Only two clinicals left for the semester!!!!!

So part of the reason why I was so absent for the month of October was the mess that Ike caused with our clinicals. I was in the precepted group which means that instead of going to the hospital a certain day of the week with a group of 10 students, I was assigned a nurse and I scheduled my clinical times according to her schedule. Since I had three clinicals this semester, that meant three sites and three nurses. This has a lot of benefits in keeping my schedule flexible and because I work with the nurses schedule I work 12 hour shifts which means I work fewer days to get my hours in. However, when Ike hit, we lost two weeks of clinical time. AND the instructors for those precepted clinicals hadn't really gotten them completely organized before Ike. So after Ike they were trying to get our classes back on track and get preceptors for all of us at the same time that the hospitals were trying to get back to normal. THEN, if that weren't enough we knew before the sotrm that there was some kind of problem with our site for our ICU clinical. But our instructor assurred us it would all work out and we could work on our other clinicals while she straightened it out. After the storm we found out that the hospital we were supposed to go to had a major administrative shake up and no longer would accept precepted students. Uh oh! Now we are behind AND we have no clinical site. This is not good. Our other clinical sites were still good but the instructors were still working on getting precetor information to us. Another lost week goes by. Finally we got our info for the other two clinical placements and got started. In order to make up for lost time, I worked four clinicals a week for a couple weeks, which meant including school and clinicals I was putting in 50-60 hours a week. It was brutal. My family was holding it together but barely. At one point working 7 a- 7p two days in a row meant I didn't see my kids for 48 hours! I was cranky and exhausted. And i was mad at a system that set us up for this my having such little organization. The storm wasn't anyone's fault but not having our clinical sites set up before Sept is just inexcusable. And this has been a theme throughout the nursing school experience. Sometimes I wonder if the disorganization and last minute expectations of us showing up for required stuff is part of the training to accept that nurses have huge responsibility and low independence.
So anyway, I haev two days left and I am going to be soooooooo glad to be DONE! Over all my clinical experiences have been great. All my preceptors were wonderful. I learned a lot and I got to see some pretty cool stuff (especially in the cardiovascular recovery room!). I'm sort of getting a sense of what I want to do after graduation (that's a topic for another post). And most importantly, I made it through!