Schools Out For Summer!!

Hi everyone! I’m crawling my way out of a bit of a blogging funk. I try so hard to only post positive things and it was a pretty crazy, stressful, sad beginning to 2022. 

It was a pretty stressful semester in nursing school and my last post here in blog land was when I had to put my precious Nermal to sleep. I have to say both have been pretty rough. I think of Nermal daily and miss him daily. He was that cat that was on top of me snuggling every waking hour I was home. But I know he’s in a better place now and I definitely did the right thing for him.  Now no cat snuggles me… my remaining cats are more standoffish …I keep hoping that one day one of them is going to step up and start snuggling me… Ha ha! Fingers crossed!! Below is my sweet Nermie…

My clinical group the past semester was awesome! I had a great instructor and the best clinical classmates ever!!!! Here they are leaving our final clinical of the semester … me in the front, teacher in the fuzzy white jacket, Mable and Katie students like me!!! 

Missing from the Picture above is Caitlyn. She was my clinical bestie!!!  She found out she was pregnant prior to the start of the semester and went into labor two weeks before the end of the semester. Talk about a crazy semester of nursing school. Needless to say, she missed the final clinical week and has to finish up in the summer but here’s a picture of her, her husband and her new baby boy Maverick!!! Yay!!! 

As you can see below I finished with a 3.6 GPA for this semester so I will be on the Dean’s list! Yippee! I was hoping for straight A’s but I’m also very happy with my 3.6! If you look at my grades below; at least I’m trending upwards… Ha ha!

So the great news is I’m off school for summer! My final semester will be fall 2022 and then I will officially graduate from nursing school with my degree. Next step after that is to pass the NCLEX and get a real job again!

I will be working as a CNA at a local hospital in my area for the summer in the Med-Surg area. I am planning to work a few days a week and have my weekends off for lake visits with my parents.

One really awesome bit of news is that I will be heading to Nicaragua in the next few days. My mother and I will be going with my professor and a few other students on a nursing trip. We will be staying in Granada Nicaragua and traveling to remote villages each day to distribute medical supplies and to perform  standard first aid for the villagers. I am so excited as we’ve been planning this for so many months… It’s truly going to be a life experience. This made me realize I need to get back into blogging again! I’ve got to share this amazing experience with as many people as possible.

If you’re on my Instagram, then you know that I set up Venmo for people to donate. If you are looking for a great cause you can donate using my Venmo below and we will use ALL the monies to go directly toward medicine and medical supplies for the villagers. I will be blogging everything that we purchase so that you will be able to see everything that your donation went toward.  Apparently they are in dire need for prenatal vitamins and basic medicinal supplies.

So, that’s my update! I will be posting every night, if possible, from the hotel. I would love it if you follow my journey!! 

Sending so much love and so many hugs to everyone out there!!

Again, sorry for the long blogging break I think I am finally ready to come out of my shell again. It won’t be long and you will be begging me to take another break!!! Haha!!!

Have a spectacular day!!!

Hugs to everyone!!!

First OB Clinical

Happy happy Friday everyone! I think it’s gonna be a very interesting semester this year in nursing school

I was scheduled to have my first OB clinical yesterday. We were going to a Pittsburgh hospital from 2 PM until midnight. Around noon we got an email from our instructor that we were doing zoom from home. Apparently the school did not get the papers filled out in time so we were unable to be on the floor at Clinical.  Because the hospital is so far away from me (about 1 1/2 hours) I was already in the car on the way to a fellow students home to drive from there. So I was all dressed with my gear when she texted me and told me it was canceled in person and we would be zooming at 2 PM.

Needless to say it was a very long day being on a zoom clinical from 2 PM until midnight. The instructor let us go around 1130 but that was still a very long day.

Hopefully we will have better luck next Thursday!!!

in the meantime I will leave you with a picture of all my clinical gear that I systematically took off after I heard in person Clinical was canceled.

Our cute navy scrub tops and pants… and yes I am working on the weight loss… UGG I hate seeing that size on my scrub top but you can not change that which you do not acknowledge, right?!?! (I blacked out the school because we’re not allowed to put any kind of school names on any kind of social media.)

My awesome stethoscope… It was a gift for my parents the Christmas before I started nursing school! Love it!


My awesome bandage scissors… We have to have these with us for every Clinical. Mine are from Amazon!


Just like the scissors… We have to have our medical pen light with us for every clinical. I got mine from Amazon I think!


I got this adorable lanyard for my badge from my nieces and nephews.  It was a Christmas gift right before I started nursing school. They found it at Bath and Body Works…it’s has sanitizer built right in!!!

I also use these awesome pens I found on Amazon. I saw another nurse with them at my first Clinical and they are so helpful. They hang right from your badge holder so they are always ready and available when you need them! They’re perfect for writing vitals or labs and initialing IV tubes and the sharpie comes in handy when you have to label bandages.  I found them on Amazon and it was the best investment for nursing school!

I always have a little cash on hand… The instructor told us the cafeteria would be closed except for grab and go but they have vending machines. Usually these hospitals have vending machines for Panera soup. That’s what I was hoping for at least. I also packed a dinner of protein bars almonds and dried mangoes just in case the vending machines only had candy. Lol!

I always keep this little baggie in my zipper pocket of my scrub pants. I have Bayer baby aspirin to chew in case I start to get migraine lights ( if you get migraines you’ll understand.) and it also has some cough drops and some ibuprofen. You just never know when you’re going to need that. We can’t have any items on the floor with us so this is the easiest way to be prepared if you yourself have an emergency.

This is my best friend! I got it at a local health store and it is like a natural version of a Vicks inhaler! One thing I have learned is that nursing doesn’t always smell pretty. This is perfect you sniff it up both nostrils before you take care of some not so pleasantly scented issues. It has made Clinical life much better.

This is my nursing watch. It has a secondhand and the plastic repels germs. It’s fully waterproof too! This was a gift from my parents for Christmas before I started nursing school also.

I found this little gem on Amazon. Another girl in my clinical was using one and I loved it. It’s a metal folding clipboard. You can put all of your patient files and important information in this clip… Then you can fold it in half and it fits right in your scrub pocket. It is fantastic because it also gives you a hard surface to write on!


As you can see on the outside of it there’s a little cheat sheets for different lab values, needle gauges, eye millimeter sizes and shot locations, etc. 

This is one other thing I always make sure I take to clinical. Nurses are not able to hydrate throughout the day. You’re so busy that before you know it it’s been four hours. So it’s super important to stay hydrated however you can… especially when nurses work 10 and 12 hour shifts. This stuff has been a godsend! The swell bottle was a gift from one of my very best friends Donna. I fill it with water and then add 1 1/2 of the liquid IVs. They taste amazing and it keeps you hydrated and feeling good all day!


So that’s it! Just a little view of what prep is like for Clinical… And then just like that it was canceled. Ha ha! I guess if nothing else you have to be flexible in nursing school!

And as you can also tell nursing school isexpensive! Once I graduate and get established I’m going to figure out how to do a grant for new nurses. When I started I had no clue how expensive it was going to be. I knew how much school cost but you really don’t have a clue as books and testing software are more expensive than school each semester! I had no idea about that. Also all of the gear that you need for nursing school is unbelievably expensive! Between the equipment and the special embroidered scrubs it ends up costing a whole ton of money. 

I would love to help someone else once I graduate and get established!

That’s all for me! As you can tell, I think now that school has started up I’m going to try my best to at least post once a week. That should be doable. Monday is dosage Calc and I will definitely post after that to let you know how it turns out.

Have you ever thought about starting a scholarship for someone less fortunate? have you paid it forward lately ? How do you pay it forward? 

Thanks for all the well wishes and support! You guys are amazing! Hugs and stay safe out there!!!

Good Cry Anyone?

Well not gonna lie…

Today is not what I would call the best day ever.

First thing this morning I realized that both my dermatologist and my medicine are not covered under my new insurance plan. So that’s lovely. I see a dermatologist yearly because I have psoriatic arthritis. The psoriasis piece has been really controlled with Stelara. Needless to say, Stelara and my doctor are both not covered under my new plan. So I need to research and find a new doctor, have all of my patient records sent to them and then find a new med for my psoriasis. 

Then I took the med dosage Calc test. You have to get a 92% to pass (you can miss two). It didn’t go well at all. Thank goodness they give us one more try to re-take the test. I messed up the simplest thing. The wording threw me off. The question was asking for a flow rate on an electronic pump and for some reason I labeled them gtt/min instead of ml/hr and there were three in a row. You can only miss two and I missed all three of those.  Pretty much spent the afternoon crying about that one. Now I’m over it and I’m ready to retake it because I know what I did wrong and as frustrating as it is it was, it was my own stupid mistake.

In the afternoon it started pouring down rain here in Pittsburgh. It was super dark outside and everything was just super gloomy all day here.

Around dinner time I took Nermal (my cat) in for his two week vet check for his diabetes. His numbers went down from close to 800 to around 420. The vet said that was great but he’s only gained an ounce. So we’re bumping him up to two units in the morning and three units at night. We will do that for a week and if I still notice he’s peeing a lot I’m supposed to bump it up to three units in the morning and three units at night.

Here’s the little cutie sleeping in his cat tree cube…

When I see it written here it doesn’t seem like it should have been such a great catastrophe but it certainly felt like one today. I was just super sad and super overwhelmed in waves. I don’t know if anyone else has had a day like this but it’s almost like waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I just wanted to check in because you’ve all been so super supportive about my nursing decision and although I really tried and studied hard I missed three stupid questions. I realize now it’s all good and I’ll do better on my next retake.

I need to go to bed now and hopefully I will have a better restart tomorrow. I am going to a conference tomorrow that I’m super excited about so I will send a whole bunch of pictures this weekend.  Thank us I have an amazing responsible cat sitter that I trust with my cats lives. She loves my cats as much as I do. She’s coming to take care of all my babies and Nermal’s shots over the weekend. It’s a lot of work so she is definitely a saint. So that’s a bright spot! 

Hugs to each and everyone of you… Thanks for being there when I need to talk these things out. You guys are another bright spot!! Hugs!

Ever have one of those days when things one after the other just keep going wrong? Ever have a day where you just feel overwhelmed? Ever have a day where the smallest thing goes wrong and it feels huge? Ever have a day when you just needed to have a good cry?

Stay safe out there!

Thanksgiving recap

Hey yinz!!

I hope everyone had a phenomenal Thanksgiving. 

This post just shows you how behind the times I am that my Thanksgiving post is at least two weeks late… Lol! But I guess it is massive progress that I’m posting at least monthly now. Ha!

I just finished ALL my finals for this semester of nursing school! I finished this semester with 2 A’s and a B.  One more year left and then I am a nurse!!

Here is the picture of my clinical group on our last day of Hospital Clinical. Our instructor is on the end on the right and I am three from the right! I scribbled our badges and school identifiers so apologies for that. I got so lucky - it was such an amazing group of women and we all jumped in and helped each other soo much!!

Thanksgiving was spent the traditional way for my family… Good food, laughter and a wonderful time spent together. We did our usual cookie baking fiasco and as usual it was great! Here are a bunch of photos from the long weekend.

Below is my my brother in laws mom and step-father, my parents, my brother in law and sister and their children and grandchild (minus her older daughter who was working this day). The little tot in the picture is my first great-niece, Leighton! We all love her soo much!!

This is my sister and brother in law with their first grandchild. Soo adorable, right??


This is an impromptu pic of the beginning of cookie baking. Those are both of my sisters and my dad.


This is our side of the family. We do two dinners and this was the second one. This is my sister and brother-in-law their children, grandchild, and one of the kids girlfriend. Also, my other sister and brother in law and their kids. The kids are all so grown up! If you have followed my blog for a while you will probably be amazed… Three of the children in this picture are those three little tiny kids that I played in the lake with for so many years. They’re all grown up now.

Many evenings we have game time. It’s a great time for everyone to just laugh and decompress. I can’t even tell you the numbers of different games we played this year.


More candid baking photos…


The kids and I fought over who got to hang out with this little cutie. She was definitely the hit of the weekend. She’s so much fun to be around and all the kids took turns watching her while we baked.


Sugar cookies…


Candy cane rolling…the worst cookie job that excreting hates-ha!!


A little relaxation - football and screen time!!


Snuggles between batches!!!


My adorable niece entertained us all with her guitar playing throughout the weekend!! Love listening to her play!


My sister started selling Beauty Counter products so of course we all had to mask up and rejuvenate Our skin in the evenings.  If you need a product hookup, let me know. I’ll get you her information!

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving and I hope everyone is happy, safe and well!!!

Thank you all of you for all your words of support!

Love you guys - so many hugs to everyone!! 

You are first to know

Hi everyone!

Happy Wednesday!

I am spending today in Columbus babysitting my adorable niece and nephew as my brother is house hunting in California. He has accepted a new job Rivian and will be moving from Ohio to California.  Right now we’re spending our time working on homeschool… It’s a blast! Aside from the mini breaks they are requesting because they are starving or their brains are stalling out or they’re working too hard or they’re fighting with each other or their feet are cold… Things are going well!

As I was sitting here playing teacher an email came through and I was officially excepted in nursing school for the spring of 2021! I am so happy to finally be able to officially pursue this path forward!!! I think I am the happiest girl in the world right now!!!

I hope everyone else is having an amazing day!

Stay safe out there and hugs to every one of you!