CNA School

In 2004, Corrie and I went to CNA school together. As we started class in the spring of that year, we were full of optimism and cute as buttons in our beautiful scubs that our moms made for us. Little did we know how completely terrifying it would be! Our first encounter with patients of any kind were an elderly couple, both had to be in there 80's. They shared a room with each other in the nursing home and we were told to help them get up and ready for breakfast. Seems simple enough, right? Well, for starters, the wife had bilateral amputations above the knee and I was supposed to help her put on her prosthetic legs. We hadn't exactly gone over that in Nurses Aide 101! And I had to empty my first bedpan! I nearly puked and spent the next half-hour hiding in the hall. Corrie decided that she never wanted to get old and was pretty sure that she didn't want to be a nurse's aide, much less a nurse.
 We manged to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and by the end of our 2 month clinical rotation, we were passing trays and dressing the elderly like nobody's business. I would say about 99% of the time, we didn't go anywhere in that nursing home without the other one. We were completely co-dependent! We both got our licences after passing the state board exam the first time around. We relied on each other so much during CNA school and we continued to rely on the other one during nursing school.
Even though Corrie wasn't standing beside me when I put my first foley catheter in or started my first IV, I knew she had done it already and it sucked just as much for her as it was sucking for me right now. And I knew that when I got home I would be able to get on instant messenger and tell her all about it as we played backgammon. I would listen to Corrie in awe as she described watching her first open heart surgery and I laughed at her when she told me about one of the many times she made a fool of herself in front of her patients. I would rejoice for her when she passed another test with a fantastical 99, and dread my NCLEX after hearing her describe the horrendous test.
It's hard to believe we both are licensed professionals when I think back to our humble beginnings but here we are, and I am pretty sure I wouldn't have survived the entire ordeal without Nurse Corrie!

The beginnings

She lives in Florida, went to DSC, works in an ER. I live in Kansas, went to MNU, work on a PCU. How exactly did we become the kind of friends we are? Well... that is a story...

Back in seventh grade we all lived in a smallish kansas town. We were both homeschooled all the way through, and it was time for our town's homeschool graduation. We were the official escorts for the 8th graders graduating. I was there with my best friend at the time, Liz, and then RaDonna was the third escort. It was the first time we had met. She refused to talk to us. We tried talking to her, she didn't really respond, and Liz and I gave up and did what best friends do, ignored everyone else. A couple of months later her and her sisters started a play, Anne of Green Gables. My group of friends were all in it, so I joined as well. That began the friendship of RaDonna, her sisters and myself. Over the next couple of years my family started attending their church, we started doing more and more together, and at some point she became the person in the world who got me. By the time I headed off to college a couple of hours away she became the friend I missed the most. When she moved to Florida with her family partway through freshman year of college, I cried. When I about lost my mind that spring, playing backgammon with her on IM was the main thing that pulled me through. We have talked each other through years of school, clinicals, the highs and lows that only someone who has experienced nursing school can understand. Last year I graduated, and she flew in for a grand total of 36 hours to watch my pinning ceremony, before she went to texas to say goodbye to her dad who was leaving for Iraq. This week I flew in for her pinning ceremony, and I just about burst out crying through the whole thing.

We made it, RaDonna. We are finally done.

Being a new nurse is terrifying. I know this, she is going to figure it out soon. The constant fear that you will screw up because honestly, I don't know near enough to do this job, can be cripling if you think about it. This blog is so we can share our thoughts, fears, experiences. So on the exciting days when something went right I can write about it and she can celebrate with me. On the days when everything went wrong, she can write about it and I can comiserate.

This is us, figuring it out.