6 OCTOBER - 5:40 AM

In class today we practiced vital signs. Ho hum. Since I already knew pretty much all there was to know about vital signs thanks to my EMT status, I went around helping the other students and practicing taking blood pressures. Taking blood pressures is hard for me. I can't hear through the stupid stethoscope. Anybody wanna buy me a Littman's? Anybody?

ANYBODY?

Okay, fine, fuck you too then.

I mean all I do is come here and update for you voyeuristic freaks who never sign my fucking guestbook anyway, and what do I get out of it? I should be studying for my vital signs TEST tomorrow but ooooooh, no. No, I'm sitting here in front of my box tapping out a lame-o update out of the sheer kindness of my heart. Do I think I ENJOY this? Huh? HUH? DO YOU?

Yeah, okay. I do enjoy this.

BUT THAT'S NO EXCUSE! Somebody out there should STILL be willing to buy me a Littman's stethoscope, preferrably one on the high end, with a short tube! Dammit!

Ahem.

So anyway, after we'd practiced for a while, we all trooped up to the teacher's desk, where Mrs. Nurse-that-obviously-learned-to-read-using-the-sight-reading-method checked our work.

(Our teacher, whose given name is really Mrs. Larke, can't pronouce anything correctly. She has a horribly thick North Carolina mountains accent to begin with, and she is constantly saying, "in-fect-CHOO-us" instead of "infectious." Drives me fuckin NUTS.)

Anyway, my partner sat me down and popped a thermometer in my mouth and started taking my pulse. As nursing students, we have to take pulses for a full sixty seconds, whereas as an EMT, we only took pulses for fifteen-twenty seconds and then multiplied, yadda yadda blah blah.

I knew that my partner wasn't taking my pulse correctly because she was pressing too hard on my wrist (which obliterates the pulse), and ALSO because she was holding on to the INSIDE of my wrist. Although you can usually feel a pulse anywhere in the wrist, it is considerably fainter when you move away from the radial bone. You are supposed to take a radial pulse at the base of the thumb. She was over there by my pinky finger.

So I started fucking with the poor girl. Mean, I know, but I was bored and anyway, she HAS to learn.

I started speeding up my pulse.

(Tim thinks it's freaky when I do that, but it's not hard at all. Just visualize yourself in a pulse-rising situation, and up it climbs. Tim made me prove I could do it. He sat there, feeling my radial pulse for two minutes. When he started (using that nifty 15-second-pulse-then-multiply tool we learned in EMT class), my pulse was about 85-90 beats per minute, but by the end of the two minute mark, it was up over 140. It really upset him, and now he's afraid that I'm going to be dead of a heart attack by the time I'm thirty. Well, now he knows how I feel, imagining him dead in every scenario possible.)

ANYWAY.

So after my partner finished taking my pulse, she wrote down "71" on her little sheet, which I knew was total bullshit. Even if I hadn't been artificially speeding up my heart rate, it never would have been below 80. NEVER. My resting pulse rate has always been around 85. She was fucking LYING!

This wasn't even for a GRADE, folks, it was just for our teacher to see where we needed improvement. And what's this girl planning on doing when she graduates? Going out there, working as a nurse, just GUESSING people's pulses? AAAA!

So my teacher takes my wrist and starts checking my partner's findings. After about 20 seconds, she looks sidelong at my partner and says, "What'd you get for her pulse again?"

"Sebenty-one," she says.

Mrs. Larke practically yells at her, "Are you kidding me? Her pulse is flying! You need to take it again!"

Anyway, my pulse rate was finally determined to be 132 beats per minutes.

I thought Mrs. Larke was going to have a nervous breakdown. She asked me if I had hyperthyroidism. I laughed. "I wish! If I had hyperthyroidism, I'd be stick-thin."

At least she thought that was funny. So there's hope for her.

My blood pressure once again worked out to be 155/90. That is so not good.

I've got to go study, yawl.