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As a first semester nursing student, you typically do some rotations within the nursing home. (This is, unless where you live has a lot of clinical space at the hospitals, which was not the case where I was.) The day before the clinical, you must go to the facility and get information on the patient which you are assigned. This can take quite a bit of time depending upon which patient you get. Most of the patients in the nursing home have charts that look like novels, and usually are broken down into more than one continuation of their chart. It’s really hard to find where and when problems originated, which is part of the information you are to collect. After doing this, we would go into the room and say hello and let them know that we would be their student nurse the next day. Okay, so I would probably freak out if I knew I had somebody practicing on me. But these folks LOVED having students. And the staff did too; it really helped them out! The nursing home residents would get extra attention and some interesting conversation for the day. I met some of the most interesting people during my clinical experiences.
Although it was a few clinicals later until I got to give medications, I remember just about freaking out over how many pills these people could take. And then you’d crush them all and mix them up in applesauce, YUK!!! Sometimes you would get residents that would refuse their meds, or spit them out at you. It was totally impossible to know how much of what medication they actually took in and how much they had spit out. This made it extra difficult when we would try to evaluate if a new medication was actually working.
Overall, aside from the smell that you pretty much have to get used to, the nursing home is a pretty good place to work. I can say this from experience as a nurse manager now. But at the time, I swore up and down that I would NEVER EVER in a MILLION YEARS work in a nursing home. Yeah, I’ve done a ton of stuff I said I wouldn’t do. Eating my words……is that how I gained that weight? 
I finished up that first semester of the BSN program with a solid B average in my classes. I started into the second semester when to my delight, I got married and was moving. I think I secretly liked the fact that I had an “excuse” to get out of this particular nursing program. I liked the program, but really, couldn’t the instructors be any nicer than say, Satan?
Okay, so I left that program only to find out that I was NOT in fact moving as I had planned. Great. What to do now? So, I thought, can I possibly get done ANY quicker??? I applied to an Associates Degree Nursing Program where I could receive my two year RN degree. It seemed like a pretty good idea. I went to talk to an advisor who let me skip taking some kind of entrance exam that was required of the other applicants. This was because I had been accepted and successfully completed a full semester of a program with a little bit stiffer requirements than the one I was currently looking into. She also felt sorry for me that my move didn’t work out!
After a few weeks, I finally heard from the program and guess what…I got in!! I was so excited. Another journey would begin.
