Kitty’s Place

LL has made plans to hand in an empty paper tomorrow in place of homework, since it is April Fool’s Day. *laugh*

Life is rolling along at breakneck speed. Our first term is divided into two section, nursing and medicine. I started with the nursing section, lots of ethics. It started out ok, but it was obvious a couple weeks into the course that my eyes were not up to it. So I put things in motion to be declared sight handicapped. It took until the end of the first half of the term, but I am now in the system as having a sight injury and have access to all course literature in the form of talking books. As of last week I have all the books in that form. It has been a help but I am such a visual person that I feel I don’t get as much out of the talking books as I should. I have 3 years to get used to it. *laugh* I felt very confident in the first section of the nursing, was not hindered by language and felt I had understood everything. Then I went in to the first exam and had a complete panic attack, resulting in me only answering two of the four questions and one of those I never completed. It was a real ego buster. But I just squared my shoulders and moved on to the next section. As I expected I got U (the swedish equivalent of F) on the exam, but the fact I got VG (an A) on the next exam gave me back my confidence. In the interim I had finally received the talking books and using them to review, I prepared to rewrite the first exam. I did that last week, went in, did not panic, answered all 6 questions, wrote 9 pages and am positive I got at least G (a passing grade). It went well with the final part of the nursing course and I started medicine a couple weeks ago. We started with anatomy and physiology and I am feeling good. This stuff I know and it has not changed since I studied it 30 years ago. There is stuff that is new of course, when I studied in the 70’s, DNA was not a big thing except to scientists, but now it is part of our basic A&P curriculum. Very interesting though and my reading of the American Journal of Medicine over the past years means I had a good grasp of it already.

I have gotten into a routine of using the hour on the train either way as study time and that is working well. Routines are taking shape at home as well. Everyone is involved in their various activities but we manage to have family time as well which is great.

We were at a day long political function yesterday. Anna had a gift for my fellow, she got him a book about a well trained dog. *laugh* There were lots of laughs over that.

I finally have a time to get my kidney stone blasted, April 7th. The continuous urinary tract infections have taken their toll and I am exhausted and have a fever the majority of the time. I will have to continue taking the antibiotics for a month after the treatment and then I never want to see an antibiotic again in my life, I have been taking them every other week now for almost 6 months.

My birthday is coming up as well. I have not planned a party, I don’t want a party and I absolutely refuse to organize one as is the swedish way. This is my 50th and I want to spend it as I want, school, dinner out with my fellows and then studying for the exam the 11th. *laugh* I will say that I will be very upset if my fellow ignores this. 50 is a big deal here in Sweden, I have had any number of free gifts in the mail, the two grocery stores I shop at have send coupons for free cake, one of the cruise lines has sent a certificate for a free cabin on a cruise to Helsinki. But when it comes down to it, I just want a bit of family time as a celebration.

Majong is growing up, he goes out now. I took him and showed him where he could go around from the front of the house to the back and all the cats play in the bushes and field at the corner of the row houses. He travels back and forth between front and back and comes when I call him. Rusty is as loving as ever, but needs more stimulation, time is limited with school. I start my training program tomorrow for this years 10 km run so I will take him along. Susan stopped losing weight on her diet food so we started her on a new one this week. The biggest problem is her sneaking Rusty’s food if we don’t keep an eye on her.

That is about all I have to update. *laugh*