Watch out lady parts and babies! I'm coming for you!!

So, I've fallen in love again; hard and fast and with every cell of my being. In our nursing program, our nursing teacher gave us each experiences on the Labor and Delivery floor. The second I stepped foot on the floor, I felt like I was home again (in that not-really-home-because-my-house-doesn't-smell-like-amniotic-fluid-institutional-grade-cleaner-and-hospital-food kind of way). I was reminded of what brought me into this program in the first place; ladies' parts, blood, and baby! Not only was I reminded of how much I love babies and mommies, but I also found an answer to a question that had been slowly munching away at the deepest recesses of my mind. Do I really want to be a midwife or do I really want to be an Obstetrician? Did I decide to become a midwife because I was really drawn to the idea of empowering and accompanying women in one of the most exciting journeys in their lives, wanting to be there every second of every contraction, reminding them to breath, and helping them to achieve exactly the labor story they wanted....AND YES! Midwives give drugs!!..., or was I just a coward, afraid to take the MCATs, sure I would end up in some online medical school...or worse...at some Mexican medical school that advertised in bar fliers. Well, we watched a Cesarian Section, and I got my answer. I have NO DESIRE WHATSOEVER to become an OB. I most certainly do NOT want to be a surgeon. It was amazing, and I didn't get sick or anything, but it was so precise, so nerve-wracking. It's the kind of thing that you need to do every time with an underlying sense of fear because the second you get too comfortable you end up leaving a sponge in the wound or accidentally knick the bladder...or something even worse. I don't strive to live my life with a low undertone of fear permeating my professional career.

I realize that, professionally, I may still have to make rounds on a medical/surgical floor, with my only responsibility being emptying bedside commodes and delivering meds, but now I've been reintroduced to the light at the end of the tunnel...the light that hunted me down a year and three months ago, taunting me with it's allure and promise of baby cries and an invitation to attend the purest and strongest example of female achievement. Old people fanny...watch out! Here I come, and I'll be wiping you faster and happier than any other fanny wiper you've had in your life!

No patients for patience

So...I'm working on my RN degree right now, and I think I hate everything about this experience. I have lab clinicals every Friday, all day. During clinicals, we are assigned a patient and our job is to just generally take care of them. We give them a bath (I hate touching people), change and make their beds (I don't make my beds at home), and then tend to their issues for which they're in the hospital. Of course I can't really discuss the patient, but I can tell you, between my pateint and the roommate, that I spent my whole morning cleaning up elderly person poop and wiping said large fanny, and the amount was astonishing. Can I really do this for THREE MORE SEMESTERS?!? I took a second to consider what other kind of patient I would have preferred. I asked myself, "Hilary, if you could "design" your own patient, what would you want?" I thought about the patients that the other students had. Would I rather change colostomy bags? Perhaps dressing weeping amputations? Maybe I'd rather monitor the urine output of the jaundice patient and his dressings on his pancreatic drain? I was confident answering a resounding no. It all grosses me out. I started to think that maybe I hadn't really had such a bad patient, until I remembered how it felt when I heard, "I made a mess again". Aw man...really?? AGAIN?? You were only clean for 15 minutes. How could one person have that much to eliminate?? Now I'm scarred. Every time I walk through stores where large people are riding on those electrical carts, mostly Wal Mart, I now think, "I'll be wiping your butt in a couple years. For God's sake woman, get up and walk to get your hot dogs, frozen pizzas, and Little Debbies. Have some dignity!" Perhaps I'm not the best candidate for this position. I love the idea of becoming a nurse practitioner, but you have to work a year as a nurse before you can apply to that program, so I'm stuck butt-wiping. I'm hoping to find a good school nurse position in which to gain experience. I can handle little kid puke, lice, and pants-wetters...and summers off! Three more semesters, three more semesters, three more semesters...