The Quarter Must End

This is my last week of the quarter, not counting finals week, which for me will be brief with a final on Monday and one on Tuesday and then = helloooooo large stack of fiction books, netflix movies and housecleaning projects combined w/ a trip to the snow w/ my little ones. I have some ambitious plans to get some stuff done combined w/ unambitious plans to do nothing. With less than two weeks for spring break (woohoo) I've got to get pretty busy not being busy so that I can get back to being way too busy.

I've been working my way backwards in my clinicals here. This past quarter I went from geriatrics (over 65) to pediatrics (18 and under - so I skipped a few decades...shrug...) and then next quarter I'll be doing maternity (followed by medical where I'll pick up those missed decades). I've loved working w/ kids and their parents. I can see myself working as a pediatric nurse. I had a patient who had her entire extended family in the room with her at one point. They were eating noodles and doing work on laptops and they all gathered around when a new IV needed to be started (nope, I learn that skill next quarter so I just assisted). It was almost festive and it certainly chaotic and that's what family is all about. You really get a sense of treating the whole family when you're dealing w/ kids and that's fabulous. I'll never be able to take care of a patient again without thinking about how their health and wellness is affected by the (usually not physically present) people gathered around and eating noodles.

Tomorrow is my last peds clinical day and I'm not on the floor w/The Bad Instructor. I'll be doing my observation day in oncology and hematological disorders: hemonc (pronounced "heem-onk"). I'll get back to you on that.

Every Easter when I was a kid, my mom would haul out the egg molds and we'd make sugar eggs topped by royal icing roses. Us kids would put little scenes inside. My brother would do some post-apocalyptic easter (probably) w/ pink-eyed bunnies being attacked by giant spiders under a steel grey sky (all topped, of course, by pastel royal icing roses). Then came the Easter where mom decided she'd make a few extra dollars by selling the sugar eggs. There's a picture of my mom somewhere looking sticky and exhausted piping roses out w/ a bunch of blurry eggs in the background. That was the last year we made eggs, though my sister reminded me that one year my sister and I made and sold eggs for some cheap wine/ comic book money. Somehow I don't remember that. Anyways, grandkids inspired my mom to bust out the dusty plastic molds and, well, that's my egg above.