Reasons for not posting: working 40 plus hours per week, returning to school for a BSN, living on a farm, homeschooling a 5 y/o, getting a 20 y/o through college, and health issues. The latter category has included breaking my big toe in the middle of training for a 5K trail run, blood sugars creeping up and a little anemia. I have yet to see a doctor because I have been very disillusioned with the ability of my physician to help solve my problems the way I would like to. So these problems have been worsening over the past year. I like her as a person, but it is nigh impossible to find a physician who isn't on the bandwagon with the current philosophies of health care, most which I am not in agreement with. It is amazing how much a small dent in your energy levels can make an obsessive-compulsive (aka o/c), over-achiever feel as if the world has ended! It hasn't. It isn't depression causing it, as they would have me believe in their brief 1-hour-every-six-months assessments of my conditions. It is my bull-headed need to have so many irons in the fire, and my tendency to have to have my mind working on 100 things all at once, all the time, and the habitual, frequent but passing resulting discouragement with myself.
Now lets focus on returning to school. I graduated with an ADN in 1997, and have been working as a registered nurse from that August on to the current hour. After 14 years of direct patient care, I decided that I might be qualified to teach it, or maybe I just want to do something else. Like forensic nursing. But an underlying fascination with immunity (did I mention I was a little o/c - I think I did), illustrated by the raw milk debates involving infectious disease and HUS; AIDS; vaccines vs pitocin and their relationships to autism; and auto-immune diseases such as diabetes and lupus; also put me in mind to study cellular biology. However, attempts at brushing up on chemistry made me realize that 22 years was a little to long to go without a chemistry class, without using it. So I settled for going for the BSN, with hopes of continuing on to an MSN in either nursing education or nursing forensics. I've been using my nursing skills. In fact I've become somewhat adept at cardiac nursing and Advanced Cardiac Life Support, when someone decides to try to die.
My first term was difficult, but went well. I immersed myself in pathophysiology, and did well enough in nursing informatics and nursing transitions to receive an "A," for all three. This term is a little more bumpy. Behavioral health statistics is not my forte. The difficulty does not lie in that I can't do them as much as in the fact that the last time I took statistics, I received a D+ because I was going through some difficult life transitions. So every time I read about the standard deviation from the mean, I have a flashback about sitting on a picnic table covered with bird poop, under a tree on Ohio State University's campus, pregnant and trying to study, and wishing I'd never gotten married; or looking at my exam in front of me in a classroom and not knowing what to make of the Greek letters before me, feeling thankful for multiple choice questions. The D+ was an entity of choosing one of the middle two answers, or the answer that seemed the least ludicrous by and large. It is sad that a person can pass a class that complex in that manner, but it happened. Unfortunately the college I am currently in requires a C or better for transferring credits, as well as for degree completion, so I am repeating this course.
But now I have the added motivation of knowing I can acquire an "A" in pathophysiology when most other nursing students can't. I also would like to be able to decipher the nitty-gritty of reports of studies, and maybe even someday conduct a few of my own. An understanding of Statistics is required for this. I may even be liking the subject. At times I find myself considering taking another class in it, and dreaming of working for the World Health Organization. Now, that is an amusing thought. The other class I'm taking this term is Sociology of the Family. There is nothing like having to write lots of short papers, but not being required to use APA format like I was last term for my nursing papers. I've also been involved in social justice issues for a long enough period of time that the terminology on the tests is surprisingly familiar. There are a few studies that have taught me something I didn't know. I do feel that some of these classes, such as the Sociology class, are somewhat unnecessary after being a nurse for 14 years, and I feel like I'm simply paying the college for a degree, and jumping through a few hoops to get it. In the scholarly discussion forums, I sometimes feel like I'm helping the instructor educate some of the students who clearly did not read the same text book I did.
The one thing the Sociology of the Family class is doing for me however, is bringing up issues I already know about, closer to my current consciousness. We are on the chapters about social class structures and how they affect the family. Meanwhile it comes out that Bill Gates has invested in Monsanto's GMO seed production, that the President of the U.S. has appointed a former Monsanto executive to head the FDA; Harvard Law School is having a debate on raw milk, and Occupy Wall Street is just waning as a movement, in the wake of several states attempting to pass laws against collective bargaining. Both the Ohio Nurses Association and the American Nurses Association have come out in support of collective bargaining. It is funny, but nobody else in my class but me seems to know about the whole GMO thing, and I seem to be the only person connecting these issues with wealth in our country. This disturbs me.
I'm not a great blog-writer. I don't take time to incorporate nice links into my text and put pictures at the top. But if you google any of these topics, you are quite likely to come up with the articles I'm referring to. It is easier than looking for scholarly studies on CINAHL. At some point, I do hope to write in a more user-friendly fashion, and more often than one post every 3-6 months. That will come with time.
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