morganizedthoughts-blog

[morganizedthoughts-blog]

mother!

If you’re watching the movie mother! for the first time, you will be just as confused as I am. A woman and her husband live together in a house in the middle of nowhere so the husband can focus on his writing being that he’s a poet who hasn’t written anything worth selling in years. All of a sudden people start showing up, and as the movie goes on and on, more and more people start coming to this secluded house. The woman (mother) is very uneasy with these people coming to her house, staying with them, and eventually tearing it apart and loses her temper more than once. The movie goes on and continues being a very odd experience for the viewer. The ending is probably the weirdest where the original mother is burned, and the husband takes her heart out of her chest and squeezes it into a crystal and then puts it in a holder. Then a woman wakes up just as the original mother did in the beginning of the movie implying that the whole thing would start all over again. Like I said, if you’re watching it for the first time you are very confused with everything that’s going on. But after doing some research, this movie turns out to be a very religious movie about earth, and basically how we are destroying it. Mother is actually mother nature, so when her house (earth in this case) is being destroyed first by the first visitors (Adam and Eve), and then by everyone else. An element of critical thinking that this movie uses is analysis. By having everything in this movie, including the setting, represent something, it makes viewers start thinking. Viewers don’t necessarily know that mother is actually mother nature, or that her husband is a form of God unless they really break it down and start thinking in ways that the director and writers want them to think. When I first watched this movie, I had no clue what was going on just because when I watch movies, I don’t use critical thinking to figure out the movie I just plan on watching a movie and enjoying it. But after watching this movie I just couldn’t deal with the fact that I didn’t know what was happening. I had to use my critically thinking skills to analyze this movie and realize that this wasn’t just a weird movie full of random things, and that everything stood for something and due to the use of analysis, I wasn’t aware of this at first. Another element of critical thinking this movie used is problem solving. In the movie, there is a crystal in a holder that seems very important to mother and her husband. When the first visitor comes and his wife joins him, mother makes it very clear that her husband does not want anyone near it without him. The wife ends up touching the crystal and drops it which results in it shattering. Mother starts freaking out and her husband ends up closing up the room in which held the crystal. For the rest of the movie, the viewer is wondering what that crystal meant and how will they fix this issue. In the end of this movie, mother is badly burned and barely alive. She looks at her husband and knows what he has to do. He reaches into her chest and takes out her heart, ultimately killing her, but then squeezes the heart into a crystal just like the one that was shattered. He places it in the stand and the movie basically starts up again with a new mother in place of the one that died. By having the husband solve this problem, we see how quickly this problem could’ve been solved but that the husband didn’t want it to have to get to this. We also have reason to believe that the shattering of the original crystal is the reason for all the chaos that comes following it. A final element of critical thinking used in mother! is communication. Throughout the movie, mother and her husband do not communicate a lot. With the stress that he is under to write a new book, he barely talks to her and she is used to it. Once people start ruining their house, and their lives, the communication isn’t even slightly there. Due to the lack of communication, mother goes crazy since her husband won’t ever tell her what’s going on or who the people in her house are. The lack of communication is a key ingredient in this movie because without communication, you can’t have a healthy relationship and the whole point of this movie is that humans, starting with Adam and Eve, treat mother nature very poorly and the relationship between the earth and the beings is very unhealthy.

[morganizedthoughts-blog]

change

Change is good. I haven’t always thought this way, and the idea of change used to frighten me. Now, the idea of a completely new wardrobe, a completely new hairstyle, or even just a change in how I go about my day sends chills down my spine. An important thing that has also changed with this “new” me is the idea of changing my mind. I’m not talking about the answer on a quiz or what I want to eat for dinner. I mean changing how I feel about topics that are major, topics that can truly affect me and everyone around me. A topic that I recently changed my mind on is the idea of gun control.

I used to think that no matter who you are, or what you do as a living you should not be able to own a gun. With all of the tragedy going on with school shootings, shootings at places of worship or even a mall, I could not possibly be for letting anyone and everyone own a gun. I once had to be locked in a store with my mother in my town mall because there was thought to be the use of guns in the food court. I was so young and absolutely terrified. My mom was trying to reassure me that we were ok, and it wasn’t a gun but a friend at home had kept us updated and said that the latest was that there was a gun pulled in a fight in the food court. I hadn’t gone back to that mall for months because I was so scared that I would get caught in something again. Tom Chatfield stated in the article “What Does It Mean to Think Well?” that our thoughts belong to our experiences, and my stance on this controversial topic was because of how I felt when I was locked in Nordstrom for hours because of a fight.

But, like I said before, change is good. I changed my mind about where I stand. I wouldn’t say I’m “pro-gun” but I’m not against it. Not all people who own guns carry them about. The main issues with the gun-related violence in the news is that the people who commit them are usually mentally not stable. I believe that the process of obtaining a gun should be more about your mental health. Many people own guns for protection purposes and I believe that is a good reason to own a weapon, but I think there should be limits. There should be limits on how many weapons you can own, the types, and how much ammunition you can own. If you have a gun for protection you will not need a whole bunch of ammunition. I don’t think that guns kill people. I think that people kill people.

This topic of gun control has been a huge issue for years in our country meanwhile a day after a shooting in New Zealand happens, they already have changes made. I believe that if you are going to obtain a gun there needs to be a mental examination and limits set. Not all people are bad people, we just need to look more closely at who is who.

[morganizedthoughts-blog]

travel nursing

After four years of college here at Sacred Heart, I plan on graduating in 2022 with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing. I also plan on passing the NCLEX and working as a registered nurse in a hospital. While working, I also hope to go back to school and study to become a travel nurse, so I can continue my career but also travel around the world.

Travel nursing is one reason why I want to become a nurse. I have a love in my heart for traveling and want to do it as much as possible. Something about travelling, and flying places, and just being immersed into a completely new culture is exhilarating for me and I have a need to continue these journeys throughout my life. Travel nursing is difficult because once you have the basics down for nursing in general, you have to focus and learn more about where you’re going. I hope to start off in the United States, but also wish to travel to as many different countries as possible.

In many places, the people most responsible for travel health is in the hands of medical practitioners who usually give nursing staff many tasks to perform. In other places, nurses have taken a leadership role and have worked independently to take care of patients. The study done by Irmgard Bauer, Sheila Hall, and Nahoko Sato was to “examine the roles and challenges faced by nurses providing travel health care in Australia, Japan, and the UK, and to compare educational and professional needs.”

Nurses involved in travel health care were invited to complete a questionnaire with multiple choice, rating, and open-ended questions. The questions used were based on clinical and professional experience, the limited literature on travel health nurses, and informal discussions at scientific meetings with nurses involved with travel health. All of the questions used were examined for their validity in each country’s context.

The results showed that General Practice was the most represented work setting in Australia and the UK. Other settings varied on the country but included the community, university health services, a private travel business, walk-ins, school medical centers, and quarantine stations. Majority of the nurses in Australia and Japan have been providing travel health care between 1 and 5 years, and mostly in the UK they have worked for 11-20 years. This shows that there was a much longer presence of travel health nursing in the UK rather than Japan or Australia. The majority of these nurses spent little time on travel health which indicated that travel health was a very small part of their general practice. The academic journal entry continues to go on about the results and how different or similar the results are.

The authors go on to talk about future research and believe that more in-depth research with larger samples should be conducted, and that this study should encourage nurses to replicate this study to compare nurses’ roles in this newer career choice.

These authors came together to try to prove how travel health is a growing industry yet that it isn’t given as much effort as it should. They used the scientific method to prove this by doing research, testing, analyzing data, and communicating results. They even go as far as to discuss future research which implies that they are still interested to learn more as this industry grows. As an aspiring travel health nurse, I am excited for this journey, but I am also prepared to put in as much effort as needed so that I can focus primarily on travel health and make that my full time career.

[morganizedthoughts-blog]

fighting for what’s right

As a nurse, you have to be prepared for anything and everything. Since you work more with the patient, you have to know everything about anything. Nursing is a very difficult, yet very rewarding career. As a future nurse, I aspire to do many great things just like Dorothea Dix.

Dorothea Dix was born in 1802, and as the oldest of 3 children, Dorothea was in charge of her family members and her household from a very early age. Her mother struggled with depression and her father was an alcoholic and a very strict, violent man. Joseph Dix, her father, though did in fact teacher her how to read and write, which implemented her love of learning and of books.

At the age of 12, Dorothea moved to Boston to live with her wealthy grandmother who encouraged her curiosity in education. Even though she received very formal education, she continued to go to public lectures, read widely, and studied literature, history and natural sciences. At a very early age, Dorothea ended up opening her own school and ran it for 3 years. She continued to work and open schools to teach both wealthy and poor girls, until she continuously got ill and agreed with doctors’ orders to take a leave.

Dorothea moved to England, where she was exposed to reform movements that investigated madhouses and asylums. She met people who believed that the government should play an active role in social welfare, as well as witnessing the mentally insane being cared for respectively. Upon returning from England, she began her second career in which she taught Sunday School for women in jail. When she first arrived, she witnessed horrible images, that were nothing like what she saw in England, that affected her forever. She saw a variety of people including drunks, criminals, prostitutes, retarded individuals, and the mentally ill. All of these people were put together in a jail living with no heat, no light, little to no clothing, no furniture, and no sanitary facilities. When she asked why the jail was in the horrible condition it was in, the response she got was “the insane do not feel heat or cold.”

Dorothea obtained a court order to provide heat and to make other improvements to these facilities. She studied up on the available literature on mental illnesses and the related treatment facilities. She also interviewed physicians about the diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses. Her motivation to fix this problem became her life for 40 plus years. She visited jails, caretakers, and townspeople and quickly found out that it was quite common for the mentally ill to be housed with felons, with no regard to their age or gender or needs.

Once she finished her research, she published the results in a memorial which would be presented to the state legislature, but since she was a woman, she had to get her friend and fellow reformer Samuel Gridley to present it. for her. Her point, and proof, were so strong that she won over the legislature. She won legislative support and funds which would be used for the Worcester State Mental Hospital. This was not the end though. She continued to travel and document the conditions of the mentally ill and poor and continued to show this issue to legislatures. She founded 32 mental hospitals, 15 schools for the weak minded, a school for the blind, and multiple training facilities for nurses.

Even though Dorothea Dix was a woman and was not shown the same respect that a man would receive, she did not give up. She overcame many difficulties in her past including abuse, deaths of her parents and grandmother, being separated from her siblings, and her continuous bouts of illnesses. She overpowered and fought hard and strong for what she believed was right. She documented everything, made multiple legislatures join her fight, and continued fighting for people who could not fight for themselves. She opened up many institutions and got so many legislatures on her side. Her ideas and her willpower won people over and made them realize that she was right and that there needed to be change.

[morganizedthoughts-blog]

what's better than Fridays? routine Fridays!

Ahhhh Fridays. The best day of the week. Last semester my Friday’s were the worst days because I had chemistry at 9:30, then math at 12:30 and then a lovely two hour and 45-minute lab ending at 4:45. I do not enjoy waking up early, especially when it’s so close to the weekend. My chemistry class was not good because I was up the earliest I ever have been and had to take a quiz every week. Luckily this semester I was in charge of making my own schedule.

Only having one class on Fridays is difficult because it’s the only thing between me and the weekend, but it isn’t bad. I set my alarm on Thursday nights for about 10:30 so I can get a decent amount of sleep. I set out my lab manual, and my lab notebook so that when I wake up in the morning, I have the materials I need to study out and ready. I finish my episode of Friends and plug my computer back in, so it’s fully charged for when I need it. I grab my sleeping mask and put it on because my roommate has an early class and if I wake up and see the sunlight, I won’t be able to fall back asleep. Then it’s lights out.

When I get up on Friday mornings I usually shower and pick out a nice outfit to wear for the day being that I only have one class. Once I finish my morning routine it’s time to study. One of my suitemates has the same lab as me so once she is back from her class we will study together, but in the meanwhile it’s just me. I plan out what different things to study and how I can so that I remember them best. I usually rewrite the notes from class on post-it’s so it’s smaller amounts of information but mainly the more important stuff. I spend a while quizzing myself and once my suitemate returns, we quiz each other and continue studying together.

We leave for lab around 1:45 to get there on time. On the walk, I continue looking over things I. got wrong while quizzing myself. We get to lab, leave our water bottles outside and head in. First thing we do is take the quiz. Once those 15 minutes are done class goes on. Lecture and then basically our lab tables just quiz each other on the materials we just learned. In the middle of class, our professor puts up the grades. Class ends, my suitemate and I head back to our room and I either organize all of my stuff, or take a nap, or both. Usually this helps me relax after a stressful week and it’s my way of rewarding myself.

Even though I am set with doing my Fridays this way, I have thought of alternatives that could also work for me. For example, the biggest alternative is taking a different/earlier class. I could’ve taken the same lab at 8 am or 11 am, but then I would have to change everything else around that. I wouldn’t be with my lab partners that I know I work well with and I would have to go to bed earlier Thursdays but also study Thursdays so I decided my Friday at 2 lab was perfect and that I will continue with it. I could also study differently. I could study in my room or at the library when I normally study in a study room on my floor. If I told myself I would study in my room, I probably wouldn't get out of bed and then my studying wouldn’t be effective at all. If I studied in the lib, I would have to wake up earlier, get ready earlier, and walk across campus. I would lose time to study so everything would have to be pushed up and I am not a happy camper when I have to be up before 9. Having alternatives are good because sometimes they will be necessary and you need to be able to switch around, but for now my routine is how I will go about my Fridays.

By following this routine, I can go through Fridays with my eyes closed. This routine helps me because the way I study helps my grades, which in the end helps me with my major. I could always study days in advance or after I get back from lab, but that will mess with my cycle and I learn best this way. Something could always come up a Friday morning and mess everything up, but for now this is how I succeed in my lab class, and Fridays will remain this way.

[morganizedthoughts-blog]

[morganizedthoughts-blog]

grow through what you go through

My first semester at college was all about growth. I have grown with my academics, with my professionalism, and as a person. Majority of this growth has come from getting out of my comfort zone and experiencing things I never thought I would experience before. My first semester was a rollercoaster of emotions and I wouldn’t be who I am now without it.

Before even applying to college I knew that I wanted to help people for the rest of my life. I had contemplated many different career paths including but not limited to: a veterinarian, a special education teacher, a math teacher, a fashion designer, and last but not least a nurse. Nursing, to me, holds so much power. With a Bachelor of Science in Nursing, so many opportunities open up and you can do so much with a degree. I can work with kids, adults, people with special needs, seniors, emergency room visitors, nursing home residents, anyone and everyone. With a BSN I like to believe that I will go far, and that I will change and help better many peoples’ lives. I knew it would be hard getting to where I want to be, but I know that it will be worth it and that I’d do it a million times over just for how rewarding it will be.

As a nursing major, the main things you hear going into college are, “The first year is the hardest. They try to weed out people so it will be a lot to handle. The classes are hard, are you sure you want to do this?” The amount of times I heard this was a bit frightening, but I knew that this was what I wanted to do and that if I went in being intimidated, I would only set myself up for failure. I went in with an open mind, even though I was a little nervous I knew I could handle it. My courses were Math Applications for Health Science, First Year Seminar, First Year Experience, Anatomy and Physiology 1, Anatomy Lab, Chemistry and Chemistry Lab. I was a little uneasy with the fact that I would be taking chemistry and anatomy my first semester and picturing the work load that came with both, but I knew I would have to take them together eventually, and better now than later.

I asked around about some of the professors I had and heard many mixed reviews. For chemistry, apparently, I had the hardest teacher there was. On the first day of chemistry my professor said, “If you emailed me, I already picked out who will pass my class and who won’t.” Sitting in class next to a complete stranger I was so intimidated but also quite relieved I hadn’t emailed her. After class I went to my room and was so overwhelmed, I cried, but I knew that this was only the first day and that I have an entire semester ahead of me. I got this.

My anatomy class did not go how I expected it to. I didn’t like the way my professor taught, as she went off on. many tangents which would not be on the exam, and instead of reviewing we did case studies. Case studies are very interesting, but I would have preferred to first understand everything that I would be tested on before trying to treat some illness. I ended up growing a lot from this class because I would have to teach myself the materials and I needed to get better grades on the tests, so I essentially became my own teacher. By having to teach myself, I spent hours and hours studying for exams just so I could reteach myself everything in a way that I understood.

As Goke writes in “The Future of Learning,” most fields have a half-life much less than that, especially new industries. Now I know nursing is a big field and is always looking for new nurses, but I won’t get anywhere in life with these numbers especially if I'm spending all my time on learning how to solve some case study. If I learn the basics I can figure out the case study, but not until after I learn the basics. Goke would probably agree with me that these case studies are not necessary and that we should’ve been focusing on more important information that would help me do well on my exams. 

Chemistry got better, and I passed anatomy but that was just academics. Over the course of the semester, problems arose that I wasn’t sure how to approach. During these times, I relied on my mom, my dad, my best friends from home, and some new best friends I made at school. Even though these people gave me great advice, I knew that I had to do what I thought was right. I grew a lot personally during these times. I found ways to stand up for myself since I never really was one to in the past. I found a side of me I never thought I had that only the best people could bring out of me. I found things I loved that I never expected to. I tried many new things and it was only just one semester. College so far is amazing, and I only plan on it getting better.

From now on I will go in with a completely open mind. Instead of thinking a class is boring, I will think of how this professor has dedicated years and years of their life to this topic and how happy they are to live out their dream. I choose to look at everything in a positive way because I believe that by doing that, I will benefit the most and have a better view on life.