Christmas Eve

It's been a long hard fall. Starting with Father's death; then, when I got home classes to attend, papers to write while catching up on the ones that I missed. Since the beginning of October, practice nursing on the anesthesia unit in Elverum, all the while working half-time. It was tough, worse than in the spring. In the course of the 10 weeks I had the swine flu (H1N1), a multiple choice anesthesiology exam as well as preparing for the home exam in anesthesia nursing. At the evaluation my teacher and nurse mentor strongly recommended that I put my books away and rest up during the Christmas break. I was exhausted by then, and it was affecting my performance.

Immediately following the period of practice nursing came the home exam. We were given the exam-text at 9 am on Monday morning and had to hand it in by noon the following Monday. We could choose between 2 subjects: obstetrics and general surgery. I chose obstetrics since this would be my last chance to learn about the subject. During the practical I had only actually been involved in 2 cesareans. I planned my days carefully with 3-4 two to three hour work periods, totalling 8 hrs a day for 7 days (9 hrs on the last day). Between work sessions I walked the dogs, went shopping, made dinner, hung laundry etc. The only problem was that when I was done writing I had 1300 too many words. I spent almost the whole last day cutting back. In the end I wrote a little about a lot. The question is whether I rather should have written a lot about a little. But by the time I realized that I should have done it completely differently it was Friday afternoon - too late to start over.

For those who are interested here's what I wrote about: We were given a case. Part A was to identify and describe the challenges for anesthesia nursing contained in the case. Part B was to write about one of these problems in depth. The case was a young women coming for a semi-emergency cesarean because of failure to progress with labor after an uneventful pregnancy. In my paper I took her through all the scenarios which could necessitate conversion of an epidural anesthesia to general anesthesia and then all the complications relating to airway management during the induction of general anesthesia and the options which each complication presented.

When I went to work in the afternoon after handing in the test I found I still am not up to my best performance. This has been bothering me since. As a nurse you have to be up to your best, all the time. As a nurse anesthetist even more so. And so I have decided that the advice given at the evaluation was good and that I would try to rest up during Christmas. I have so far been able too stay away from my books. I have some withdrawal symptoms - a kind of restlessness, but am doing my best to frivolously do things like watching Grey's Anatomy, reading novels, playing logic games (griddlers) online, and do some working out (unfortunately all this school stuff is not good for my waistline).

During the last few days I have also been enjoying baking hutzelbrot and bagels, shopping, setting up the creche and decorating for Christmas. Really I have to thank my family that we are having a Christmas at all! Husband baked almost all the cookies. Ingvild and Christhian trimmed the tree yesterday. I am now going to start cooking christmas dinner, before picking up Irene from the bus from Oslo, and Ingvild from work.

Merry Christmas!