A day in the life: a nursing school day

Last time I did a day-in-the-life post, nursing school hadn’t started.

My days have changed a LOT since then, so here’s a peek at a day in nursing school.

6:30

I woke up, laid motionless in bed in the dark for a while, then checked my phone (I know, I know….the routine of champions.)

7:00

I got up, threw some clothes on, did a bare minimum hair/makeup thing, and ate a bowl of shredded wheat.

7:30

I walked to school, carrying nothing except my little school-required calculator.

There is a nursing school rule that says if your phone goes off during a test, you will immediately be demoted to a 75 as your best possible grade.

This has terrified me so much, I do not even bring my phone with me to school on exam days.

On this day, I left it at home, under my pillow.

Why under the pillow? Well, my earbuds were plugged into my phone, and I figured it would be safer to hide the whole mess under a pillow because of the cat criminal who lives here. 😉

7:45

I arrived at school and chatted with classmates until our exam room opened at 8:00.

We take our exams in a big room with individual computers for each of us. We get a pencil and a scratch piece of paper, and nothing else.

We even have to leave the lids of our calculators at the front of the room.

I’ve heard that there were some cheating issues with another semester recently, so that explains why things are verrrrry locked down in the nursing program these days.

8:45

Test over! Time to walk back home.

9:00

At home, I:

• showered
• got dressed and did my hair/makeup (which, as I always say, is not a big ordeal because I am lazy in the beauty department)
• made my bed
• started a load of laundry
• wrote this post up to here 😉

And except for during the showering/writing part of that bulleted list, I listened to a chapter on hypertension in my earbuds.

The amount of reading that’s assigned to us is wild (this particular week, it was 22 chapters), so I listen to the book’s computer voice read the chapters, at 2x speed, whenever I am walking, driving, cleaning, doing laundry, cooking, and so on.

10:00

I:

• made coffee
• listened to part of a chapter on diabetes management
• filled out a med card for humalog insulin
• texted with a friend from my support group who is having frustrating troubles with her ex-husband
• texted with a friend who was about to take the math test (we’d studied together a few days prior, and I quizzed her on a few things/encouraged her)

11:00

I:

• posted the day’s blog post on my Facebook page, my Facebook group, and sent it out to my email subscribers
• switched my laundry to the dryer
• made a salad for myself, using lettuce, ham, dill Havarti cheese, and a cucumber (while listening to more nursing chapters)

• ate the salad with Chiquita

• texted with Sonia (our conversations largely consist of sending each other pictures of our cats)

• got ready to head back to school

12:00

I:

• walked halfway to school and realized I had never put deodorant on after my shower
• quickly walked back to my house and rectified the deodorant situation
• had to change plans and drive to school because now I was short on time
• found a parking spot so far back, I might as well have just walked to class after all

12:30-2:00

We had a lecture on chronic diseases (like diabetes, hypertension, COPD, and heart failure).

 

2:00-2:30

Break time! I spent it socializing with my classmates.

Annnnnd we got our math test scores at this point in the day.

2:30-4:30

Next up, we had a two-hour lecture on perioperative nursing, which is nursing done before, during, and after surgery.

4:30

School was out for the day!

As I was walking out to the parking lot, I saw a classmate who was repeating semester 1 because she hadn’t passed the math test last semester. She has faced some hard challenges this semester (like one of her parents dying unexpectedly), but she told me she’d passed!

I screamed a happy scream with her and gave her a big hug and my goodness, I almost cried because I was so happy for her.

5:00

I picked up some paperwork at home and drove to go drop it off at an office.

Did I listen to nursing textbook chapters as I drove?

(Yes. Yes, I did.)

On my way back, I popped in at Safeway because I needed some tomatoes for a salad.

And that’s when I picked up the free pound of butter I mentioned in a previous post.

6:15

I made chipotle chicken and grilled it. I also made the sauce, and a green salad, and we ate the chicken on the salad, with the sauce as a dressing.

I got some croissants out of the freezer and toasted those for us to eat on the side.

Since I’d been gone most of the day, I chatted with Zoe over dinner and got caught up on her day.

By 8:00, dinner was cleaned up and I sat down to catch up on writing down my day.

8:30

I worked on finishing up my blog post for the next day and I scheduled it to publish the next morning.

9:00

I was pretty tired by this point, so I didn’t have much energy for anything brain-related.

I did text with Sonia to figure out a time for her to come over for FAFSA help.

Then Lisey called on her way home from work and while we chatted, I folded my laundry and got ready for bed.

10:00

I did my Duolingo lesson, applied my dry-eye mask (you can read more about the eye mask/my eye issue here), and went to sleep.

You know that Calvin and Hobbes book titled, “The Days are Just Packed”?

That’s how I feel most of the time lately!

Except my packed days do not involve hanging out in a tree. 😉

By the way, nursing school days vary tremendously, so it’s hard to share one that is emblematic of this period of my life. This particular day had an exam (we don’t have those every day!), and several lectures.

But there are also days when I don’t spend much time at the school building, and more of my time is spent doing homework and studying.

And soon, some of my school days will be clinical days.

Sooooo, when I do another nursing school day-in-the-life, it probably will be nothing like this one. 😉