Diagnosis Delirium

Its been a while since I've written. I've got a lot of new thoughts in my mind, and with those new thoughts come a new name for the blog. Why "Diagnosis Delirium"? Well, according to Merriam-Webster, delirium is "an acute mental disturbance characterized by confused thinking and disrupted attention usually accompanied by disordered speech and hallucinations" or "frenzied excitement". I laughed when I read these definitions recently, and thought of how they both apply to nursing. The life of a nursing student is full of its ups and downs.
There are those times that we've spent more hours in class than we have sleeping, when we talk about disturbing things we've seen at clinicals over the dinner table, when we're up late at night memorizing the signs and symptoms of acute coronary syndrome. During those times, we become strangers to any friends outside of the nursing program. We drink copious amounts of coffee and other caffeinated beverages. We ignore everything we ever learned about good sleep habits, healthy eating, and exercising regularly. We carry textbooks that weigh more that dictionaries. We use silly phrases like "King K lives in the castle of the cell while Sir Sodium circulates outside" to remember electrolyte concentrations.
These things we do in order to pass our tests, to avoid failing out of the nursing program, and to one day graduate with our Bachelor of Science in Nursing. But behind all those things, what truly drives us is a desire to help others. In the end, a diploma is just a piece of paper, but the satisfaction one gets from serving someone in need is what makes all the work and the late nights worth it. However, when I do receive that piece of paper one day, less than I year from now, I expect that I shall experience the second definition of delirium. :)

In the future,the blog shall be a recording of the life of your average senior nursing student. I also hope to get some more of my notes from Zimbabwe up. Until then, cheerio!