RN, BSN

Monday I took my NCLEX and I felt okay afterwards but then I did a really smart thing – I starting thinking about the test, not keeping myself busy, analyzing my answers, etc. In short, I worried and fretted over the test after I had already taken it – the after test was way worse the pre-test phase of waiting. To make matters worse, I blew out a belt loop in my “fat” jeans. Now these are jeans I need to use a belt to keep me from looking like a hoodrat wanna-be so I realize it was likely just poor stitching and not that I’m too fat for jeans that are too big for me but it still bothered me.

This is the first time in 12 or 15 years I haven’t played some form of fantasy baseball. To distract myself from school in between study sessions, I created an alter ego Facebook account and played the 3 games I played on my regular account – Mafia Wars, Castle Age and Mobsters 2: Vendetta – but I shut that account down and deleted all of the games off of my regular account. I noticed as this past semester went on I started getting on them less and less and as the NCLEX started getting closer I did a lot less of everything else as well. I got rid of all my “distractions” as I was finishing up school, I found I simply didn’t need them anymore. In April, my Xbox 360 came out of my closet for the first time since last October and I started playing that again once in a while. I just wonder, why is it so easy to dismiss games on Facebook, get rid of my alter ego account and yet not be able to do the same with food…? I used them both for the same reason, to cope with the stresses and difficulties of nursing school and for an added bonus, the money troubles involved therein and that have followed since.

The good news is, I found out on Wednesday at 1330 that I did in fact pass my boards and I am now officially an RN, BSN – the ICU/cardiac telemetry float pool now awaits. That ended 2 days of hell, brewing and stewing, worried about how I was going to do and wondering what would happen if I didn’t pass.

My chest pain is still going strong even though I’m done with school, it seems I “like” to be stressed in that I have now switched to worrying about my money troubles since I have been part-time since almost this time last year. I cut down on that stress, job stress, job/school stress and replaced it with worrying about money – the fact that I didn’t have this last semester paid for until my parents took out a loan for me 3 weeks prior to the end of the semester. Since then I have been studying, studying, studying for the NCLEX and only picking up an extra shift here and there. My financial situation looks like an uncooked scrambled egg – 1/4 of a tank of gas, 2 checking accounts and 2 savings accounts hovering just above the $17.00 range and 3 credit cards that are teetering close to their limits…

Worrying does no good, I get that. But money problems are real, I’m not in danger of being kicked out or starving but worrying every single day about every single penny sucks. So why worry? How can I not worry with my situation? It’s not like money is just going to appear out of thin air. It wasn’t until Monday that I could really consider picking up extra shifts. I will start now but I am off the tech/secretary schedule starting July 3rd as I will be a nurse in another hospital by then – THANK GOD!

A note on the NCLEX, I wanted to feel like I’d been prison raped by several RNs after I was done as it’s been said that the tougher the questions are, the better you’re doing. Well, I got my wish. Tough, tough, tough, easy seemed to be the relative pattern but there was one stretch of about 10-12 questions where afterwards I needed to stand up, stretch and remain standing for a few minutes. Man I felt like I was owned by several nurses but alas I passed! Some final thoughts about that god awful test – from graduation to test date, I took over 3000 questions, half of which were pharmacology, did metrology – the ones I missed or was fuzzy about I looked up later – I had 20 pages of notes… I knew the items I had during the questions due to my research, I used the “decision tree” and my real-life experience in the ER all accounted for maybe 9 questions on the test, which is likely the difference in my passing the test.

My trouble with it is, out of all those 3000 questions, solo study sessions, several group study questions and some gaming study sessions, why in the world did all that only account for so few questions? I didn’t know about 2/3 of the medications on the test and I had A LOT of pharm questions. After 3 years of nursing school, about 100 patients in a clinical/preceptor setting, several hundred meds and a pharmacology class, how could I know so few meds compare to what was on the test?  My 3 years ER experience gave me one question, my 20 pages of notes another 4 and the decision tree accounted for 4 more. I just can’t help but think that the lottery system with which you get the test is a bunch of crap. People’s lives and careers are at stake and it seems to me it is simply luck of the draw as to how well you do or which questions you get. Now I have to promptly forget everything I tried to learn in the NCLEX way because the real world never works in best-case scenario, ideal situation, textbook way that nursing school is taught in or the NCLEX tests over. Only once did I ever have a patient exhibit “textbook” lab results. The real world should be how it’s taught and tested over, school as always, really tells it like it ain’t…

Of the 3 days since, I’ve been in the gym twice putting in a total of 70 minutes, 4.75 miles and 470 calories of elliptical work. Just stretching the legs out, getting the dust knocked off a bit and will get down to business in a few weeks. 1 week of this, 1 week of circuit weightlifting of light weights just to wake the muscles up and then I’ll be off and running. And damn it feels good already, I’ve missed it so much…

Tags: BSN, gym, ICU, NCLEX, RN, self-soothing behavior, stress, working out