To start a blog...

...Is a very hard thing to do. But my sister is so good at it, and I know that if I move to Dallas, my Mom will be begging me to start one too. So here's to hopin' I start gettin' in the habit.

Right now, I feel really sick (some upper respiratory cold nonsense) so I do not want to do any homework. I thought this blog could be like a journal for me in some ways so I thought I'd write what I would normally write about in my journal.

March 1st, Thursday

Dear Journal,              <-----haha this, is how it usually starts

Today was a long day of classes. Tuesday used to be the long day of nursing classes from 8am to 5 pm...all those semesters really made me start to hate tuesdays so I'm glad they finally moved this last semester of nursing classes to Thursday. It gives me a new day of the week to dread, haha.

So, typically this semester I work 1-3 days a week at the Veteran's Hospital (VA) in SLC. I really like it and it makes me feel good because a lot of the other nurses as well as my preceptor nurse always ask me if I've applied to work at the VA yet. They really like me and think I do good work! I also really like the patient population. It's mostly older adult males, but older adult males are pretty fun to talk to. The only thing that gets old (besides my patients' age...haha) is having to do so many urinary catheters....really....I think I've done enough urinary catheters to last me my life time. Sometimes I have nightmares...

One thing I like about being a nurse is the love you can feel for your patients. It's so odd. You don't even know this person for one hour, yet while you watch them sit in their bed and eat the nasty hospital food all you can think is: "Gosh I love you and I'm so glad I get to meet you! You're so precious!" And yes, I feel this way about my grumpy patients too. Perhaps it takes a little more effort and prayer, but I still love them.

Last week, I had a patient that the nurses would kind of get annoyed with because he was a bit demanding and OCD (wow--just like me!). Anyways, he was a sweet 80-90 year old Catholic man. He wore his rosary around his neck and would always kiss it (I thought that was really nice :] ). He'd also always shout out: "God bless you!" every time me or the nurse would leave the room, haha. I loved it, but I think my nurse thought it was strange (she's not religious).

Anyways, this little old man and I became really good friends and he said he was excited for me to graduate and thought I'd be a really good nurse. Unfortunately, the doctor made him upset later in the day and my dear little friend got short tempered with me.  But that's okay.  I understand how stressfull being hospitalized can be.  It's just makes me mad when someone else comes into the room and makes matters worse by making the patient feel unappreciated or degraded.  That bugs me.

So I think this will be the end of the first blog post I ever write.
Sincerely,
Kelsey Justice