The Roughest Nursing School West of the Mississippi

The beat goes on. Or maybe I should say the beating goes on. Semester 4. Holy Moly! Glad to be here. Glad to be almost done.
This semester instructors did their usual show-of-force routine as previous instructors before them: not acknowledging the presence of any individual students, no smiles, no jokes. Eyeballing us secretly from the back of the room where they quietly congregated,looking at us, turning away and chatting, then looking back at us as if to say, "Look at that one there. What a chump. I'm gonna break him!" It had a real WWF wrestling vibe to it. I envisioned my 5'10,rather husky Nigerian born instructor, picking me up and spinning me above her head like apiece of pizza dough and then throwing me against a pile of chairs. After I hit the ground she bellows at me, "What labs should you check to see if you're okay after this traumatic injury? RBC's? No! Who cares how many red blood cells you have? BUN/Creatinine? I don't care about your kidneys. No! Check your CKMM, YAARGGH!"

The 4th semester chair had this to say, "I guarantee you by the end of this semester you will be burned out, so use your sick days wisely."

WTF!? Is that what nursing is about? A fucking marathon of busy work and a battle of wills? Maybe it is. What I can never separate, what I continually struggle to understand, is my instructors desire for us to be very competent novice nurses or are we reveling in their dark sticky bully side where they get off on fucking with us. I guess all this ball-breaking is for a good cause, and I, no doubt, will look back when after graduation and be thankful for the lessons I learned while still in school as a student as opposed to being on the floor with a license to defend...but at what cost? I can not BELIEVE how tired I was a month ago. It was scary. I was so tired, I didn't EVEN KNOW how tired I was.

I finally decompressed on the last week, the 4th week, of break. The first two weeks of vacation I was an anxious, irritable ball of nerves. The third week I slept, the fourth week I rejoiced.

Now I'm back in it with more soon to be fulfilled promises of extreme exhaustion and cramming. These fuckers even want us to come in on Saturdays to go to healthfairs and recruitment sessions (and I know like you know you can't recruit to a captive audience). Including clinical which is 17 hrs a week, I'm in class another 8 hrs over two days. Plus fucking 6 more for Saturdays. Isn't there some like nursing student sweatshop law? With all the massive write ups, projects, and arbitrarily graded care plans (fucking 3 our last semester- grand total of 9 throughout the program) and hellish exams I'm already in a straight jacket.

Whine, whine, whine. Fuck it, just get through it, I'm almost done. Keep on'. I'll do whatever it takes to have a job I feel truly passionate about and be able to adequately support my family. I should be so lucky.

Thanks for everyone's support with the previous post. It really helped.