Now the real summer break starts.

My training is all done, so I get from today until June 4–two weeks and a day!–off for my “summer break”. I imagine this will be the last summer break I will ever have. As I mentioned before, I plan to spend it cleaning and reading. I also plan to retrain myself to drink adequate amounts of water. I used to drink 3 litres a day, a few years ago. By the end of my spring semester, I struggled to drink half a litre. Tsk tsk tsk.

My training was actually at the hospital to which ‘my’ clinic is connected (by name, not physically). I was there with another student from my program and five other people, one of which was a permanent MA hire, another hired to float between clinics (I am guessing in her area, as there are about fifty of these clinics around Houston). The rest were externs, but from another program. I was told this was strictly computer training, but it turned out to be clinical training, a review of some emergency procedures (basically proving we know BLS and some training on what to do in such an emergency), and then computer training. I am grateful for the clinical training, but worried. Does this mean I will be expected to do more earlier, and by myself? I am nervous in a good way. I want to show I can do the job, but not right away.

The highlight of the week, however, was being in the hospital. The clinical training took place in what I call the “HR building” because all of the offices had some sort of Human Resources title attached, even though that is not what the building actually is. The computer training took place in the hospital. I fell in love immediately. I am surprised that an introvert like me had such a positive reaction in a hurried, busy, loud, crowded place, with patients and providers running around. The other externs felt the same way. There was a different pressure to do well; more than wanting to impress so we would get a job, we wanted to impress so we could get a job at this place. No, the clinics are nothing like the hospital, but it seems most of us want to move on to some sort of job at a hospital, and we simultaneously concluded that we wanted to work at that specific hospital.

There was an attitude about the place I hope carries over to the clinics. Everyone thanked people in service positions. If you mentioned which clinic you belonged to, most people knew the office managers and/or providers and could tell you a thing or two about them. No one seemed annoyed if you asked them for help and more than one person stopped you if they noticed you were wandering around lost.

Being in the place gave me a certain feeling that I will survive in healthcare, and I would more than likely love it. I passed two nursing schools to which I plan to apply daily, one of which I stared at while eating lunch every day, and I do not know, it made everything feel so perfect.

The other odd thing connecting the externs together was that it seemed most of us did not have working air in our cars. Most of them lived much closer than my classmate and I, though. I live about an hour away and that is with “typical” Houston traffic. During peak traffic times, which–unsurprisingly–is when I had to be on the road, that travel time was just about doubled. Not so bad in the mornings, but with Houston’s heat and humidity beginning to settle in for the summer, it made me one miserable (and faint, and wet) person.

I tried to stay in the area as long as possible, which really only worked Friday evening, where I went to a bar with some sort of England theme. I meant to only stay long enough for traffic to clear and the temperature to lower a bit, but ended up staying for hours. The bar was having a conversation about books and movies and movies based on books. I wish such a thing could be more everyday in my life.

End of semester 2.

I wanted to update before now, but I forced myself to wait for this day. This morning I took the last final of the semester. While we do have a meeting tomorrow to discuss our externships, I consider the semester officially over.

I doubt I will make all As this semester like I did last semester and plan to do with our summer classes. I feel disturbingly disappointed about this. Part of it has to do with how unhappy I was with the program this semester, as if I am owed good grades for getting through. Part has to do with the thought that if I cannot do this, then I cannot move on. Actually, I just checked my grades and I made all As! My confidence is intact and I do not feel the semester has been a miserable failure! Yay!

I managed to get an externship at a local pediatric clinic, which is where I have always wanted to go. My professor commented once that I would not survive there because I was too slow (which cannot be further from the truth), but I think I will be happy there. Over the break I have to go to some mystery place to be trained on the computer system the clinic uses, but otherwise I plan for my break to be spent cleaning–my room has gotten downright embarrassing over the semester–and reading.

I feel like this blog needs a bit more focus. I already know I will not do reviews, because I suck at those. I consider myself always at the ready to discuss matters dealing with politics or anything remotely social, but for some reason I have not come across anything worth writing a blog over. Quick opinions?

1. Obama says he supports same-sex marriage. This makes me happy, naturally. I could not care less that it “took him four years”. Since when does it matter how long it took someone to come around to such opinions? He did not believe in same sex marriage four years ago and does now. That is what matters. I would have been more dismayed to know that after four years of thinking his opinion hadn’t changed at all, or that his opinion had gotten more regressive.
1a. Obama has always been a centrist. I do not understand why people act like he is some failed liberal. Do you want to meet a failed liberal presidential candidate? Talk to Romney. And sometimes I cannot tell if liberal-minded distrust of Obama is any different than the conservative-minded.
2. Thirty-nine percent of voters in North Carolina voted against Amendment One. While it is nowhere near a majority, that group is not ignorable. The backlash against the south given the voting in one state makes no sense and it ignores how hard liberals in these areas work. It ignores, also, the bigotry that exists outside of the south. It is not like I am trying to say that, in terms of equality, the middle of the country is as progressive as the edges. But I am saying it is shitty to paint an entire population of people with such broad strokes while ignoring that one’s own groups have the same issues. Just pretend I said it more eloquently.

Anyway. I am not sure what changes I want to make with this blog. There is not yet much to write about, being a homebody still in a vocational program in the most boring suburbs ever and no time or money to go do big-city things in the nearest big city. (Speaking of, the race distribution maps from the 2010 census have been made and posted! The sociologist in me is squealing with delight.) I know I want to keep it, but I am not sure how to make it better right now.

Sticks and buckets.

We are sticking one another every day now. In the lab class, we are practicing venipuncture. I am good for everything with standard venipuncture except switching tubes, where I pull up on the needle and make it come out–along with a giant spurt of blood. I have not been as successful trying with a butterfly needle and the thought of taking blood by syringe scares me. I am, unfortunately, not a good patient. I cannot recall why, but I used to have to have blood taken from me regularly. I have deep, weak veins, I am always cold and dehydrated, and I was terrified of the needle, so both my arms have too much scar tissue to be used for drawing blood. I feel bad for my classmates who get stuck with me (that seems like a bit of a pun) because I doubt anyone will be successful. I do volunteer for people to practice their butterfly technique with me, because I am used to it.

In this same lab class we have to do between two and four capillary punctures every Monday (in addition to venipuncture). I have gotten really good at minimising the pain of the lancet and also getting an adequate amount of blood for whatever tests we are running.

In our pharmacology class, we are practicing injecting water into our bodies. I have a knack for this, apparently. I have not been nervous wielding these needles (whereas I get so nervous I feel a little nauseated and dizzy when it comes to drawing blood) and I have yet to make anyone yelp or cry from pain. In fact, my partners only realise I am done when they see me pushing the safety device on the needle. Next week we are going to be practicing intradermal injections, which is what one gets when they are being tested for TB. I have fears I will massively fuck it up.

I do not like all the needlework we are having to do. My fingers, hands, and left arm (as I absolutely refuse to let anyone try in my right arm) are covered in bruises, sore spots, and puncture marks. They are not healing as quickly as they used to, but that may be due to my anemia. One girl has a big bruise from another student making a mistake. We practiced on an inanimate object for injections, but not for venipuncture, something I disagree with wholeheartedly. The main thing is I feel it is too much to expect of our bodies, somehow. I wish we had done one of these classes last semester–pharmacology, perhaps, switched with the administrative class. If we had learned how to use needles last semester then we would be more confident this semester with venipuncture, and then we would not spend a month being stuck multiple times a day. As it is, we are all big balls of nervous energy.

April is usually a bad month for me, due to some memories. But since those things happened, ten years ago, worse things have happened and lately Aprils have not been terribly bad. My mood is not as chipper as before, but I have not been sad, per se. That must be progress. I am happy to report that I am not the same person at twenty-eight that I was at eighteen, and I like feeling like I am capable of letting go of something that drags me down.

The good thing is, despite the dip in mood, I am still creative. I have not sat down to actually write a story, but I have been diligently taking notes on stories I would like to write. I carry around a journal just for this purpose. I feel as silly as I thought I would feel doing this, becoming the sort of person who suddenly has an idea and scrambles to write it down, but I would rather that than to forget my ideas as soon as I have them. I had a big writing-shaped hole in my life. I am creative in other ways, too, but nothing makes me feel like me more than when I get to write.

Yesterday, I decided I need to come up with a bucket list. I doubt it would be unique–fly first class (I am not even sure why this appeals to me), visit x countries, learn y languages, do an assignment with MSF, et cetera. I believe this is the first time ever I felt truly alive and could have a future and do ‘cool’ things, and having the list would help me organise my life so that I could continue feeling alive and actually do ‘cool’ things. So far, I have:

• learn to style my hair in different ways
• learn to walk in stilettos
• take up running again, especially as part of anti-zombie-horde training
• American travel: the coasts, Alaska, and Hawai’i
• non-American travel: where would I even begin? Anywhere. Everywhere.
• learn more ASL, re-learn Spanish and Russian, plus pick up at least two new languages
• be published
• read one completed story in front of strangers
• become a mid-level practitioner
• do at least one assignment with MSF

Odd how that went in reverse order of importance to me. I hope I can look back on this in a few years, loving all that I accomplished and all that I will add to it.

Something like senioritis.

I realised the post from a week before last was a week too early shortly after publishing it. Oh, well. I was a little too excited, I suppose.

To counteract that jumping of the gun, now I am dragging my feet. I have papers to write, normal homework to do, and things to turn in. Feh, bleh, and sheh! I cannot get motivated to do anything.

That is okay this week, because we are on spring break. It ended, technically, yesterday, so I need to whip myself back into shape. I have no clue where my scrubs are and should find them and wash them if needed. My books and supplies are strewn about the house; I should remedy that, least of all to do homework and most of all so I will not be up at one in the morning Monday trying to put everything together. I have to take serious stock of groceries to make sure I actually have enough for lunch next week.

But I don’t wanna do any of that. The only thing that can hold my attention lately are books and the couple of stories I am trying (and very well succeeding, thanks) to write. It is rare for me, but I wish I did not have this obligation, just so I could have all the free time I want to sleep all day and be up all night, reading and writing and thinking and plotting. I usually hate having nothing to do and no real structure to my day. I think I have something like senioritis.

Next week will be our tenth week in school, which means only six left before the semester is over. Only six left before I have an idea of where I will be doing my externship. Even though we will have a couple of short classes in the summer, I consider the end of this semester to be the end of the program. I thought I would feel more anxiety about this, but for now I am excited. Surviving for six weeks is absolutely nothing, so to speak. The icing on the cake is that we get out early two days a week because the EKG class is over and done with.

What am I looking forward to most with graduating, hopefully working? Well, yes, money is always the answer. Besides that, though, I am looking forward to the free time. I will not have a job I have to bring home, or even think about outside of my shift. I will have time to do the things I want, and it will not be taken from me until I go to nursing school. I think this is amazing.

In my thinking about the future, I realised that I wanted to rush through everything. I do not think I do, anymore. I think I want to wait before going to grad school. I though about travel nursing, but I am not sure I want to wait until I am eligible to be a travel nurse, then doing the actual travel nursing, then going to grad school. I need time to slow down and, well, have my free time. There isn’t anything I have to put off until I am done, either–if I want to spend my free time being married or a mother, I can do all that, too. I cannot recall the last time I felt so excited about life.

Halfway through semester 2.

As the title says, today begins the eighth week of my second semester of CMA school. One of our classes, the EKG class, is over this Thursday (yippee! No more disrobing twice a week!). It marks quite a sense of running downhill for me.

The year is going by very fast, and I am grateful for it. The sooner we get to finals this semester, the sooner the summer semester starts, the sooner I start my externship, the sooner I graduate, the sooner, hopefully, I get a job. Each day seems so long, but we look up and two months, eight weeks, half the semester, have gone.

What frustrations we felt with our professor last semester seem amplified this semester. My biggest annoyance is her teaching style. She does not make up the Powerpoint presentations that she reads, word for word, in class–the textbook company does. She wastes our time trying to find videos relevant to the material–and many times fails to do so–or we are stuck watching the same videos over and over. She does not make up our exams–the textbook company does–which leaves me perplexed on why our exams are so short. They are often fewer than twenty questions long, which means each question carries close to ten points apiece, and since the wording is often unclear or there are many questions covering material we have not covered in class, it is far too easy to fail an exam. Even while doing procedures, she refers us to our books or supplemental material when we have questions. I would rather do some sort of apprenticeship, if my program is going to be self-taught to this degree. I am still passing, still making good grades, so I should be grateful, I guess.

That is not all, but it is all I feel like divulging about the program at this point.

We are at least doing somewhat interesting topics in class. Although it weirded me out having to pee in a cup and hand it to a classmate, urinalysis was pretty interesting. I would love to say I have completely healthy urine, but our dipsticks expired anywhere from two months to five years ago–so not the most accurate measure. I liked using the urinometer just because I got to spin the weighted stick. Easily amused, no? We have moved on to throat swabs, and I found out I am perfectly fine with the actual swabbing, but my gag reflex is really sensitive to the tongue depressor. Many of my classmates have very sensitive gag reflexes, so this portion will not be as fun; the thought of standing near someone making retching noises makes me a little nauseated.

We have gone on to actual dosage calculations in pharmacology. I suppose I am not the most excited about anatomy & physiology, but that is because it is barely more in depth than med terminology last semester. Then again, when I have to take it again to get into nursing school, where it will be more in depth, I am not sure I would find it fascinating, either. One of my hopefuls, though, does not require A&P because they want you to take their classes, which includes a gross anatomy lab! Everyone I know who has had to attend gross anatomy says it is actually pretty boring, but the thought still excites me.

We are going over microbiology and autoimmune diseases/the immune system in lab class. We go over these topics a lot, understandably, and I am still reminded of my wish to go back and pursue one of them, chiefly immunology. I can still recall sitting in my virology class and being fascinated by the acquired immune response to infection–the role of killer T-cells and MHC molecules and whatnot. I tend to say now that I thought I was interested in disease, and I am, but I realise now I am much more interested in the immune response to disease. I wonder if I would have been happier had I pursued that track more than my more humanitarian goals now.

The one downside to the year flying by is that I am very far behind on my reading. I am reading a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, but my goal of reading 700 pages a week is far from realised. And writing? Ha! I have not written anything creative in perhaps half a year, though I may be remembering this incorrectly. I need to sit and restructure my days so that they include everything I want to get done: school, homework, gym, reading, writing, and a little time left over to watch whatever series I am into at the moment (right now it is Doctor Who). I know I can squeeze all this into my days with some willpower and great time management skills. If I do not learn them now, I certainly will not survive nursing or grad school!

Getting into the swing of the second semester.

February is already around the corner. We started school on the seventeenth, and it feels like we are just reviewing a lot of stuff we learned last semester, which is frustrating. On top of, our A&P class seems to be a barely more in-depth med terminology class–which either means the A&P sucks or the med term was too in-depth, which makes me feel like we wasted money on taking med term. There is quite a bit of material this semester I already covered while I was studying microbiology, so that helps.

I know I am being whiny. For Mike’s sake, we started on microscopy today in lab procedures. Tomorrow we are starting with doing EKGs on one another. We are doing things!

It is dawning on me now that I have one more full semester and a short summer session to go; we will also be starting our externship during the summer semester and will be…externing? full-time by the end of the summer. After that, we are done. I can take the exam and become certified, and then I will be loosed on the world. Some of my classmates have jobs or have been guaranteed jobs already, because their family own a practice or because they know quite a few doctors who own practices. I feel like I need to be doing networking of my own, somehow, but I am not sure how. My first thought is to wait until it is closer to graduation and start schmoozing, no matter how awkward that feels. My second thought is to beg my classmates to drop my name to their employers.

There are some things I am not looking forward to this semester. In the lab procedures class, we have to do at least sixteen capillary punctures, eight Vacutainer punctures, four syringe punctures, and four butterfly punctures. I am fine with taking others’ blood; I am not looking forward to others taking mine. People can rarely get blood from me, enough that I panic a little when I see a needle meant to take my blood. Injections and piercings are fine, so I am not worried about us having to inject one another. My professor said I could be “practice” for hard sticks, but no. Oh HELL no. I set my foot down that two people can try and if it is not coming, it is not coming and no one else can touch me for the day.

I am also not particularly looking forward to the various lab exams, such as checking for strep throat or a UTI, or the glucose tolerance test. I am more terrified that I will be embarrassed because something is wrong and I didn’t know. But hell–I do not have insurance. Having free diagnostic testing should make me relieved, not scared.

I am also not looking forward to having EKGs performed on me, because it requires that I take off my scrub top. The girls will still be in sports bras, and we do get hospital gowns and drape sheets, but still, parts of my body I never let anyone see will be exposed. At least it is motivation to keep going to the gym…

This is all part of the glamourous life of living with anxiety.

What was I saying about too much review and not enough work? Tell that to the mountain of homework I must get started on. Until next time!

Did I make the right decision?

I am done with my first semester of medical assisting school. As I plan out 2012, I have begun to think about where I will be in a year, where I could have been, and how what I will do in 2012 will impact what I do in 2013 and beyond.

I know I should not dwell on how long it has taken me to get where I am, and how long it will take to get where I want to be. Yes, I am twenty-eight now, and I will be far into my thirties before I am done with school. Yes, I should have realised long before now what I want to do. Yes, it is unhealthy to dwell on these things. To be truthful, however, it is hard not to. Most people who want alternate careers have already had a career, or taken time off to be married and/or raise children. I have none of that. At this point in my life, I want to be married and have children, but I am not sure how that will be possible. I want to get an education, work overseas, get married, and make sure I am established enough before I consider children. By then, in reality, I may be too old. I do not want to be the age I will be before I start school.

I research ways to make the journey shorter, but none of them work out in a way I find comfortable. The risk I would not find a job is too great, or it only shaves perhaps half a year off my plans, or perhaps it does not properly train me for what I want to do.

I think about dropping the nursing component and going for “just” the MPH, but now public health jobs plainly do not excite me as much as public health nursing or advanced practice nursing does.

I think about being in medical assisting school, and how perhaps I could have tried instead for a two-year nursing degree, or an allied health certificate that might lead to a higher salary, such as billing and coding. But, again, for various reasons these do not strike me as being the best decision to make. (I think the education I am receiving will help me with nursing school. I wanted to wait the least amount of time possible before being able to work, and it would have been three years for the two-year RN (due to pre-requisites), assuming I got in on my first try…)

So it would seem that I have the best plan for me all mapped out. Why, then, does it seem so wrong? Because of how much time I wasted getting here? Because no one around me seems to understand why I don’t “just go to medical school”? Because I always second- and third- and fourth-guess myself?

As I go into 2012, and as I further and further realise my goals, I am most obsessed with convincing myself that I am making the right decisions.

First semester wrap-up.

My first semester in the medical assisting program is wrapping up. This year is beginning to wrap up, too, so it is only fitting that I am wistfully pondering the nature of things.

Well, that, and the fact I fucked up my back last Thursday (Thanksgiving, for Mike’s sake!!) and have been on four different medications that all make me drowsy since.

I never realised how different it is to be in a vocational program versus a purely academic program. They are both challenging, but in separate ways. But, also, I felt like I had too much free time at the university; here I rarely have any. I was lucky to be in an academic program at school that challenged my “common sense” and personal philosophies all the time, but I also consider myself lucky to be in an environment that is not so cerebral. This is not to say there is no grass-is-greener feeling going on; I hated feeling stupid by talking about more concrete things while at the university, and I hate feeling weird and/or boring here, where I mostly gossip about other students (something I thought I would never do, how’s that for proof of society’s influence on the individual!) and talk about boyyyys.

I get along with my classmates, which is great. People around me say I am much happier in this program.  I attribute this to being far separated from the things that made me sad all the time–ex-friends and exes–but also that I feel really accepted by this group. It has been an exercise in keeping my mouth shut most of the time; they have average opinions or knowledge about most things, which means their assumptions and opinions come from an erroneous place. Things like believing people choose to be homosexual or that there is something inherently wrong with a single-mother household. I am waiting for someone to post something about keeping Christ in Christmas on Facebook. I, bitterly, will never forget an exchange between two where the first was describing being in jail for a night, and said, “…and then these four black girls walked in” and the other responded, “oooh, I would be so scared!” It did not shock me because she said it, it shocked me because she would say it in front of me–essentially saying she finds people like me scary, and/or I am not “that kind” of black woman. Wrong, hurtful, and offensive either way.

But I shall not get too much into the crap I witness with regards to race or gender.

All we talk about is school or classmates, which I take as an indication that we would not really keep in touch after graduating. A couple of years ago this would have upset me, but I am fine with that. I am finally coming into my own, finally comfortable with being my own company, finally becoming whole onto myself. I think this is another reason I seem happier lately.

All I know for sure right now is that having a few weeks off in between semesters is definitely not enough of a break.

Next semester is intimidating to me right now. I will be taking a course about laboratory procedures for medical assistants, a course about electrocardiography, pharmacology (for MAs; doubtful it is as intensive as it would be, say, for research, physicians, or nurses), anatomy & physiology, and medical insurance. I think the didactic portions will be much more of a challenge for me. I hope the lab course will be cool, in that I think it might excite the parts of me that gets excited by science…even though I am not looking forward to doing fecal occult tests. But if I survive that, everything after will feel like a breeze. I would not worry until it is time to find a job.

As I think about the next year, I also think about how I want to change myself besides being in school. I dislike new year’s resolutions, probably because it is one of the few ways I can feel so much cooler than everyone else. I guess I am starting early and calling it “necessary changes” rather than using that R-word.

I want to eat healthier and go to the gym more, like just about everyone else out there. I need to get back into reading for pleasure. I should get back into writing. I want to clear my skin up and whiten my teeth.

I want to learn how to be assertive without coming across as being selfish or bossy. I want to either take up making jewelry again, or I want to take up crocheting or knitting. I want to organise myself and stay organised. I want to meditate often.

I want to keep the dream of spending a month overseas. I want to find a white wine and a couple of beers I enjoy.

I want to end the year feeling awesome and accomplished.

Busy times.

I realize it has been a long time since I wrote anything. School has been keeping me busy. None of it is terribly hard work, but the issue is that there is so much of it. I liken it to being asked to compute hundreds of simple arithmetic problems. The issue is not that the problems are hard, but that there are so much of them.

This semester, I am taking medical terminology, a course about the expected administrative procedures for medical assistants, a course about the expected clinical procedures for medical assistants, an online course about business math ( for the life of me, I do not understand the point of this course…), and an online statistics course–which is for nursing school. I get to wear scrubs and white nursing shoes for the clinical class, which makes me more excited than it should.

Most of the materials, not including the career-specific stuff, is stuff I learned before I graduated high school. This creates two issues with me: my classmates tease me about my good grades, and I am often down on myself that I am doing the program at all. The former is an issue of conditioning for me. I am used to people using my smarts as an insult or a reason to distance themselves from me. I find myself “editing” my personality–I went through my Facebook and removed any reference to my Atheism and sociopolitical leanings, for example–so I do not come off as being the weird, socially awkward, lonely intellectual/nerd that I am. There are only sixteen of us in there; I feel a great pressure to be well-liked and fit in. I would say it is like high school all over again, but I went to an awesome high school where being weird and nerdy was encouraged.

The latter is hard to get over. I am in a program where we spend weeks learning what a copier is, what a computer is, how to use a keyboard or the Internet. I have to take a class where the first two weeks were devoted to basic arithmetic using whole numbers and fractions. Why am I doing this? Going over medical asepsis and the spread of diseases was especially hard, because it was a constant reminder of how I had to give up my dreams of epidemiology. I would not have been more hirable having a BS in microbiology, but perhaps I would be in grad school studying nosocomial infections in a much more fascinating and challenging way. Then I feel bad because it sounds even more like I think I am too good for any of this.

I am reading a bit more, as it helps to shut my brain off so I can sleep at night. I am wondering if I should continue with the reviews. I think I am awful at them.

I am also going to as many Atheist meet-ups as I can. I did not expect them to be as much of a welcome reprieve as they are. Even if I am gone for a large part of the day now, it is still unbearable to hear the hours and hours of conservative Christian programming that plays in this house. The people who go to these meet-ups tend to be liberal, as far as I can tell, and a lot of people from other countries show up. The one thing I dislike is that someone feels the need to tell me that I am a black female all the time. I know, black Americans tend to be very religious (and it is often easy to see why), though I am not sure how the fact I am black and female comes up. I sense a need to quickly look up religiosity across gender lines. In any case, I am just tired of it being pointed out. I feel like a commodity–I was once called a “jewel” for this reason–and I hate having to field questions about black religion or religiosity. I feel like such a Token. I am not sure how to field this issue. The people I meet seem to be genuinely curious, and probably do not realise that one can feel singled out by their actions. I doubt they know what a microaggression is, in other words. I do not want to be the one ~educating them about race relations in (and out) of the Atheist community any more than I want to be the one educating them about black Americans and religion. (I often feel this way. I do not want to be the person ~educating others about class, gender, race, sexuality, etc. When do I ever want to be that person? I do not know, except to say it is never when I am just trying to be social…) I hate to silently fume, but I am not sure how to broach the subject.

Well, this has been a nice vacation. Back to my mountain of homework.

I got in!

It has been a long time since I wrote anything. This is due partially because of a messed-up sleeping schedule that made me too foggy to write, partially because nothing terribly exciting has been happening, and partially because I was afraid I would write approximately 3000 posts about how hard it is to wait.

But today, I got the letter that I was accepted to the program! Now I can pretend it was a sure deal all along, but I was convinced the last three weeks I did not get in. It is a major relief. I will be getting relevant education. Hopefully having the certification  will lead to a job that will provide relevant experience, and allow me to save up for nursing school. Hopefully I will get into nursing school and do well. Hopefully I will eventually go to grad school for nursing and public health and be able to spend my life providing healthcare to underserved and vulnerable populations.

It all starts here!