering other students questions that the instructor doesn't know during class. That's how you miss clinical and still pass around here. Me, I always show up and even if I think I might be late, I show up an hour and a half early. I'm not kidding. I got some weird looks from the night shift waiting around for an hour and a half at 4:30 AM, but they liked the coffee that I made them. My clinical preceptor doesn't even know that I was early every clinical because she showed at 1 min. til and I still got the same drill sargeant routine as everyone else. I did not miss a clinical even though I worked 8 hours the same day when our clinicals were 6 hours. I have not missed a single clinical this year despite having sprained my low back several times and that clinicals are 12 hours long for two days with eight patients, and then they expect me to take a test the following morning. I'm not sure they know that I am human, but I better not make the mistake of showing it. I recieved an unsatisfactory on a care plan last year because it was THREE days late, despite including the doctor's prescription to refrain from doing schoolwork for SEVEN days because the textbooks were over my weight lifting restriction. (Three unsatisfactories gets you failed). If you want to go through nursing school, don't ever make the mistake of needing medical care yourself. My problem is that they keep trying to eat me because I'm not percieved as the strong of my species, and I'm getting a bad attitude about it. There are places in the future career world where they expect you to be on time to care for patients without exception and you're taking over for someone whose worked the previous 12 hour shift and has to stay until you get there or your co-workers have to cover extra patients (even if it was because you were digging yourself out of an avalanche with a needle and a toothpick with two broken arms). If I ever make it through school I am NOT working at that place, and that's what I've learned from their x-treme standards.

We have one surviving male nursing student in our class. He is in OB class now. Much applause! At our last study group, he remarked how he was privy to information that most women do not share with men. Yes, it's true we accept him as one of the girls. He shared that when asked to be the example for the instructor's 5-minute physical assessment, he was actually quite embarrassed. We thought nothing of it, but apparently at that time it was about the third week of class and he was asked to take his shirt of for the exam in front of 20 strange women. All he could think was, "must suck in stomach." Thanks guys for sticking in there!!!

I am a senior nursing student currently doing rotation in Geriatrics and Med-Surg concurrently. The week before last week I had a great time in the ER, day surgery and OR. Then last week I had my second Geriatric clinical. (Our clinicals are 12 hour shifts for two days.) I have told the class instructor that I don't like doing geriatric nursing. I would like to go into OR, ER, or ICU nursing. However, I show up an hour early to clinical by half an hour or more, because I want to do this well. I feel sorely misjudged! The instructor thinks that just because something is not my first choice she's assuming that I am not doing a good job at it. Since I show up before the instructor, she doesn't know I've been there early and that I look up things of interest to me during that time. She's never in the room when I do any assessments. When she was in a patient's room with me at my last clinical, she proceeded to interrupt my social needs assessment by performing a physical exam on a patient that I had already done a physical assessment on. According to my other instructors my assessment skills and write-ups are excellent (I peer mentor for the junior nursing students). However, according to the geriatric clinical instructor (this is her first year teaching) my assessments need work. The NH is USUALLY well staffed with CNAs (amazing isn't it!), so I have had time to sit and address social needs (again, amazing) with the five patients that I was assigned for 12 hours. Occasionally, they have an urgent need and I'm right on top of it, i.e. dropping O2 sats and SOB, etc. This instructor keeps telling me that I need to work on my time management. I don't know what she's talking about and neither do my peers when I ask them what they think. (I'm the class president.) Like I said, she shows up at the nursing desk when I'm there and watches me chart and then leaves. On my clinical write-up, the instructor told me that I had the nursing diagnoses that were a priority correct, but I was not focusing on the correct "medical diagnosis" which goes at the center of the "wheel of thinking" with the nursing dx as the "spokes". I know that RNs at the NH have to function more independently of the docs than at the hospital, but this is way independent for my liking. (It's a lot easier when the doc prioritizes the med dx for you at the hospital. And if I assess and come up with a conflicting medical diagnosis as a priority, do you really think the doc will go for it? Yeah, right.) So, how do geriatric RNs decide what is the most priority "medical diagnosis"? I get the nursing dx, just not the med dx. Thanks in advance for your input.