Revisiting Nursing School (nine weeks in)

If you had asked me the week before reading break how nursing school was going, I'd have told you that while I still didn't love it, I was starting to feel like I was settling into a rhythm with it.  That I wasn't coming home quite as exhausted from the countless hours of group work, and it wasn't taking the whole three day weekend each week to recover enough energy to force myself out of bed on Tuesday mornings and go back to school.

I might have spoken too soon.

This last week, the first week back after reading week, was rough.

It held a midterm, an in class paper, and lots and lots (as always) of group work.

The paper went smoothly.  The midterm not so much.

There is nothing as frustrating to me as an exam that is designed to test if you can think like a professor, rather than if you've actually understood and internalized the material through a process of learning and critical evaluation.  Historically I've been a fan of multiple choice testing.  The principle being that the correct answer is one of the options right in front of you and you have to have prepared enough to narrow down the options and then choose the correct one.  This exam, well, it wasn't like that.  If this exam had been a short-answer test, on many of the questions you could have made a convincing case for three of the four options.  Since it wasn't a short answer question, you had to choose the "best answer."  The problem with that is that you needed to guess which one the professor thought was the right answer.  Other questions were designed to be tricky, with plays on words and needing to be able to pick out things like "malificence" was a wrong answer because to be right it should have said "non-malificence." The correct answer hinged on your ability to pick out the fact that the professor had deliberately left out three letters and a hyphen.

When I'd finished the sixty questions, I sat and commiserated with a couple of friends, and we eventually decided to drown our sorrows in carbohydrates.  We landed ourselves in the campus pub at 11am, talked ourselves out of ordering alcohol and ordered big plates of hamburgers and fries instead.  The carbs served their purpose and temporarily soothed my grouchy soul.

And then there was the group work.  Apparently a week spent away from it, in quiet, tore down any built-up levels of tolerance.  Let me say right up front that I really enjoy the individuals in my group.  I like the mix of personalities most of the time, and I like each of them as individuals.  But this week was exhausting and some of the activities reminded me of the principle that sometimes it is better to internalize honesty, rather than bluntly speaking your mind.  Before reading break, an hour of cleaning on Friday evening was usually enough to allow me to separate myself from the exhaustion of the week and settle into rest.  This last week, that simply didn't happen.  By Sunday afternoon I was still feeling exhausted and drained, dreading the return to this method of study that is the hardest for my introverted, formerly homeschooled, independent learning self.  I am reminding myself of a long conversation I had at the beginning of the semester with a trusted advisor about coping strategies for group work, and promising myself that I will do a better job of incorporating them in the week ahead.  I'm also reminding myself of the need to spend time with people who really understand, and I'm looking forward to a couple of "dates" with good friends in the coming week, including a skype date with my closest friend, who is also doing this "mature" student thing, albeit on the other side of the planet.

I find myself wondering, sometimes, if I polled a group of practicing nurses, how many of them would say that this group work that is so common in nursing education actually prepared them for their jobs.  I know a lot of practicing nurses, and we've had cursory conversations on this topic that would seem to indicate that many of them are as in the dark as I am as to why this was considered the best method of educating us.

And y'all, it didn't help that the focus of this last week was on tolerance.  I'm not sure this is a safe topic to wade into on the wide open field of the internet, but I happen to believe that my love for Jesus means that I need to love people the way he did - unconditionally.  That means that I can disagree with various parts of their lifestyles and still care for them.  I think that that means that as a Christian, I should be the most tolerant and caring person around.  I know that I fail at this sometimes, but it's what I really do aim for.  Why is it that a faith that teaches me to love is one that is stereotyped as uncaring?  I spent the week feeling more and more frustrated with the instruction.  Feeling like I was being told at every turn that it is wrong to have specific beliefs, and most certainly wrong to express them.  Ironically, we spent a good deal of time at house church on Thursday night discussing a topic that was then central to the lecture I attended on Friday morning.  With the way the week had been going, I texted a friend commenting on God's timing that this topic would pop up after the discussion we'd had the night before, and then asked if she would pray, as I was trying hard to absorb the information so that I could critically evaluate it, but was instead finding myself reacting to what felt like a blatant attack on the worldview that has been shaped by my faith.  My friend's response was helpful - she acknowledged that this was a tough spot to find myself in, didn't minimize, and told me that she'd pray that God's spirit would enable me to respond in love.

Her response sits with me even now.  As I look at the week ahead, while still sitting in the midst of the frustrations from the week that just passed, I find myself thinking about the truth that love needs to be my default response.  That all my opinions, all my words, all my actions need to come from that place of love.  That I need to consciously temper my frustrations with love.  That I need to see others with eyes shaped by love.  And that I need God's spirit to enable all of that, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, and week by week.  And so that is my prayer, and my prayer request this week - that I would know God's spirit within me, opening my eyes to love more deeply and to respond only from that place.

Daily 5 - Year 3, Day 197

Today's Daily 5:

1. Hot crossed buns
2. sleeping late
3. lit candles scattered around my living space
4. a series of text messages that made me laugh out loud
5. making good progress on a paper that has been hard to feel motivated to write

Daily 5 - Year 3, Day 196

Today's Daily 5:

1. Warm weather and doing errands in only a hoodie, without a jacket
2. Having my student drug insurance finally be active
3. A random encounter with an old lady in walmart.  She glanced sideways at me, then turned to me and said "You want a weight loss tip?  Grapefruits and spinach.  Tell your overweight friends." She paused, looked me up and down and added, "You don't need it.  You're not overweight."
4. A guy waiting to cross the street, standing on the corner on a windy day, practicing tree pose from yoga.  First one side, and then the other, swaying in the wind gusts.
5. bare toes soaking up sunbeams
6. a borrowed car and accomplishing errands quickly
7. fresh raspberries
8. time spent alone in quiet
9. a phone call from a friend
10. chinese take out

Daily 5 - Year 3, Day 195

To be honest, this week kind of beat up on me a bit.  The first week after reading break wasn't as smooth as it has been some years.  A rough midterm, not enough sleep, my ongoing struggle to balance my introversion with the demands of twenty hours a week of intense group work - none of these did me any favors this week.  That said, it's weeks like this that remind me why it's so important for me to count reasons to smile - to list the things I'm thankful for - at the end of each day.

So, here's today's Daily 5:

1. Friday - that moment when I get to turn off the 5:30 alarm clock and know it's not going on again until Tuesday
2. Wearing a dress, leggings, a cute scarf and boots to school today
3. sitting in companionable silence with a friend over lunch
4. Vietnamese noodles
5. choosing honest expression (speak truth even if your voice shakes - and mine was)
6. feeling really stretched in my thinking around personal values and tolerance - but not feeling as threatened by that stretching as I might have, and being able to identify the emotions that I was feeling, to name and add humor to those thoughts by composing phrases like "All this teaching on tolerance is starting to make me feel intolerant"
7. friends who cared enough to check in
8. getting a skype date on the schedule with a friend I've been badly missing
9. arriving home to quiet
10. good bus connections
11. pouring myself into some mindless and soul cleansing tasks like vacuuming, laundry, and taking out the recycling
12. washing dishes - until I decided enough was enough with my living situation and started eating something besides microwave meals in disposable containers, I'd forgotten how soothing it can be to wash dishes at times.  I'd also never believed that something as simple as washing your own dishes could feel empowering, but it is given the situation in which I've lived for the last two years.
13. really good leftover chicken, vegetables and goat cheese risotto from dinner out at an Italian place with a friend earlier this week
14. feeling the reality of exercise in my muscles
15. putting on pajamas still warm from the dryer
16. watching the season premiere of the newest "America's Next Top Model" cycle.  This time it pitts 7 British girls against 7 American girls.  I'm betraying my American heritage and cheering for the Brits (which, by the way, deeply embraces my Canadian heritage, not only because the Queen is also our head of state, but because it's very Canadian to cheer for anything that isn't American!)  The show was exactly the right mix of humour, mindless, and catty to mitigate the events of my day.  It did however remind me that I was mocking a friend's slightly similar viewing choice earlier today, by telling her that every time she watched it, a book committed suicide!
17. collapsing into quiet for most of the evening
18. word games (Words with Friends and Scramble with Friends) on my iphone (add me if you play either of these - should be under my full name from Facebook, or if you need a user name, email me!)
19. the catharsis of writing a long overdue email to one of my best friends, and knowing I could humoursly rant and she'd exactly understand both me, and the situations I was conveying, and empathize since she's experiencing similar things at the moment
20. chocolate.  any day that ends with chocolate has to be at least a little bit good.

Friday Reflections, March 2, 2012

Given that yesterday I shared in greater depth about my journey with food and eating disorders, it seems somehow appropriate to share some reflections from Henri Nouwen on the spiritual value of sharing a meal today.  Nouwen's thoughts on this subject have shaped some of my passion for sharing meals with friends, and for cooking, and fit nicely into the themes I seem to be exploring in this space lately.


The Meal That Makes Us Family and Friends

We all need to eat and drink to stay alive. But having a meal is more than eating and drinking. It is celebrating the gifts of life we share. A meal together is one of the most intimate and sacred human events. Around the table we become vulnerable, filling one another's plates and cups and encouraging one another to eat and drink. Much more happens at a meal than satisfying hunger and quenching thirst. Around the table we become family, friends, community, yes, a body.

That is why it is so important to "set" the table. Flowers, candles, colorful napkins all help us to say to one another, "This is a very special time for us, let's enjoy it!"