Suffering from ENSS

Are you tired, run-down, listless? Have you recently spent countless hours studying in front of your textbook or computer? Have you felt the urge to throw it up against the wall every time you read the same sentence twice? Do you throw your hands up in frustration in between pages of reading your school assignments? If this sounds like you, you may be suffering from ENSS: Erratic Nursing Student Syndrome.

I. Am. Pooped. I had a massive public health test today. MASSIVE! While I’ve been keeping up with the readings for class, I really started buckling down and studying last Friday. I worked on reviewing material most of the day, reviewing what didn’t quite make sense to me. Then I worked Saturday and Sunday, but took my notebook with me, trying to catch a glimpse at the ‘tenets of public health nursing’ or reviewing the “community as a partner” model on lunch break. I literally did nothing but study all day Monday and Tuesday, waking up at 6 to studying and working into the night. I really started to feel like a machine when, after clinical on Wednesday, I sat down at my desk and just kept going. I kept reading highlighting, underlining, re-writing notes until I ran out of scratch paper.  I was up till midnight last night reviewing and woke at 5:30 to get ready and leave, and study some more in the 30 minutes before my 8:00 exam.

It’s been non-stop public health nursing for nearly 7 days, if I have to hear the words “assess not just the individual or the family, but aggregates and the population as a whole” ONE MORE TIME, I think I may just scream. I’m happy to say that I am feeling pretty good about it, and that whatever I got, I am good with since there is not one thing more I could have done to get this information into my head. My score is my score, but an immense weight was lifted from my shoulders when I walked up and handed in the test. But I honestly felt like collapsing the second I walked out the door. I am an “8 hours of sleep” kind of girl, and my sleep cycles have been out of whack all week, I’ve been sitting at my desk for more hours than imaginably healthy, and I even recited facts from the history of public health nursing as I was falling asleep last night.  No joke. I am not feeling myself, and while this test may be over, there’s always another one next week, and then projects galore as we enter into the second half of the quarter.

Suffering from ENSS? I definitely am. Treatment? One glass of wine, a warm blanket, and a good movie sounds like it would do the trick. But for now: on to the next test.