If Nurse Eye Roll ran nursing school

iStock | Nikola Nastasic

Here is what my curriculum would look like if I were Dean Nurse Eye Roll.

Freshman Year

Anatomy Abbreviated

How to Be the Best CNA Ever

Vitals + Developing Your Nursey Sixth Sense

How to Talk to Patients and Their Families Without Sounding Like an Idiot

Mastering the Nurse Walk/Run

Optional Elective: Walking Quickly in Danskos

Mental Health Nursing

Lab Values That Doctors Care About

Nutrition + GI System

Optional Elective: How to Not Turn Into a Morbidly Obese, Lazy RN

Sophomore Year

How to Use IV Pumps + Give IV/IVPB Meds

Cardiac Nursing (Minus the Fluff)

How to Do 25 Things at Once

Optional Elective: Eating Your Lunch in Less than Seven Minutes

Giving and Taking Report

Meds You’ll Actually Use and How to Administer Them

Optional Elective: Becoming a Medication + Applesauce Mixologist

How to Make Kids Cry (aka Pediatrics)

Respiratory-ness

How to Not Get Sued

Junior Year

Med-Surg (Minus the Fluff)

Holding Your Pee for 12 Hours

Optional Elective: Learning How to Not Hate Your Life While Working Nights

Not Crying When Doctors Yell at You (Dealing With Difficult Coworkers)

Dealing With Pain Med Seekers

Understanding Diabetes and How to Teach Patients About It

Gross Wound Care

Optional Elective: Mastering 700 Different Kinds of Tape

Dealing With Dying People + Their Families

Head-to-Toe Assessments for a Nurse (NOT an Advance Nurse Practitioner)

Senior Year

Nursing Procedures You’ll Actually Use

Optional Elective: Helping Doctors with Bedside Procedures

How to Talk to Physicians

Charge Nurse 101

How to Not Cry and Be Useful During Codes

How to Delegate to CNAs

Critical Care Nursing

Mastering Microsoft Outlook

How to Realistically Manage Your Time

There would be no 25-question quizzes after being responsible for 300-plus pages of material.

There would be no memorizing ridiculous amounts of information and medications, just to forget it all for the next exam.

You’ll actually know how to be a nurse when you graduate and it won’t be up to your hospital to train you/teach you literally everything.

You would spend 10 minutes of the first class on nursing theorists and not an entire semester.

You wouldn’t be taught assessment skills for advance practice; you’d be taught assessments for normal nursing practice.

You wouldn’t spend four years learning how to work in a perfect nursing world that doesn’t exist.

You wouldn’t spend $400 to $700 per year on textbooks you’ll never look at again and can’t resell after you graduate because they’re outdated.

The focus of your education wouldn’t be on passing one single test.

You wouldn’t waste the time and money on two years of prerequisites that have nothing to do with nursing.

To read more, visit NurseEyeRoll.com.

Learning how to be a great nurse at the bedside while maintaining your sanity at home is no easy task. Becoming Nursey: From Code Blues to Code Browns, How to Take Care of Your Patients and Yourself talks about how to realistically live as a nurse, both at home and at the bedside…with a little humor and some shenanigans along the way. Get ready: It’s about to get real, real nursey. You can  get your own copy at at NurseEyeRoll.com (pdf), Amazon (paperback) orGoodreads (ebook).