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For those of us in the Traditional BSN program, our six weeks of winter break—whole acres of free time—are coming to a close tomorrow. A rather abrupt one, with Pharmacology at 8 a.m. on Monday morning, but not an entirely unwelcome one. It’s been a fantastic, long break, but the part of me that is looking at how much more school I have left to go before I meet my goal of becoming a Family Nurse Practitioner with a Masters in Public Health is ready to get on with it already.

For those of us in the Traditional BSN program, our six weeks of winter break—whole acres of free time—are coming to a close tomorrow. A rather abrupt one, with Pharmacology at 8 a.m. on Monday morning, but not an entirely unwelcome one. It’s been a fantastic, long break, but the part of me that is looking at how much more school I have left to go before I meet my goal of becoming a Family Nurse Practitioner with a Masters in Public Health is ready to get on with it already.

Some of my classmates found work as CNAs over the winter break. Others traveled. A few went to South America, and one friend went back to the birthing center where she worked before deciding to go to school to become a Midwife herself. I spent my break catching up with my long-distance relationship, visiting my family, reading obsessively, and training for the National Marathon in DC this March. Self-indulgent? Perhaps. Can’t say that I have any regrets, though. It’s easy to get sucked into nursing school, and whenever I surface, it’s important for me to touch base with the other cornerstones of my life. You can’t be good at taking care of people if you forget to be a whole person yourself.

I’ve managed to knock off more than two free-reading books a week over this break, which is two more than I can usually read in a week during the semester. In order to best segue into the whole “nursing school” mindset again, I’ve tried to make the last books health-related. The one I recommend the most is a book by Anne Fadiman called The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. This book should be required reading for anyone who is at all interested in cross-cultural nursing. Or, more realistically, for anyone going into nursing at all.  It’s a non-fiction book exploring the culture clash between a family of Hmong refugees and their epileptic daughter, and a small county hospital in Merced, California. Despite being heavily annotated and cross-listed as “Cultural Studies/Medicine,” it reads like a novel. It’s probably at the library, and you can probably go find a copy today.

I’ve registered myself for more electives this time around—more than I can possibly take, actually, I’m going to have to go down to the registrar’s office at some point next week and drop a few. Still, I’m excited about the new classes and new clinical sites. Excited enough that I’m not going to begrudge how early I’m setting my alarm clock for tomorrow. Not too much.