This morning when I got up, I was feeling pretty good. I had been studying for days, felt like I basically understood what I had been taught so far, and was ready to take on Tuesday, my longest day of the week at school.
Oh plus, I had my first test of the year yesterday and I aced it. (NURSING SCHOOL I OWN YOU.) Et cetera.
I was even feeling pretty good around 4pm today, 7 hours into my 11-hour day of in-depth discussions about varieties of hideous, crusty, skin lesions and a lecture about hospital bureaucracy in New York State.
(This is where you start wishing you had my life, right?)
Things started to deteriorate about 30 minutes into my advanced physiology lecture, when I realized that I wasn’t entirely clear what the professor was talking about, and broke down entirely at the 2-hour mark (that’s 9 hours into the day, for those keeping track at home), when I realized that I just. didn’t. get it. I could see the professor standing at the front of the hall, and I could hear that there were words coming out of her mouth about the cellular-level workings of the endocrine system, and that’s about it.
I started to panic that I wasn’t ever going to understand this material, or any of the hideous crusty skin lesion material, and that I am going to fail, AND that the real point is that I am possibly a complete dolt.
Good thing that was about when we got a break and I was able to go hide in the bathroom for 5 minutes and collect myself.
I somehow made it through the final two hours of the lecture, had a moment of sanity with a new friend who admitted that she had no idea what a beta-1 adrenergic receptor was either, and collapsed into a mostly empty subway car headed back to Brooklyn. Suddenly, I had a stroke of genius – a moment that clearly proves that I am not a huge dolt – because I knew what would fix the tizzy of utter dejection and despair that I had worked myself into!
THE BOSS. The Boss would fix this.
I will leave you to imagine the break dance I did down the middle of the A train (as well as to ponder how you are going to find a headscarf as fetching as Steve Van Zandt’s).
I felt the panic dissipate, like a fever breaking. (Which is known as the defervescent third stage of pyrexia, just by the way.) I remembered one of my realizations from last week, which was that, as long as I study for hours and hours, I’m going to do just fine. I put my focus on tomorrow, when I’ll get to do such fascinating things as practice physical assessments on my unsuspecting labmates by poking around their ears and inspecting their skin for any suspicious looking moles – and then thought even further ahead to Thursday, when I will spend my first day in a hospital unit. Taking care of actual humans. Who don’t really care whether or not I had a meltdown during my physiology lecture.
And I emerged from the subway, back home in Brooklyn, to a gentle rain falling.
So when next Tuesday comes around and I’m curled up in a little ball on the floor wondering how I’m going to go on – remind me that Tuesdays are the worst, alright?
And that The Boss knows best.
