Tales of a Nursing Student

My car, Jane, is plain but a good worker. She gets me where I want to go without any fuss about it. We go on adventures together, sometimes going down to Bloomington and other times going beautiful places like Turkey Run State Park, about an hour from Lafayette.

This summer, we went to Cedar Bluff Nature Preserve, about 15 minutes from home.

It was really beautiful.

That’s Jane in the background. I told you she was plain, but don’t tell her that or she’ll get in a huff. Outside doesn’t look like that around here anymore. Drought and fall have taken their toll on the green.

Turkey Run was starting to show the first sights of shriveling up a few weeks ago when I visited it.

Not that you can really tell in that picture, but it was.

My most recent adventure, however, only involved Jane for about 200 miles of the over 1000 miles traveled. My family and I went down to the Smoky Mountains for a long weekend, where the higher parts of the mountains really were starting to look like fall, with fingers of red coming down on the ridges.

Our second hike was almost 9 miles long, so we started at the early hour of 8 AM, Sunday morning at one end of Cade’s Cove.

They don’t call them the Smoky Mountains for nothing.

Before we started, someone (Amanda I think) suggested we take a family photo.

Apparently Jonathan didn’t like it.

Since Sunday was October 10, 2010 (10-10-10) we kids decided to jump when the clock hit 10:10 (cause you know, nothing is more enjoyable than saying, “lets do something at 10 10 10 10 10 10” and lose track of the tens.

So we jumped

Apparently mom and dad kissed, but none of us saw that, much less captured it on film (which is fine with us!)

The top of the mountain gave us pretty swell views of the cove

Around this time, though, our guide estimated that we had only gone about a quarter of our hike, and it had taken us a good 2.5 hours. So we stopped taking pictures and practically ran for the next half hour, when we found we were actually more than half done with our hike.

By the end of the hike, we were ready for a big dose of power from peas and we formed a union to make our wishes known to the pea carrier.

Because we partially ran down the mountain, we reached our destination too early and had time to play before our next fun activity (a hay ride in the back of a cut-off semi trailer around Cade’s Cove).

The next day, after we had all killed our legs, feet, toes, anything that helped us climb a mountain, were killed again on another hike. Sure it was beautiful, but we still killed our legs.

Nearer the end, we found these great vines. If you fell off, you fell down the mountain. Great fun!

But by the end of this hike, the union was pretty determined to get what we wanted and so we went on strike. It was a great vacation.

This time of the semester, it is hard for me to sit still, hoping that time will speed up and hurriedly bring me back to Bloomington. But, since I will most likely be living in West Lafayette for the better part of the next three years, I had better start liking at least some parts of living here. So here are five things, in no particular order, that I especially love about living in West Lafayette / Lafayette

1.The Wabash. While most people who grew up here take it for granted, or even hate it because it is polluted, dirty, and floods, I find it a soothing influence. No matter what, it is always running south. Someday, I’ll get a canoe and float down south with it.

2. The stacks in HSSE Library. This is the best place to study on campus (even better than the bathrooms!) They have windows that open, private desks, and two outlets so I can plug in both my phone and my computer! I’ve spent more time there than anywhere else this semester, excluding sleep time.

3. My church. Immanuel Reformed Presbyterian has been pretty swell. The kids (little ones) immediately accepted me at the beginning of last year, even though I hadn’t been raised singing Psalms. And the parents followed their children. They are some of the craziest, most enjoyable families I know. Special thanks to the Pfeiffer’s, Larson’s, and Olivetti’s.

4. Being in biking distance to everything that is necessary. Part of the reason I am is because I have increased my biking distance to twenty plus miles… =) I have diffidently gotten in better shape, biking up to the grocery, out to the Pfeiffer’s house (a good ten, flat miles from my apartment), to the Fort, and every other place imaginable. But, having a car will diffidently make my life easier.

5. Being outside so much that I already have tan lines on my feet. I know that as soon as I go back home, I’ll have some sort of job or another than will require me to stay inside with closed toe shoes. Why didn’t I choose to major in something that let me go barefooted? That should have been on my list of things I thought about when I picked what I studied.

Last week and tomorrow in my A&P lab, we are doing a thorough dissection of a rat, looking at all of the various systems (muscular, digestive, urinary, reproductive etc.)

 

I really wasn’t looking forward to these two weeks. For one thing, formaldehyde makes me cry, just like onion. For another, we had been warned of both pregnant rats (and we later discovered that it was a very needed warning.) Yuck!!

 

Tuesday morning of last week broke bright and early and I got to my lab by 7:30. After a brief explanation of how to skin our poor rat, we went up to the front to get our rat.

 

In order for the rats to fit in our dissection pan comfortably, we have to cut off the tail. (It also really helped the squeamish factor. My lab partner and I were very thankful to see our tail go.) Tomorrow, after we finish dissecting our rats, we will have a competition for the best rat name. I think formaldehyde does something to our brains because nobody in our lab could think of a good name (Stuart and Templeton were both thrown around, but most of our rats were female.) I thought it would be fun to make up a story about our rat, about why she was so much smaller than the others, but we couldn’t make up one of those either.

 

Skinning the rat turned out to be no pleasant job because the connective tissue held firm.

But it was amazing to see how the muscles overlapped and looked like one giant muscle with fibers going in different directions. Also, every organ that we saw was beautifully and wonderfully made (even in a rat!) One of the coolest things was the pancreas, which did not have a firm structure and looked like cottage cheese. Anyway, it was not quite as bad as I anticipated it to be, but I'm still not looking forward to tomorrow and the rest of the dissection. By the way, did you know that rats have no gallbladder and no appendix?

 

Right now, my nameless, tailless, and taleless, rat is sitting, wrapped in a damp chuck, in my lab desk drawer waiting for me to come and cut her up some more. If you have any good ideas for names, suggest away. She was a black/white, small rat who had yellow teeth, was only slightly pregnant, and didn’t want to be skinned at all!

In my ethics class we have been studying ethics around how we treat the land. Today my TA was wondering out loud if it were morally wrong to eat a tomato that had been flown in from Mexico during the winter because of all the green house gas emissions that were produced in transportation. That made me think of one of my nutty customers at Bloomingfoods last summer. She was at the salad bar, and demanded,

“Why aren’t these greens organic!!?”

“Well, they actually are. But because they are grown locally and not certified, we can’t sell them as organic.”

Then she exploded.

“I don’t care if we have to kill the whole state of California!! You NEED to see organic greens here.”

So much for supporting the local community…