What do you call a nurse that graduates with B's?

I think I suck at being a nursing student. I always got really good grades during my pre-reqs and studied a lot. Now I study A TON and I'm really not doing so well. I am really good at practical stuff, hands-on, procedures, things that are important, but written tests, not so much. But what do they call a nurse that graduates with B's? An RN. That's what I've decided my new motto is. I will still try my best but I'm not going to freak out if only get an 86 on the test I just took when I was positive that I only missed 3 questions. Ok, I'm over it.

Okay some more frustrations and then I will end on a happy story that happened during clinical. Sometimes I wonder about our classes. I feel like some of the things we do are complete waste of time. How have the students before us not stood up and said something about this before us? Whatever their reasons, I don't care. I am standing up. I'm currently drafting a letter to the dean of the college requesting an entire change in the layout of our Nursing Research class. I have legitimate reasons why we don't need to spend class time on certain topics because we have already learned them in many of our other classes and it's just useless repeat. I am being very professional and not just complaining but offering a real solution to the problem. The other stupid class I have is what we call, Communication Lab. Now this class, unlike research has a lot of potential to be beneficial, it is just going in the completely wrong direction. Right now it's basically a relief society lesson every week. Let's learn how to be compassionate and listen to our patients. Okay, first of all, how could a person even get through life this far without doing some of these things. Second, don't you think that we already know how to do this otherwise we wouldn't really want to be a nurse? Some things that have been suggested this semester are aspects of communication that we actually need to learn how to do like: talk to a doctor, put disease explanations into layman's terms, handle workplace conflicts, get telephone orders, handle combative patients.

Okay, I'm done complaining. I have a patient that I'm responsible for in the nursing home, we'll call her Ann. Ann, on a first meeting is not a very nice person. She has something called, agorphobia, which is fear of people or social situations. You can only imagine. Each morning, "good morning, Ann"..."TURN THE DAMN LIGHTS OFF!" It is actually quite hilarious at times, but it does start to get old. Because of her surface negative attitude nobody spends any time with her. She doesn't like to get out of bed and tells people to leave her alone and turn the lights off. Well, I decided to try a little bit harder. We have a lot of down time during clinical so lucky I was able to do this and it was really neat for me. Luckily Ann was in a little bit better mood one morning and was willing to go down to the Dining Room to eat breakfast. When she came back to her room she was grumpy and asked me turn to the lights off. I did but I stayed in there with her. I talked with her, mostly just coaxed her to talk by asking questions about some pictures that she had and an Elvis movie that she had on her table. She got to talking a little bit to me. She has slight dementia, but she knows that she does so she couldn't remember a lot but I think it was nice for her to have someone to talk to. No one even put forth any effort before. Well soon enough, 9am rolled around and that means The Price is Right, definitely can't talk during that. But I sat with her. After about 20 minutes of just sitting with her I got up to go and Ann said, "You leavin already?" I said I just had to go check a couple things and asked if she needed anything. "She said, you've done more than enough. Thank you." That is huge for Ann!! Usually she kicks people out of the room. It was so cool for me.

You never know what's underneath that first layer of someone. First impressions are not always correct. Give people some time and you may make there day and/or your own.