The Insanity Begins..

Well we are officially a week and 1/2 into my last semester of nursing school and I can say with confidence that I am stressed. I never cease to go crazy the first 3 weeks of school when they over load you down with everything to expect throughout the semester, the quizzes, tests, assignments, and projects, but for some reason this semester seems a little different.

One of my classes in particular has a project that accounts for 50% of my grade. While that in and of itself tends to stress me out it gets worse... we went over what all it entails today, and while the 15 page paper with tables and appendices and annotated reference page doesn't bother me THAT much the fact that the 28 page packet in which our teacher used to explain the project to us was so confusing. I am pretty positive that I will have to read it 4 times before I will fully understand the project and by then it will be Tuesday when I will have had to post my first part of my draft!! Everything is just coming and starting so fast this semester since our classes end so early because of our role section for the last 6 weeks.

I am excited about my topic for the project and that should help I just hope that I'm able to pull off a decent grade since it is HALF of my grade in this class. No big deal right.

Well other than that I have been preparing for my skills validation on Friday which I am kinda nervous about. I haven't done this stuff for a grade since Fundamentals and the masterys stressed me out then too! Hopefully they will go smoothly and we can get this semester going.

I'm ready to start applying for jobs and find a place to work :) Although I can't say I am not terrified about the interviewing process...

Thoughts and prayers would be greatly appreciated throughout this whole semester because I can guarantee I will need them.

~Maggie

School approches!

Once again school is just around the corner. I have started getting emails about the start of the semester and have been trying very hard not to get stressed out about it. I am very excited about this semester because as everyone knows it is my last :) I cannot wait to walk across the stage at graduation and begin working as an RN in 2011!!

This will be an interesting semester for many reasons. Between going to classes, applying for jobs, and planning a wedding, I think I have my work cut out for me this time around. But needless to say I'm ready to get started because the sooner we get started the sooner we can finish!

I am recovering from my surgery that went very well. So far, two weeks in, I have still had no headaches. Which is a huge blessing! I hope that it continues this way. I was also released yesterday to begin driving again, although I don't think I should have taken my surgeon up on it quite yet. I met Abby and Ben for lunch yesterday and my neck has been sore ever since. All the more reason to think that just because you CAN do something doesn't mean you SHOULD do it.

I just hope that I will be able to get out of this brace soon. I hope that it does not interfere with school at all and that I will be able to start this last semester strong and get through it quickly.

I would still love some prayers for healing as I am not completely healed, and prayers for sanity would also be greatly appreciated as we all know that nursing school is not the best way to keep sane :)

~Maggie

Journal #8

One of the issues that we had been prepared for coming over to England that was going to be different was the drinking. We knew that obesity was less than in the US but alcoholism was seen significantly more often in the UK. Until this evening, minus during the world cup, I had not really seen a lot of this. I had just assumed that there were a lot of people that had admitted that they had alcoholism but did not really have what we would qualify as outwardly noticeable alcoholism.

This evening, on the tube home from seeing Wicked, we noticed a gentleman who could hardly hold himself up. He was mumbling to himself words that no one could really understand, and holding onto the bar with two hands to keep himself standing up. While it is hard to say what this man’s background was just from seeing him this one evening for only ten to fifteen minutes you could tell a lot about him by the way he acted how he talked, how he smelt and what he looked like. He smelt like he had bathed in liquor, not showered in days, and he had stubble all over his face. I know these seem like simple things and very judgmental things, but you also have to take into consideration what time we were coming home, 10:30. Who is fall down drunk at 10:30? Once again this is all based on assumptions, and I know what happens when you assume so the rest of this will be based on how it made me feel.

I was very sad at first because I knew that one whether or not he was a chronic alcoholic tonight he was. It was very apparent that he was very drunk and behind those sad eyes there was a reason why and he is probably the only person that knows why. But I wonder if he knows or even cares about all of the things that he is doing to his body by drinking himself into oblivion like that. When you are to the point where you cannot stand or speak not only are you doing things that are completely unsafe you are hurting your body in so many ways. Your liver for one is being destroyed. If you were to drink like that for days into months and years you could end up with cirrhosis and possibly need a liver transplant, which can be a life threatening condition! If you are not careful and all you do is drink and you forget about the need to eat you can end up with an array of disorders in which you can have problems such as thiamine deficiencies and other vitamin deficiencies. If you are not careful your kidneys could have problems filtering all of the alcohol that you are drinking and you could go into acute or worse, chronic, renal failure which can also be life threatening.

I don’t want this journal to come off as judgmental and rude because that is not how it is meant to be. These are just meant to be observations and feelings. It is hard to see someone do these things to their body when you are not sure if they do or do not know what they are doing to them. It’s even harder when you know the person and you know that they know what they are doing and yet they do it anyway. I hope that everyone will take this with a grain of sand and realize that your body is a onetime thing, you cannot replace it. So be careful what you put into it and what you do to it because you cannot take it back.

Journal # 7

When you think of undergraduate nursing school there is one word that I can say for sure does not usually come to mind, dissertation. At the City University of London their nursing students before they graduate have to write a 10,000 word dissertation on a problem that they have found in the field. It really surprised me because in the US you usually do not have to write dissertations until you are at a masters or doctorate level. I know that they want their nurses and their nurses’ degrees to be well respected but I never thought that the program would be so rigorous. On the flip side, when we were in the skills lab we talked about IV starts and found out that their student nurses do not start IV’s until they have their RN degree and start taking other classes, that is not considered a normal nursing duty in the UK.


Learning about how the school divides up the time evenly between class and clinical experience and how much time is spent in each area was very interesting. The fact that the student nurses had to choose what they wanted to specialize in before they even made it past their first year, i.e. adult, child , or mental health, to me is such a hard concept because a lot of us are in our final year and don’t even know what we want to do. Another thing that struck me as very different is that the average age of students at their school was mid 30’s whereas at TCU most of us came straight from high school into college to start our degrees. There are a lot of things that are different about nursing school in London as opposed to the United States. One that I think my dad would have liked to have known about before I went into school was that in London they PAY for you to go to school and they PAY you a stipend while you are in school… yes you read that correctly… I would not have had to pay to learn to be a nurse; they would have paid me to learn and paid me for working in the hospitals. Would have been nice right dad?


I have a ton of respect for the nurses in London knowing not only what they have to go through to become nurses, but what they have to deal with once they are. Once they are RN’s they can have anywhere from 7-15 patients that are their patients on a ward on one shift and while their shifts are usually 8 hrs instead of the 12 that ours are that is still a TON of patients! Being a nurse in general is never easy but there are always differences wherever you are that will make it more difficult for you to do your job safely and effectively.


I have a very hard time thinking that it is a safe practice to assign that many patients to one nurse when I know that nurses in the US have less patients than that and there are still medication errors and other errors that occur on shifts. I think that there should be a regulation for how many patients a nurse can have at one given time based on the acuity of the patients. If you stretch a nurse to thin, no matter how well trained they are, mistakes will be made. While I think it is good that they have shorter shifts I think that they need to look at how they are dividing up the work and manage to put more nurses on the floors so that they can keep the patients safe. I know the NHS is tight on money but patient safety should be number one on the list and I feel very strongly that having about 10 patients is not the safest practice.

Journal # 6

Here is another journal for class for Diane and Susan. It is an observation from Dublin and how it relates to health and healthcare.


Who would have thought that Dublin would have been a place that you would have run into more smokers than London? After spending 2 weeks in London I thought it was the 2nd smokiest city that I had been to, only to Paris. That was until I went to Dublin.

When we arrived in Dublin it seemed as though everyone from the twelve year old to the 98 year old on every street corner was lighting up. I am pretty sure that I managed to inhale enough second hand smoke in Dublin to last me a lifetime.

From a healthcare perspective I have to wonder if cancer rates, especially lung cancer are higher in the UK and Ireland than USA. I also think that this would be a hard thing to prove since the detection methods are different than those in the US. As far as I can tell from my observations I don’t see a lot of prevention being put into for smoking prevention or smoking cessation programs where in the US they are becoming more prevalent because we have begun to see more and more of what smoking does to the body and how hard it can be to stop lung cancer and even sometimes how hard it can be for the body to withstand the treatments that are needed for lung cancer if they will be successful.

With Oncology being my field of interest I have very strong feelings about this topic in particular because of what I have seen in the field. I have seen many people suffer because of what they have done to themselves in the years of smoking, and I have seen people suffer who have never smoked a day in their life. Treatment for cancer, while usually effective, is very harsh on the body and can be hard to see as a nurse. When you are giving someone a drug that you know they are probably going to have problems with you have to keep telling yourselves and them that there is a reason you are giving it to them and that there are proven results for the drug. When I see patients that have lung cancer, while I am still compassionate just as much as I am for all my patients it in some ways is harder on me because I know that some cancers, not all, can be avoided and its sad when you see those because it breaks your heart knowing that there is something that could have been done somewhere down the road to keep it from happening.


To make a long story short I feel as though smoking is way more prevalent in Europe than it is in the US for whatever reason and I would like to see if in correlation to that the cancer rates are higher. It hurts me to know that there is something that can be done that isn’t and that people are starting to smoke so young and continuing to smoke till so late in life. But in the end there are some habits you just can’t change.

" Big Girls Don't Cry" - except when in Dublin...

O where to begin, should I start with the almost missed flight, the late bus, the screaming children or the awful waiters? I guess I will just start at the beginning.

After getting an early start Friday morning to catch the tube to the Gatwick express to the airport we managed somewhere to get behind. The Gatwick express stopped somewhere in the middle of the route for no apparent reason, we had to stand in line to get our passports checked even though we were not checking baggage BEFORE going through security and then AGAIN when we went through security and then had to practically RUN to the gate before they closed it.

We took the flight on Ryan Air because it was cheaper and for the most part it was fine, minus all the advertising and selling, they would sell you their own hand if you paid enough I think. We had a good pilot and got off and on the ground safely and that’s all I can ask for. When we got to the airport we had no trouble going through customs or anything but managed somehow to wait for 20 minutes for a bus before deciding to take a Taxi to our hotel in Blacherdstown outside of Dublin. We got in a bus taxi so it ended up being cheaper that way, it was great. We checked into the hotel and were on our way to a great weekend.

Once we finally figure out which bus we have to take to get to the city center of Dublin and find where it leaves by our hotel we are set to go, it’s only 7 miles away! 45 minutes later we make it to Dublin. Who would have thought 7 miles would take 45 minutes to drive! Apparently in Dublin it does. We found the green tour buses for the hop on hop off tour and hopped on and headed to Trinity College. We walked around Trinity for a little while and found the area that held the book of kells. We were really excited about seeing the book of kells until we realized we weren’t going to be able to see it unless we wanted to pay 8 euros, which is about 10 dollars. So we went into the store looked through the books of the book of kells and I bought some postcards. We hopped back on the green bus and headed to the main attraction of our trip, what we had been waiting for and had heard so much about, the Guinness factory!

As we got off the bus the smell of beer was in the air, and while I’m not much of a beer drinker I was still pretty excited as I had never been to a brewery before. As we were purchasing our tickets something happened, it was almost as though they knew we were in the building and were having a rough day, the power went out, complete power loss, apparently first one in Guinness history while they were open because the workers didn’t have a clue what to do at first. We all stood outside for around 45 minutes before the power came back on and they let us come back into the building. We toured around for a while, took lots of pictures, bought souvenirs and then moved on to trying to find our way home for the night and find something to eat!

After we hopped off the green bus we searched for the 39 bus back to Blanchardstown. And kept searching… for about an hour or so. Finally we found the 39 and jumped on, so excited to finally be headed back home. 10 minutes later he stopped the bus and said, “end of the line”. So there we are searching for the 39 again, but this time we ask before we get on to make sure we are FOR SURE going to Blanchardstown. We made it back to next to the hotel and are starving and decide to go to the Captain America, just kidding it’s a 90 min wait, even for 2 four person tables. So we head over to wagamamas and ended up paying like 15 euro for dinner but at least our waitress was helpful! Then on to bed for a good night’s rest on a bed that you couldn’t feel the coils in!

Day two started with a trip to starbucks on the way to the bus stop as we headed into Dublin on the 39 to catch the 7 into Dun Laoghaire. As we climbed on the bus, happy with our coffee and pastries we were greeted with a screaming child. The child wasn’t screaming because he was in pain or because he was unhappy, he was doing it just to hear his voice, he had to be 16-18 mos he could say some words like mommy and things like that so he knew better. His mom didn’t stop him at all, in fact it seemed like she encouraged him! Not the best way to start out the morning.

After the 45 minute ride into Dublin we managed to find the number 7 bus to Dun Laoghaire and rode 45 min into the port city. We walked around for a while until we found this quaint little jewelry shop with some great jewelers. A few of the girls we were with wanted to buy the traditional Irish rings and we found some beautiful ones there. While we were there Katrina and I were able to talk to one of the men about why we were in the area and in the UK and got to have an interactive discussion about healthcare with him, it was really awesome. Then he saw my ring and told me it was beautiful and that it looked like I had gotten a really great diamond. Good job baby!! We got an OK from another jeweler! Then he told us about a festival that the town was having and told us where to go to see it. It was such a blessing to find this jewelry store because otherwise we would have been at a loss.
We headed down to the pier and looked at the water and took pictures and realized how to use the timers on our cameras so that we could get a picture of the 8 of us. We walked around the festival and took in the fun and found some fun foods to eat like crepes. I have found my new favorite chocolate, buttons, it’s the chocolate from Cadbury eggs just in like little buttons. They are wonderful. So I had them in a crepe. HIGHLIGHT!!!!

So after that we rode back to Dublin and sat next to a chick whose music was playing so loud we could actually hear the lyrics also, it was annoying. So after we had all been beaten down for 45 min with awful music from loud music chick next to us we went shopping for souvenirs and headed to Dublin castle, which by the way is not really a castle. Then we headed on to St Patrick’s Cathedral to take pictures… in the rain… go figure.

After the rain we decided to go to a pub in Temple Bar to eat dinner and have a drink so we go into Quay Restaurant. We proceeded then to have wonderful food and AWFUL service. Our server came to the table all of twice, we had another server that filled our glasses and brought our food to us. Not only that but our server also wouldn’t split our check, even though at the beginning we told her we needed to because 3 of us needed to pay with a card because we wouldn’t have enough money to pay for the taxi to the airport which tends to be kinda expensive… We had a girl go to the bar to break a 20 euro note and she said something to the bartender about our server and asked for a manager so he pointed her out to our friend, and guess who the manager was… you guessed it… our server. So two hours and a service charge later we walk out and find our 39 bus home. The bus ride home wouldn’t have been so bad if it wasn’t for the people pressing the stop button every 2 minutes and every 30 seconds after each actual bus stop. 45 minutes later we were back at the hotel, our wonderful 4 star hotel, and we decided to go down to the bar and have a drink and dessert. It was crazy expensive and it was like she got the notice that it was bad service day and took 30 minutes to get our drinks to us, well to me. Apparently they didn’t have mint and Melissa couldn’t have her mojito but they decided not to tell her that for 20 minutes so she had to change her drink order and wait another 10-15 minutes.

Welp after all of that we crashed into our wonderful hotel room early , showered, and got up at 530am for our taxi ride to the airport this morning thinking that it would take 30 minutes to get to the airport, 7 minutes later we arrived and were headed on through security. After that we headed to find something to eat, all we could find was a burger king, thinking that we could get a soda in the morning so that we could wake up only to find that the soda we bought was FLAT and disgusting. Then as we were boarding the plane we were gagged by an awful smell , we all look at each other and realize that the man in front of us had just ripped a big one, in fact it smelt like diarrhea for about 5 minutes just trailing behind him.. it’s not like he was an old man and he might have actually had some, he had to have been like 23. AUGH!!

So by the time we got onto our 745am flight today Katrina , Melissa and I were all delirious and irritated, as we loaded onto the plane I noticed that the advertisements on the overhead bins were all the same but at that time I didn’t really pay that much attention to them, that is until Melissa said something about the advertisements, it said “ summer love, the way it’s meant to be felt”… I’ll let you think about that for a second…. Are you there yet…. Do you need another second….. yes it was advertisements for prophylactics called skyn and I don’t mean antibiotics.. ALL OVER THE PLANE. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was just the words, but no it had a picture of the box AND a picture of the item in question. We tried really hard to be mature about it but after 4 hours of sleep and no caffeine we could hardly contain the laughter. So once we got to cruising altitude and turned on our Ipods I put down the tray table so that I could lay down my head and take a nap for the hour flight, o wait what is on the tray table, an advertisement, what for? Skyn, again…. Not only do we have to look at it all over the plane we have to SLEEP on it!

Once we landed in Gatwick, and got on the express we could not have been happier. We got on the tube at Victoria and headed back to 17 Bedford place. When we got to the door we almost ran in we were so excited to be back to London. As much as I have enjoyed my trip abroad, mostly London, I think I am about ready to go home. I miss my family, my bed, my snickers, and of course my sweet fiancé.

Journal # 5- Nothing exciting...

When you are thinking about having surgery what is something that you as a patient look for: Credentials for your surgeon? Location? Where the surgery will take place? How about a small building connected to houses, how does that sound to you?

When we were in Ireland this last weekend we noticed something rather strange. On the outskirts of Dublin in a town called Blanchardstown we started to see on strands of houses that were connected random houses that had signs that said SURGERY. That’s it, just SURGERY. And we began to notice some of them would be lit up, like vacancy signs. This concerned me very much because in reality why would you go to a small office in a residential area surrounded by houses? Are these surgery offices licensed? As a nursing student, soon to be nurse, the sanitary conditions are also something that concerns me. Being in an area like that there is only so much that you can control because if you are needing a sterile environment and you are surrounded by houses and someone happens to walk into the wrong house, oops there goes your sterile room!

All of us on the trip talked about them every time we passed by because we found it very odd because we don’t have things like that in the states. We have small surgery centers but they are like little hospitals and they are not placed in the middle of residential areas in between two houses! The fact that they are in those places while yes they are accessible to the general public makes me question how good they are and how clean they are. “They just seem like back alley places where people would go to get cheap surgeries the government won’t pay for with a coat hanger”- Melissa Gase

I wonder if when the light was on the SURGERY signs that meant you could walk in and get surgery and if it was off that meant there was someone on the table at the moment so you had to wait till they mopped up the blood….Hey mom and dad why don’t I just go back and get my surgery done there! Good idea right!? Not!

There were plenty of things that went wrong while we were in Ireland but at least none of us got injured and had to actually find out what those surgery centers were all about. I tried really hard to get a good picture of one but every time we were coming home on the bus there was either a child screaming or we were sleeping on our 45 min bus ride so I missed the good ones all 4 times, sorry I know everyone would love to have a good picture of this great mental image I drew in your head, maybe next time.