It was another Tuesday around 730 pm last night when I rolled into my driveway after another long 12-hour clinical shift at the hospital. Another day with nine nursing students. Each sitting in different spots in this 3/4ths completed fall semester of their senior year. Some sitting comfortably above the 80% passing grade, some sitting just above the line, and some just below. Balancing all of that while keeping them interested and focused at the bedside isn't an always an easy chore. Nursing school comes down to one thing....passing, and it's all exam scores and making that 80%.
Most nursing programs evaluate a students success solely based on exam scores, with the clinical and lab portions pass/fail. If you're a good test taker then you're good, if not, or can't grasp critical thinking, then each exam is live or die. If you've been, or know someone in the game, then you know how critical each exam is. Throw one exam and you spend the rest of the semester on that 80% line and playing catch up.
Keeping them engaged on weeks after they took an exam, or have one upcoming, can be challenging. Their eye is on the prize, with both a solid performance on the exam, and graduation six months away. Patient assignments, assessments, med pass, running on Code Strokes, Code Blues, or Trauma Codes, keeps their heads in the game. And during the down time it's reinforcing the hands on stuff that nurses do balanced with A&P, disease process, assessment, interventions and treatment. Making the connections and readying them for the NCLEX and the real world is a daunting task.
So by the time the days over I'm beat. 57 isn't old, but it isn't young either. If I started early I am old enough to be some of the student's grandfathers. Some of the students call me Pop-Pop, or Pops, especially when I have my 3.0+ Clics on to read the small, well normal, sized-print in a drug book or the patients chart. If I had a step counter on then I'm no doubt walking 20 miles a day in and around Capital Health's Regional Medical Center. One of my last jaunts last evening with a student was hightailing it from the helipad on the roof down the stairs to the Shock Trauma Bay. By the time we hit the first floor I could feel it. But their excitement in getting there kept this old(er) Pops going.
When I got home I took off my lab coat and plopped in my old man recliner. It's an old leather one, with the button on the side which kicks my legs out in the perfect napping position. It's the one you see on Facebook Marketplace with the head spot worn out from whatever hair I have left fractioning against the fake leather, wearing it thin. Theresa made me dinner and served it on my lap. I put on the Roku channel and watched another 1,000th episode of Law and Order from the 1990's while surfing through the online wedding album from Tara and Simon's recent wedding. As I chewed and surfed I could feel my eye lids start to get heavy. It was time, and it wasn't even 8 o'clock.
The recent time change has me off a bit. Instead of hitting the sack at 8-830 it's now around 7 pm when I'm ready for the heated blanket and bedside fan. And instead of waking at 4 am, which I regularly do, it's now before 3 am, and today it was around 2. I woke up thinking of the usual. Did I hit the lottery? Did I go over properly the algorithm for emergency treatment of cariogenic shock for the patient we had in the ED yesterday? What's the dosing of Levophed? What's the plan for Thanksgiving? And what's the plan for today, Wednesday, my day off from work?
Since transferring from Essex County College in Newark to Capital Health School of Nursing my quality of life has improved greatly. The commute was a killer. On the road before 5 am and getting home after 7 pm. The driving, the tolls, the gas, and the time. Add to that going all in with 80-100 students left it all on the table, and little in the tank. So, now with time, the last three months I've been on a house project tear. It all started after the pipe busting flood we had while we were in Ireland. That brought me from work on the inside to the outside. And with winter coming each day of scraping and painting is like a race against time, and the cold. Before each day in the hospital I spend an hour the night before trying to get the paint out from under my nails and off the skin on my fingers. I do that so patients aren't freaked out that the repairman isn't placing a Foley catheter or starting an IV. Thank God for gloves.
But I'm also sitting in bed, trying not to wake Theresa, thinking about fishing. While fly fishing for striped bass in the spring has become my don't miss, the fall still calls. Should I go now? Fish in the dark like the sharpies do? If I leave now I'll be down there, most likely alone, by 4 am.
To me the fall is a daytime thing. That's not the rule, just my thinking. First light, sure, but it's the birds, and the bait, and the bass hunting that is more fall than spring. It's hard to do that during the graveyard shift. And if I go I know I'll be cold before first light even breaks the horizon. Couple that with dead-low tides around 6 am and I know I'll just be casting a fly into the skinny water from the recently formed new beaches from the recent weather and strong tides.
If I don't go then what? I could start my day getting ready for another day with heat gun in hand burning lead paint off inch my inch on the 100 year old wooden boards on the house. If it's around 50 degrees I could sand, prime, and paint. I have one side left with about six boards that are about 30 feet long. Surely time better spent. And since I don't know what the rest of the fall will do weather wise it just seems like a smarter option. Should I wait for the mid-day light and tides when there's visibility and water on the beach to go and run and find some fish? Or will it just be a burn, sand, and paint session mixed in with my checking the on-line reports and cams searching for bass on the beach?
That's what the fall runs have become, at least for me. When I used to live in Ocean Township, and then on Phillip's Avenue in Deal, or even Red Bank, making that 20 minute, or 20 second, run down to the beach wasn't a big deal. The fish were there, or not. But now over an hour a way those quick look and fish sessions, or just looks, are more of a commitment. And really it's not fishing, it's more like hunting, with a truck and a pair of binoculars, and a cell phone. It comes to risk vs gain, or winning vs failure. And it's very annoying. It's really not fun until you are down there. If and when it happens, it's great, if not, it's a ride home with me telling myself it was a dumb decision to go.
So I'll roll the dice today. It's now 312 am. If I go and I'm right, like there was nothing going on, then I won't have to drive home around 12 and peer over to those six unpainted boards sticking out with 100 year old flaked paint sticking out like alligator skin. And if I stay it'll be with a heat gun in hand trying not gouge out the exposed wood with my go-to scraper, one that has become an extension of my hands. One I know just when to advance and get a good 4 inch strip off as the paint heats up. Getting that done, and then running down for a mid-day session seems like better time well spent. We'll see if I made the right call.