Happy New Year!
05 Jan 2012 4 Comments
in Being a student nurse Tags: nursing, nursing student, personal, sri lanka, student nurse
First of all I’d like to wish you all a Happy New Year! I’m not one to bang on about fresh starts and New Year’s resolutions, but if you have any then I wish you the best of luck with them. I finish my nursing course in August, only a matter of months away now, so if I had to make a resolution it would be to leave all my troubles behind and concentrate more on my work. Which leads us to my next bit of gossip about what’s been going on lately.
Once again I must apologise for my complete lack of blogging. Things have been very bumpy for me for the past few months, causing a lack of motivation for my university work. So blogging has been somewhat pushed aside for a while. Back in October, at the start of my placements, serious events happened between my parents that made me decide to leave home for a while as I did not feel able to cope with living with them. I packed up as little as I needed and found myself living at my boyfriend’s (Kov) for around two months, which made things quite difficult as it meant him having to give up his desk for me to do my work and me regularly waking everyone up to get ready for a 7.30am shift. I spent most of my time there living out of bags and feeling very stressed about the entire situation. I brought emotional baggage with me everywhere, including placement, which made it hard for me to concentrate. Luckily for me the first half of my split placement was on such an amazing and inspiring ward, and the nursing staff were more than friendly and supportive. My mentor knew what was going on and always checked up on me to make sure I was ok.
Eventually I was able to move back home when my parents reconciled and went away for Christmas. Unfortunately this meant that I was responsible for buying most of the food for Christmas dinner and cooking it all for those of my family who stayed at home! It was stressful to say the least as I had never made Christmas dinner on my own before.
Catching cold after cold for two months did not help; during my last week of placement I managed to lose my voice and was sent home from placement on my last day. I managed to develop some kind of allergy to something while living at Kov’s – my eyes were constantly sore and itchy and I found myself taking an antihistamine every day, until finally my mentor sent me to A&E to have my eyes examined when I started waking up with puss in my eyes. The problem still persists now.
Moving onto better news, I am going to Sri Lanka for my six week elective placement on the 21st of January, which has come around very quickly! I will be going with four other student nurses from my course, and yesterday we met with a very nice medical student who will be staying in the student house with us when we get there. Of course I am very excited about this opportunity, but also quite nervous as I am still due some vaccinations and still haven’t applied for my visa!
I will also be without Kov for six weeks, something which I know I will struggle with as we are very close. We have been through a hell of a lot through the past few months and suddenly being without him is going to be a shock to the system!
But I will be with some good friends and there is a hell of a lot to do there other than work and study – we’re already getting giddy about going to the elephant orphanage, visiting the temples, lounging on the beaches and climbing Adam’s Peak.
At the moment I am currently enjoying four weeks off university – that means no lectures, work or placement at all. Enough time to organise Sri Lanka and try to tidy my room up a bit now that Kov is living with me!
Anyway, that was just an update about where I’ve been. I will be posting more very soon about some of the things I have experienced in the past few months, including witnessing my first patient death.
Those of you who started your training only a few months ago, I hope you have enjoyed your much needed time off and that you haven’t been put off nursing completely! I’m sure you can all appreciate how hard it is already.
Until here, take care and look out for more posts soon 
Sarah xXx
