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Senior year of high school, I thought of spending it as a breeze as most seniors do. But instead of that, it was the most stressful year of my entire school career. This all happened because I decided to take a nursing offered at my school to see if I truly wanted to have a profession in the medical field. Coming into the class I knew it wasn’t going to be easy because previous students warned me that the class was going to be tough. But despite of all the negative feedback I still put up with the challenge. I thought to myself, “Oh this will be fine! I can manage it!” Boy was I wrong. That nursing class was hell and my teacher was Satan herself.
To begin this lovely turn of events, the nursing class was a zero period which meant it began before the standard 8 am classes. But to make things worse, I had to be in my seat before 5:30 am every morning of the second semester. Waking up at 4 in the morning was just the highlight of my senior year. Being up that early honestly wasn’t even the worst part of it all, I was involved in other extracurriculars besides the nursing class. I was a part of: student government, yearbook, was the Vice president of a volunteering club, played soccer and ran cross country. Every day I stayed on campus from 5:30 am to 5:30 pm. Unlike all my other peers from the nursing class that got to leave 3:07 pm, I had to stay afterschool for soccer or cross-country practice, or to take pictures for yearbook. Since I was in leadership as well, every Friday during the cross-country season, I had to stay on campus until 10pm due to setting up the snack bar during our team’ football games. Staying that late at school is something I don’t wish upon my worst enemy.
Despite all of this however, I had a lot of unforgettable experiences that shaped my character for the better. I learned how to manage my time wisely due to all the things I participated in. Every Fridays during the first semester of school, my nursing class gave out rigorous medical terminology tests. These weekly exams required us to create a hundred or more flashcards that we had to memorize to be able to communicate with the nurses. We had the entire week to memorize all these words and the diagrams that followed with the chapter. But this wasn’t the only thing I had to focus on during the first semester, on Thursday’ I had my cross country meets and on Fridays were our high school’ football games. On the bus ride to my cross country meets, I spent my time studying that abundant number of flashcards. I also had my friends test me before and after the meets, their astonished reactions towards my gigantic stack of flashcards was very entertaining to watch. After coming home exhausted from my meets, I would stay up until midnight to make sure I knew everything before the test. Getting no sleep before the test to cram was very successful because I would surprisingly get amazing grades on my tests the next morning.
Lack of sleep and abundant hours of studying helped me prepare for college because yes, I still do these things now. However, I thought first semester of senior year was horrible but as you guessed it, second semester was a disaster. That semester was when it all got serious, to the point where I was responsible for someone’ life or death. Second semester of the nursing class was the horrendous time when my peers and I had to be in class before 5:30 am and if anyone were a minute late we would feel the wrath of Satan. We were required to come to class during the crack of dawn because every Mondays through Thursdays we would go to a convalescent home to practice our skills. If you didn’t know, a convalescent home is a nursing home in which people dumped and ignored their sickly family members in need. It was our job as students to work along the nursing staff and make sure these elderly people didn’t die and hopefully recover from their injuries to go home to their happy families.
It all seemed so simple during the first week, we all had to follow our designated Certified Nursing Assistants, or CNA, to observe how they treated their patients and to get a sense of their daily routine they went through. You would think that these state certified nursing assistants would do their job correctly, but it was all a scam. I don’t even know how some of the CNAs passed the exam with how poorly they treated their patients. My teacher warned us about how terrible the workers were and forced us to not become them. She would watch over us like a hawk and although it was intimidating, it truly taught us how to professionally take care of our patients. Even though my teacher was a strict pain in the gluteus maximus, her form of teaching taught us skills essential for the real world. We had to deal with patients with dementia and had to work our way around the illness. We learned how to be understanding and compassionate with the patients there that were terribly neglected. But most importantly we learned that life was terribly short, we saw illness and death right before our eyes. The patients would tell us their life stories and how content they were with the life they lived. Which truly inspired me to live life the best way I possibly could because we never know when our time will come.