I'm a real nurse now...

I'm a real nurse now! As of the end of my shift today (which went FAR too long past change of shift) I am no longer on orientation! I will be taking my own patients (which I was already doing)but, that's not the point! The only thing that happens now is more staff get to take more holidays! Haha! So, we'll see what happens. I get to come back to the states soon anyway so I'll get some time on my "own" and then get a vacation! I haven't had too many OIF/OEF patients that are coming in with battle injuries but one of them today who came from the OR right at change of shift was an SF soldier (rugged and handsome as they all are) who got shot through both legs and blew his hand up trying to throw and enemy frag grenade away from himself. I guess he's being submitted for a silver star. Right at change of shift PACU brought him down still dopped up, with a rectal probe up his butt, and with out of control pain. (NOT COOL). PACU just decided they wanted to go home because it was 1900 so they sent us a patient still recovering from general anesthesia...So, he's why I stayed late. There were 3 of us trying to get his pain under control so that night shift could do everything else they needed to do.

So... now that I've talked about an SF soldier who got blown up... guess who got selected for SF!!?! Gabe, of course. I knew he'd do very well. He got back last Wednesday from selections as a selected candidate. He's beat up, bruised, and physically exhausted, but he's in one piece and he's going on for more. He's back in the states now for leave to visit his family. If we'd communicated better we could have timed our leaves so that I connected through NYC and we could have gone to see Wicked! Currently, my plan is to go see it in London very soon. The permanent production in Stuttgart is in German....so London is the closest English production. When I come back on leave there's a tour group in San Antonio... but there's no reason to go to San Antonio so I'm out of luck. Since I finally finished the book I'm very anxious to see the show.

A few days ago I went with Julie to Pirmasens. What is Pirmasens? It's a city. Just a plain old German city. It has some very pretty architecture, a few museums, but best of all... It has a great walkplatz. Julie and I walked up and down the cobblestone hauptstrasse and went in all sorts of stores. Of course we caved in and shopped at H&M... which I feel silly doing because I know it's in the states and the states run on the dollar.. but, I was conservative. Then we sat outside at a cappucino and ice cream cafe. We ordered spaghetti eis. We shared two. The first was vanilla eis on top of whipped cream with chocolate sauce, white chocolate shavings and bananas. The second was vanilla eis on top of whipped cream with strawberry sauce, white chocolate shavings and blue berries, raspberries, strawberries, and I think cranberries. Both were excellent. And yes, the ice cream looks like spaghetti. It was lots of fun.

I have been catching up on my scrapbooking as best I can. I seem to have lost most of the pictures from senior year of college. I'm hoping beyond all hope that there are copies on the dell laptop I left in the states. I also need to go buy more paper and stickers. There really aren't scrapbooking stores out here that I've found... and the Euro makes it that much sillier to buy scrapbooking frivolities here.

I'm very tired, yesterday and today were CRAZY. I was out cold before 9pm last night and tonight might be heading down the same path.