Two Weeks Down.

It's hard to believe that two weeks of my senior year already went whooshing past; some of my friends are only starting classes now! This past weekend was wonderful---a great mix of study and fun. My roommate and I have made a determined commitment to get homework finished before Sunday so that Sunday can truly be a day of rest, relaxation, and rejuvenation. Granted, it means working our little tooshies off on Friday and Saturday (when most people are socializing) and then being bored on Sunday (when most people are doing homework and can't socialize), but it is still rewarding and refreshing.

Anyway, after classes and work on Friday afternoon, we took a girls-trip to Aldi's, Wal-Mart and the library... with each stop adding it's own unique success. Foods, necessities, non-necessities, books. At the library I picked up two books, the Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, upon Karissa's recommendation during our summer travels. Friday evening we spent some time working on homework. Saturday, I did laundry in the morning and worked on homework in the morning and afternoon. Around 4:00 Katie and I decided that we were going to work until 6:30, at which time we would stop and make grilled-cheese and watch MASH and ER. After a few episodes, we watched "EverAfter" with some girls from the hall and then headed to bed!

...which meant that Sunday was church, adoptive family's house for lunch, fun reading, phone call home, uploading Peru pictures, and more ER episodes, plus dinner date with (almost) the whole hall!

Today brought the reality of school back full-force! The weekend went by so quickly, but four hours of lecture beginning at 8:00 a.m. with only a one-hour break for chapel quickly reminded us of our full-time jobs as students. After class I grabbed a super-quick lunch (pizza, soup, and veggies) before heading to work, where I am answering phones and doing odds-and-ends tasks until 5:00 p.m. today.

Tomorrow we begin clinical, the "real deal." We'll begin by helping a nurse with her patients; in following weeks we will have one patient that we are responsible for, then in the last couple of weeks we will have two patients that we are responsible for. It's always nerve-wracking to start clinicals! Do I really remember how to do these things? Can I really do them?!

But, I am looking forward to this rotation; we are in the Intensive Care Unit at a local hospital, a good hospital. It's a bigger, newer hospital than the sites of my previous clinical experience, so I am glad that I get to have my "area of interest" rotation in a hospital comparable to the hospitals at home.

We have a drug quiz at clinical tomorrow, which I definitely need to study for!! After clinical tomorrow and Wednesday, we have classes again on Thursday and Friday, with nothing exceedingly special about those classes. Then it's a 3-day weekend because of labor day!! Wahoo!!