"Good thing babies are breakable!!!"

OK so I haven't written in a long time I realize. These are the last few experiences from my classes last semester. I know it took me forever to write this even though I started forever ago. Sorry. I hope they're worth it now. :) Enjoy!

So Scatterbrained was on a whole nother (is that a word? eh, oh well, it is now) level one week. This is a direct quote from her while we were studying GI (gastrointestinal): "this is boring. Well it's really not boring, you can save someone's life with this stuff. But, I'm like dying for a guest speaker for GI." Um, did she really just say that her topic was boring? Wow. I guess it was true though, GI is pretty boring but we still have to learn it. I'm not sure a guest speaker would have helped us though. Scratch that...maybe that class would have made more sense from guest speakers. This is a demonstration of what she drew on the board almost daily with her notes. Yeah that's a box that's circled like 10 times with arrows coming off of it pointing to things all over the board. This was a daily occurrence. Too bad you can't read her handwriting. I think my all time favorite moment in that class was when she brought in two old casts from a broken arm and a broken leg and made one of my friends put the cast on to demonstrate something. EWWWWWWWWWW GROSS!!!! Who wants to put on someone else's old, dirty, smelly, nasty cast?! That gives me the willies!! Poor girl. Then Scatterbrained threw her leg up on the front table in our classroom and tried the leg cast on herself. I'm pretty sure I'm was trying to contain my laughter (and horror) on the back row by that time. Yuck!! Seriously. Oh well. She's a really nice lady and was a pretty good professor (minus the ditsy part) and I did fine in her class so whatever, moving on.

My last class period of Drama Queen's class period was rather uneventful, if I remember right, except she just HAD to get in one last jab about milk. Ugh. It started out with her going off on calcium. She told us to ask our patients: "Excuse me?! How much calcium do you take?" Then she told us that we should "take enough to supply our bones, but not too much." This has to do with kidney stones and how too much calcium (aka milk according to her) causes them, supposedly. She said that she "just had to bring it up." Well yes, we wouldn't have it any other way on our last class period than to have you vent one last time about milk. Then she succeeded in throwing in her anti-men clause as well. Kidney stones are incredibly painful (just so you know). But this was her little complaint about men. "Especially men, they act like they are in labor and I say 'No way!' They act like such babies." Hahaha, eh never mind it was funny when she said it. But your public service announcement for the day is that you "need to be really careful about how much milk you drink." Oh no, not again! I'm so freaking sick of hearing about milk. Not that I'm a big milk drinker, but I love cereal, therefore I have milk in my diet. Heaven forbid. However, this is NOT something I ever want to have (forgive the pic, don't worry, they're much grosser in person). But FYI, high calcium alone isn't a risk factor for kidney stones (despite what DQ's opinions may be) other factors are involved. Enough with the nursing stuff. She was also a very nice professor, as dramatic as she could be.

On to the title story of the blog. No, you didn't read that wrong. That is a direct quote from Monotone herself in one of my last class periods. Monotone said, "Good thing babies are breakable." I burst out laughing, I just couldn't contain it, it was too funny. But I was kind of loud and by this time everyone in the class was zoned out already. She looks at me and she's like, "what?!" I'm like "did you hear what you just said? [at which point she stares at me blankly, so I have to repeat it back to her] 'Good thing babies are breakable.'" I was having a hard time keeping a straight face (I think she was surprised to find that I was even listening to her at that point). Monotone then tried to correct herself by saying "one good thing about the babies is that they break easy. [I was still laughing, that sounded just as bad- so she tried to fix it again] Not that they break easy, but that they heal easy. It came out wrong." Well, obviously. I would hope that you're not glad that babies break easily. Too bad she didn't find this situation nearly as humorous as me and my friends did. It was worth it to go to class this day just to hear her say that. I still think it's funny. :D

There's this weird thing about winter here where everyone and everything gets really staticy (that's not a word either). (Yes, I'm going somewhere with this) After the whole breakable babies conversation I had a hard time (harder than usual) concentrating in that class. Both my friend and I were really staticy though and kept shocking each other. So we were discussing this (instead of the lecture- during the lecture)...the following is the disastrous (or funny, whichever way you want to look at it) result of sarcasm + the two of us + Monotone's class + funny moments in Monotone's class + no filter + lack of sleep + too much stress + end of semester= Me: "you just have a sparking personality. You want me to rub you? Oh wait...That sounded wrong...." :) Her: "I dig myself a hole. You jump in it and start covering yourself up." Unfortunately that's very true. Damn.

Moving on to the Postpartum Depression lecture (that was like 15 minutes later in the class)....this was my friend's response about how she's going to be when she has kids. "I'm gonna be like WTF?" [when they hand her the baby and she doesn't know what to do with it]. Me: "Your kids are going to need therapy before they get home [from the hospital]." Her: "I'm not going to lie to you. Maybe that's what their Dad is for." Lovely. Well if we haven't learned anything else this semester I think we have come to the conclusion....are you ready for it?! OK my final conclusion for this last semester is....We're not ready for kids yet. Love them to death, but yeah I'm so NOT ready for them. Nephews and nieces are great. At the end of the day, you get to give them back. I've lived with a nephew and niece and I just spent the Christmas vacation with my nephew and nieces. Yeah, I wouldn't trade them for anything, but boy am I glad I'm still single at this point in my life. There you go folks, that's the final blog for last semester. Sorry it took so long. I hope you're IQ didn't drop reading this. Alright, off to bed so I can start a whole new semester at 8am tomorrow morning. Bleh.

Avoid caffeine = 5 cups of coffee a day??

I don't really have time to put a full story of last week's classes together so this is just the highlights. Drama Queen has it in for milk, seriously. For some reason my slides aren't opening so I'll just quote what she typed on the slides, my comments are in brackets. "Do not put a baby or child to bed with a bottle of milk!!! [Um, this is Pathophysiology, NOT Pediatrics, I happen to be in OB and Peds right now too, so I don't really think you're the expert on kids, sorry.] If the child must have a bottle in bed, fill it only with water. When they lie flat, children will aspirate the milk down the right main stem bronchus and develop pneumonia- very common [I'm pretty sure if you lie anyone flat with fluids while sleeping, they'll aspirate and could develop pneumonia, it's not just the milk]. No pacifiers- They cause vacuum pressure in eustachian tubes with resultant otitis media (ear infection). No smoking around infants and children- results in lung and ear infections." She then felt the need to add her comment that this was not her bias and that studies have been done that have shown these results [that just made me roll my eyes, not your bias, B.S.]. She also mentioned several times that her children didn't ever take pacifiers [of course not, because your children were perfect, of course]. This woman drives me crazy! I wish I could put some of our slides on here for last week, you can't even read them, the print is so small and they're just paragraphs of information that we can't even read. Oh, and how do you know that your professors need a hobby? When they're so bored they're putting the pictures of famous authors who had diseases from the 1800's on your slides because they have nothing better to do. What a waste of ink and paper, since we have to print them out. This particular author that she put a picture of on our slides had TB (tuberculosis). She told his story of how he moved to a better climate for treating his TB, then his wife hated it, so they moved to a different climate and the "TB loved it. [like it had a personality] It did him in. [Of course it did, otherwise the story would SO not be worth DQ telling it]." It's like inanimate objects talking, except now diseases have personalities too, lovely. Oh, and we're CONSTANTLY told NOT to diagnose in nursing school, including this class. But somehow several times each week DQ will find a way to slip into her lectures "nurses do a big job in diagnosing." Or "the doctor told me that basically I diagnosed the guy." Of course you did, and you're the hero and you lived happily ever after....oh wait, wrong story. Oh, by the way, apparently DQ has gone off on milk in other classes. My friend said that she also told them not to shave their arm-pits [excuse me while I gag here] and that deoderant is bad and gives you infections, or something like that [remind me never to get too close to her]. The woman might actually be insane, I don't know though, I'm not supposed to diagnose.

OB is always interesting as well. Monotone nearly kills me each week of boredom. Everytime I look around the room everyone looks like a bunch of zombies that are completely zoned out. We may be looking at the professor, but that doesn't mean we're paying attention. Like I said, it takes all of 10 minutes or less to zone out in that class. The glazed over eyes aren't from drugs, they're from boredom and lack of sleep. This is about how I feel about that class: Actually this picture was on the slide about the effects of alcohol and drugs and tobacco on pregnant women. As my professor put it, "cigarrettes have that stuff in them, what is it called, nicotine, in addition to upteine other things, and it's best avoided." Um, no kidding. Street drugs will cause your "baby to be born as a junkie." Oh yes, this is the enlightenment I get in my classes each week. That doesn't even count the comments we get from the idiots in our classes. OB is probably the worst b/c some of the students have kids in there, so obviously they think this makes them THE experts on the subject (more so than the professor, at least). They also think whatever stupid things they hear from their friends who have kids are automatically facts. One said idiot tried to argue with my professor for like 10 minutes about whether you can have too much Vitamin C or not. My professor kindly tried to explain time and time again that Vitamin C is water-soluble and therefore goes right through you. It can't build up in your body. But this girl was having none of that. She's still convinced that you can have too much. Apparently we need to go over the definitions of water and fat-soluble again. Good grief.

Pre-natal classes are common and there's several different ones besides just "Lamaze" which is the one most people have heard of. Unfortunately, one of them is named after it's creator "Dick-Read." Why the hell would you name a childbirth education class this? I also love (NOT) that all of them are created by men. As one of my friends raised her hand and asked in class, "are any of these actually created by a woman who's been through birth?" Seriously! One of them is all about the woman being able to feel the pain and he thinks that "fear of birth = tension/ pain." Um, I'm pretty sure that's because he's a guy and he's never been through it. The jerk. I'd love to see him try to go through just an hour of labor. I'm pretty sure he'd change his entire philosophy then. Apparently when you no longer fear the birth you won't feel tension or pain. Yeah right.

Peds was actually pretty good this week. I actually learned stuff. That might have more to do with the fact that I had a really cute 14 month old as a patient this week, so lecture related to what I actually saw with my patient. I totally wanted to keep him, he was adorable. But the one highlight from that class was when my professor (Scatterbrained) was talking about allergies [not milk] and stated "If the dog/ cat dies, it's a good opportunity not to get a new one." Brutal! My classmate chimed in and was like "In other words kill it," (sarcastically of course). I think that just came out really wrong for Scatterbrained. It did not go over well for my class.

Oh, the title line: "Avoid caffeine = 5 cups of coffee a day" is from OB. Apparently avoiding caffeine during pregnancy is equal to having no more than 5 cups of coffee a day, a couple of bars of chocolate, some coke, etc. Ok, even thinking about that much caffeine is making me sick and I'm not pregnant. Yuck! It sounds a lot like the diets of a lot of my classmates though. Not like mine is all that much better, minus the coffee. :)

"Got Milk? Got Allergies?"

Ms. Drama Queen was on a roll today. Maybe I should mention that she just got divorced, so maybe that has something to do with why everything is so dramatic for her, I still don't know. Apparently she's VERY biased against cow's milk. "Cow's milk is only for baby cows." Well then, Ok. She vehemently told us this in class today. She's against human beings consuming any kind of milk, clearly. She said and I quote "NO MORE MILK!!!" Wow...she thinks that the majority of people are lactose intolerant or have an allergy to milk and should not be consuming it. She said NO soy milk either, sorry. Soy milk has estrogen in it, she stated and "you'll BLOW RIGHT UP!!!" In other words you'll be very edematous (swollen) from it. Right. I've had soy milk and I've never "blown up." I also have milk with my cereal everyday. LOVE cereal. It's never really bothered me either. I do HATE the smell of milk though, I can't tell whether it's rotten or not. It all smells rotten to me, even when it's not. Little tangent, sorry. Anyways, the woman was pretty passionate about the subject. My friends and I decided that we'd all love to bring milk to class next week just to see what she'd do. Have a flippin' MI (heart attack), I imagine. Then a guy in my class (he may earn himself a nickname by the end of semester), decided that he should invent a bumper sticker that says "Got Milk? Got Allergies?" Um, no comment. Anyways, my professor told her normal dramatic stories in class. Except Pop decided that one story was about her having an allergic reaction. "and then the little girl, I mean boy....named Nancie, I mean Ned..." Yeah and the allergic reaction was probably to milk, go figure. Maybe that's why she's so biased against it.

We also covered HIV/ AIDS today. Pop felt the need to tell the class I have HIV by pointing at me. Yeah, I don't. But it was funny nevertheless. The teacher was like, "you don't need to tell us." Oh good grief. Yeah, you know me, total skank and druggie too (rolling eyes). The only way I could've gotten HIV is in the hospital. I did stick myself with a dirty needle once though. It sucked. I had to have my blood tested for like 6 months or a year, I don't remember which. It was less than fun. Don't worry, I'm clean. That's a story for another day though. Anyways my teacher told a story about a couple who came in before their marriage to get tested for HIV. According to my teacher the guy was "REALLY cute!!" Unfortunately, he tested positive for HIV. His fiance' then wanted nothing to do with him, of course. My teacher's comment then was like, "it was really too bad cuz he was REALLY cute. What a pity!" Or something along those lines. Uh, yeah I don't know about her sanity sometimes.

Moving on...in my other class today it was back to monkeys again. Some girl in my class watched the Discovery Channel last night and saw a show about Orangutans or something. I have no idea what that had to do with our lecture, but my friend once again stated "I'm not a monkey, dammit!" Orangutans?! Honestly, the people in program worry me some days.

Don't worry, it gets better...a lot of our lecture today was on the topic of breast feeding. Milk vs. no milk, that is the question of the day. You're supposed to switch to cow's milk at 1 year old. Would you people make up your minds? Milk or no milk?

We moved on to pregnancy. During the first trimester feelings of ambivalence or uncertainty are common in mothers. Questions like, "Is this the right thing for me?" Well, I'm sorry to tell ya, but it's a little too late for that. Sometimes Dad's have "Couvade= pregnancy- related symptoms" in addition to the Mother. The commentary between my friend and me on this was: "Serves him right." "You're mean. Remind me not to talk to your husband when you have your first child." :D We also talked about the Dad's first reaction to the pregnancy. That reminded me of that AT&T commercial where the woman calls her husband and announces she's pregnant, except her call gets dropped and she can't hear him screaming and yelling in excitement. Her response is, "Way to step up there, Rick." hahahahaha, that's one of my favorite commercials, ever!

My lecture today reminded me of when my oldest sister-in-law was having her third baby. Her doctor told her she was going from man-to-man to zone defense. Lol, so true. I love those kids though. They have nothing to do with this blog, but being in this class today made me miss them horribly, hence the picture. Isn't she cute?!:)
(Sorry this was pretty disjointed. I'm kinda tired so I'm rambling. Oh well.)

Yellow Jackets and Yellow Fever

I don't know if it was actually a Yellow Jacket, it might have been a hornet, either way I have NO idea how a bee ended up in my pajama pants @ 5:30am. I totally got stung and then had to try to catch the stupid kamikaze bee careening around my room. My poor roommate was wondering why I was jumping around so much. Now almost 2 days later my leg still hurts and itches. Yay for Benadryl. But, boooo for bees stinging me. I still want to know, how do you get a bee in your pants (excuse the phrase) @ 5:30 in the morning? But this blog isn't actually supposed to be about me, it's about school, of course.

Moving on...my professors this semester are interesting to say the least. Scatterbrained, monotone, and drama queen are words that have been used to describe them. Don't get me wrong, they're all very nice and they know their subjects well, but that doesn't mean they're good at teaching them.

So, as I stated, one of my teachers is a total drama queen. Maybe it's because our class is in the auditorium in the library where the plays are held. So she teaches from the stage. There's actually a white board that states there will be auditions for some Christmas play soon that is on the stage, so maybe that rubs off on her. I don't know. When she tells stories in class we're just waiting for her to say something like, "and then I came and saved the day..." blah blah blah. One story last week was especially bad. Apparently in Panama there was a guy (and his wife) who had had yellow fever before, so he'd built up an immunity to it (I wasn't listening all that hard, so I think this is what happened, anyways, he had an immunity to it). When they had a really bad epidemic of yellow fever down there and everyone was sick, no one could help them because then they would catch the disease as well. But, since he was immune he was able to go around and eliminate every bit of yellow fever in Panama by himself. Because of this, it was then possible for the Panama Canal to be built. I kid you not, that's what she said. Yeah, I do my fair share of eye rolling in that class. Pop, who sits next to me, just cusses at our teacher and makes sarcastic comments. haha

In another class there is, unfortunately, an individual who does not feel the need to wear a bra. I wouldn't normally notice that, but my friend brought it up and now it's really obvious. Gross! This is a quote from a classmate on that topic: "I'm a hippie. I like my freedom." I decided there's entirely too much estrogen in our lecture halls of women. There's only 2 guys in that class, poor things. That class is also incredibly boring. Not because the material is boring, it's not. But because the professor is so monotone that I zone out in about 10 minutes or less. It's bad. So of course we have to entertain ourselves to even stay conscious in class. The following is the disastrous consequences...(once again, I'm not really distinguishing who said what)

At first glance it just looks "busy or crowded." But in response to this picture I said something like, it would be hard to teach your kids about #'s..."this little piggy went to the market." Ohhhh, Jennie you're so morbid. Morbid, but funny according to my friend. She just decided to cross out a toe though, I don't know if that's any less morbid. Ok, maybe.

Often in nursing classes you find yourself diagnosing your own problems. All of a sudden you think you have all of these horrible diseases because you have some of the symptoms. This is pretty common, actually. We decided that it's pretty hard to diagnose yourself in OB though, because we're not babies. Except we could probably pull off a "lusty cry like a baby" pretty darn good. Especially after sitting through 6 hours of class straight. Yeah, you would want to cry too.

At some point in the lecture last week my teacher stated something about "we come from monkeys." My friend vehemently opposed that statement. "I don't believe that. I'm not a monkey. Take THAT chimpanzee." hahaha There's a skin disorder called a "stork bite" due to it's location and appearance that is common in children. Gggrrrreeeaattt....so we came from monkeys and we're dropped off by storks. Lovely.

We got in trouble for talking in class though. Gaysauce. The professor asked us what was so funny and would we like to share with the class since we'd been laughing all class period. My friend after a slight pause was like, we're just laughing about my car breaking down this morning. I chimed in something like yeah if we didn't laugh, we'd cry (which is true). Good thing she saved the day cuz I had nothin'. Crap. But what can she do, kick us out of class? Yeah right. Since we're paying a freakin' fortune to be there. Maybe that means we should pay attention. Nah...OK, OK, that's not totally true. We do pay attention. But we're pros at multi-tasking. Listening to lecture and still having fun with it is a talent, thank you very much. At least in my classes it is.

"Take 'em back, take 'em back..."

I realize I haven't written in awhile and people have been asking about it, so here's the deal....I'm taking OB and PEDs this semester (aka children and mother/ baby). So...a lot of our lectures, at least in OB, are really graphic and pretty awkward subjects outside of nursing (even in nursing). I'll try to tone it down for the blog, but you've been warned, k?! This commentary from today's OB class was between a friend and I. I'm not going to distinguish between who said what, but they are direct quotes mostly. :) Oh...and most of it shouldn't be said out loud, as usual, last warning...

Male determines gender of new baby
X = girl
Y = boy

I believe the response to this picture was:
"Cute."
"You just called sperm cute."
"It looks happy."
"Not THAT happy, it hasn't been fertilized yet."
"Why does the male get to determine the gender?"
"Because they don't really get much of a say in anything else." (Oh, soooo true, poor men. I almost feel bad for them, almost).

A fact on another slide: "Sperm: Live 1-3 days after ejaculation"
Response to that slide: "AH-HAH! That's how they do it. Otherwise they'd never survive in our world. We're very mean to them." (Ouch, that's actually true too...hmmm, but they might deserve it).
In response to this slide and my professor's rather terrible explanation of it my friend wrote on her slide "WTF?!" "Look up in book!" Hahahahaha...that's pretty bad when you have to write WTF? on your notes b/c your professor sucks so bad at explaining the material.

On the "Infant State-Related Behavior Chart" descriptions of actions of the infant are evaluated on scales. Under "Cuddliness" the "Implications for Caregiving" are stated as: " cuddliness is usually rewarding behavior for the caregivers. It seems to convey a message of affection." I do believe, we volunteered to spoon at this point...cuddliness IS, indeed a message of affection. Hey, guys are good for something, at least. Yay for LoveSac's which facilitate great said "cuddling or spooning." ;-)

Last Saturday I went to my bro's house for their going away party. Boooo....they're abandoning me in DC. Gaysauce. I'm really too bitter about this subject to talk about it right now. I already whined for a good half an hour about it today alone. Anyways, I went to their party with a bunch of married people, oh the joy, actually that really has nothing to do with this except we were talking after. OK, I am tired. Moving on. My sister-in-law works at an all girls private school. One word, "MONEY." Their tuition is more expensive than mine, good grief. Who pays $25,000 for their 7 year old to go to school? The answer is lots and lots of people in the DC area. Anyways, Carly was telling me a story that one of her co-workers, an alumnus (is that the right word? whatever) told her. The woman said she knew that she went to an all girls school one day when she saw a girl walking down the hall, grab her stomach and say "Ah, my uterus hurts." Uh yeah, only at an all girls school would that happen. My sister-in-law is also pregnant and due in February with their first baby, YAY (except they'll be in Littleton, BOOOO, again). The problem is, my brother gets horribly queasy when it comes to blood and guts. Yes, we have VERY different tastes in life. Poor guy can't even handle me telling stories...he turns a little green. It's kinda fun. :-D I'm so evil! He's convinced that he's going to be in the Labor/ Delivery room with Carly when she has the baby though, I'm convinced he's not going to make it. He'll pass out, I'm sure of it. He's so determined that he'll be fine and that he's just going to stay at the top of the bed. He thinks he'll rally when he has to though and be just fine. There's a slight possibly that might work, but there's NO way he's going to make it through the after-birth. The placenta is probably the bloodiest thing I have ever seen/ touched. I used to have the oh so pleasant job of cleaning the birthing carts and bagging the placentas to freeze them. My professor tried to describe a placenta today, but until you hold one in your hands there's no way you can possibly sum up how bloody, rubbery, and disgusting it really is...and yet that sack allows a fetus to grow for 9 months, amazing. Truly incredible! There's also nothing like holding a brand new, literally, baby in your arms. It's a pretty special experience. I would never do OB, it's just not for me, not enough excitement, surprisingly enough, but it's fun to do every once in a while. I enjoyed the time I worked there as a CNA and a secretary on a Mother/ Baby Unit.

Anyways, that was quite the tangent, sorry. I hope I didn't gross anyone out too bad. Oh, I just realized I didn't explain the title line. We also talked about twins and how they're formed today. My friend decided she definitely does NOT want twins and if she has them she's going to be like: "take 'em back, take 'em back!!" hahaha...yeah, I would probably feel the same way. In fact, by the time this class is over we're probably not going to want kids at all. Thank goodness for nieces and nephews. LOVE them, especially since you can give them back!! ;-) So this semester promises to be an entertaining one full of lots of blogs, probably. For now, it's late and I need to be sleeping.