Nursing

Showing up to this new, unfamiliar place, with new, unfamiliar people is scary. I knew nobody. I first am in a large room with booths set up everywhere, a scavenger hunt to find all the different info needed on dorm rooms, class schedules, meet the professors, school ID photo, club information. Standing in line waiting to have my picture taken, I met a girl. I actually typed out the entire story of mine and Katie’s friendship and demise here, but by the time I got to the end I realized I didn’t want to use this space to talk about her. I want to talk about the struggles of nursing school, which sucks. All you need to know about Katie is that we were inseparable, and now we don’t talk. Actually we haven’t talked since graduation, which was over a year ago.

Nursing school is hard, and I’m not even talking about the exams, the papers, the studying, or the stress of getting 100% on your med sim. I’m talking about how hard it is to force yourself to wake up at 3 AM to drive to your clinical site in Bum-Fuck-Egypt and take vital signs for the nurses who hate you. It’s hard to have no time to spend with your family, to say sorry I can’t come to Easter dinner, again. It’s hard to say goodbye to your faithful, loyal dog, who you are watching get older day by day. It’s hard to have professors who don’t give a shit about you or whether or not you pass. It’s hard to maintain ANY relationship. It’s hard to deal with the isolation of nursing school, the anxiety, the depression.

I told myself from the beginning that I wasn’t there to make friends, but having a friend in nursing school makes it so much more tolerable. Someone, the only one who can truly understand what you are going through. I’ve heard people say that those friends are the friend that last a lifetime. My story was much different. Just to wrap up on Katie, what I think now is that she was using me the entire time, that our “friendship” was superficial, and she really only wanted to be friends with me during the program and had no intention of including me in her “real life.” We are no longer friends.

The struggle is real…here are my honest opinions and thought on nursing school. When I take into consideration all of my prior experience before starting nursing school, I really thought I was going to have a leg up on all of my peers. To be honest, I did. Learning the content was not hard for me, understanding the “bigger picture” and how everything worked together was not hard for me. I won’t be as cocky as to say nursing school was easy however, because it wasn’t. But for me, the hard part was not learning, it was the commitment, the anxiety, and late nights and early morning, the stress, and Dr. Black (name changed for privacy).