Why Nursing School is Bad for Your Health

There are a few obvious reasons why I usually feel exactly how I look above (so flattering, I know). Not much sleep. Too much caffeine (the tea over coffee diet didn't last very long). Staring at books for eight hours straight. Eating way too much junk food. Sitting in one chair for nine hours at a time. Not exercising more than the bare minimum, if at all.

A not too obvious reason: they are teaching me way too much! Since starting the program every little ache freaks me out and my mind automatically goes straight to the worst case scenario. Suddenly I've got every disease I learned about the class before.

Over just this semester I have come down with: heart disease, histrionic personality disorder, diabetes, bacteremia, all sorts of cancers, peritonitis, appendicitis ...

Hi, I'm Caci and I am a hypochondriac.

Seriously.

Last Thursday I woke up spinning. Every time I tilted my head or bent over any direction the room would spin and I would get sick to my stomach. It would catch me off guard, I never knew exactly when to expect it. It was miserable!

Let the paranoid, unreasonable diagnosing commence…

By nine a.m. that day I was convinced that somehow I was pregnant – there was no other explanation. Around noon I decided it was just a virus that had gotten into my inner ears and was wreaking havoc. I was ok with that diagnosis for a bit. After I took a decongestant to hopefully get some fluid draining out of my ears, but kept spinning past the 30 minutes it took the meds to kick in, I started to wonder. That's when I started leaning towards a tumor in my cerebellum.

The next morning I was, again, convinced we were going to be welcoming a bundle of joy in nine months. But that really didn't sit well with me so I kept scratching my brain for some hint of rationalization. Later on meningitis fit my symptoms pretty well (did I mention my thumb had been twitching? That propelled the meningitis diagnosis). I informed some schoolmates I had come down with meningitis, and they needed to struggle on through school without me. A friend text back that her veterinarian fiancé thought I had lymphosarcoma in my neck. We decided I also had bipolar and that D was going to have to start comfort measures.

On Saturday I flipped my hair over my head to pull it on top of my head, got woozy, regretted the stupid idea, and woke up on the floor of the bathroom. Luckily there was a towel that my head landed on, but my hand got smashed. I really started getting worried there was something much worse than meningitis or a tumor in my brain. Something like eminent death seemed much more plausible. I kept going over my symptoms – listening to my heart, taking my blood pressure, and temperature – but, there was nothing but dizziness when I tilted my head weird directions. I never fully recovered from my fainting spell and felt absolutely horrible all day.

Later, Gram gave me the idea that vertigo was the problem. I looked it up and added it to my diagnosis options. It became my favorite of the diagnoses, and the least threatening – which may have helped it attain favorite status. Since vertigo made the most sense we went for a pharmacists consult at WalMart and ended up with Sudafed, ice cream, Gatorade, and Milano cookies. Sudafed did the trick for Sunday and Monday, and now I'm cured.

I think the Gatorades just evened out the electrolytes in my cerebrovascular fluids, which cured my meningitis! I'm slightly impressed (besides the fact that it's a pain in the booty) I can come up with so many possible disease scenarios … apparently I've been doing too many care plans.

In reality I'm pretty grateful for that stupid information in my brain – mostly because I could get it in there in the first place – but, I wish I could apply it to only anyone else but me. I'm starting to wonder how doctors live without being freaked out all the time. They probably just have good self control – I heard that's kinda nice to have.