Where I've been

Well, Dortmund is exactly where. It's a hellish 2+ hour drive every day each way.

And a class I thought would be a piece of cake (hey, I was a CNA!) is almost overwhelming due to all the medical terms being in a foreign language. Thankfully most of them are similar to English. Where I screw up, is with the "simple" German words that the teachers don't explain. Sucks to be me, I got 12/20 on my first test, and 2 of them were cuz I didn't understand a simple word, not a medical term.

I get up at 5:30, drive to Dortmund (which seems to be a really nice city, especially in comparison to Cologne!). Half the time I'm late due to traffic, and half the time I'm early cuz I really have no idea. One of the teachers gave me a really bad time for being 15 minutes late, when I arrived and there was nowhere for me to sit. He said, "That's what you get for being late!" I said, "I left my house two hours ago." He didn't care. At the first break he found a table and said, "I got you a table, so you can fit." He placed the table in the middle of the circle of desks, so everyone would be staring at me, all day long. The dunce cap. I said, "You want me to sit in the middle?" He did nothing. I dragged the table to the side, loud and heavy. He wanted to humiliate me! After my struggle with traffic stress! I have a feedback form for every teacher, and I already have some nice feedback for him, his good points, and his cruel ones.

Then I spend the day concentrating as hard as I can, focus more than I ever have in my life, to understand the class sessions.

I'm trying to become a medic. At a very late stage in life, apparently, because all the other students, except for one, were born in the late 90s. I am the age of their mothers. . It's not a nice feeling. The only one close to my age is 11 years my junior, a big guy named Jan who I immediately informed he will be my partner for the hands-on work.

Half the kiddies wear medic uniforms, because they are volunteers and are being sponsored by the institution*. That means, they don't have to pay, and their hotel, lunch, and dinner are paid for. Sucks to be us, the 3 of us who are sponsoring ourselves! It's not a cheap class, and we are not allowed to drink the coffee or soda or o-juice.....those are for the sponsored kids.

And those kids are GOOD. They've been working out of ambulances and they know their stuff.

And they all have German as a native language.

I feel really bad when I ask whoever I'm sitting next to, "What did the teacher just say?" and "WTH does that word mean?" The teachers explain the difficult words, not the "easy" ones.

Today we learned how German law affects this field. OMG. I didn't understand a word, and most of them were 10,000 point scrabble words.

You don't believe me?

Verhaeltnismaessigkeitsgrundsatz.

Ordungswidrigkeitengesetz

Unterlassungsdelikte

* - When I say the institution, I mean the Catholic church. Both Catholic and Protestant churches have an elaborate system of social programs to help the public. Both have ambulances/medics to help people. Both have church-paid Kindergarten, psychological help centers, suicide lines....it goes on and on. Church and state work together in Germany. 

Currently I am "working" for the Catholics, even though I'm Protestant. There would come a point where they would want my conversion, to allow my employment. This is not religious discrimination, this is German life.

All the practice bandages, all the time spent in class, it doesn't come from just our tuition, nor from church donation, well, that, but also....church taxes. Because in Germany you have an annual tax declaration, and in it you describe which church gets your "church tax."

I think I see some Americans freaking out: ) I did too.

Which tax do I pay on my paycheck? (When I actually had a job) - NONE. I refused to join the church-state collusion. Phooey. I will tithe when I want to give money to a church.

OK back to today...

At the afternoon break, 3:30,  I got up and left. I couldn't take any more, and I have a book to try to learn from (the book isn't very helpful either, I will need my husband to help me.)

Good is that my partner Jan is super motivated to learn this stuff. We're older and self-motivated, we're different from the kiddies.

I spent the weekend studying (my husband walked in and laughed cuz I had my name-card out on the kitchen table as if I were in class, so the teacher knows my name). J, "I've never seen you study before."

"I'm having University of Washington flashbacks. Stress. But I can do this, I know I can!"

I studied 8 hours this weekend. I created index cards. So many I ran out and had to start cutting up paper.

Jan spent lunch with me today and I pulled out my cards and I think he was impressed that I have so much stuff on cards, and in my head, so far.

He's a natural teacher and if I got one wrong, he'd talk and talk and talk......*sigh*

Tomorrow we're gonna spend our lunch break testing our blood sugar, blood pressure, bandaging each other and our amputations, and perhaps work on the CPR dummy with Defi.

I think we are going to be partners for our final exam, the hands-on stuff like defibrillator- assisted CPR, bandaging, intubation....and we make a good team. We're the oldies, but we're on fire to learn this stuff. 


Imagine this is me and Jan, playing both roles as the defibrillator commands (during the analysis phase, we are told to wait, and that is our chance to switch positions). It's challenging and fun as a team.

I know from real life, it is not so fun, to do it alone, on a real person. For 15 minutes. But the way I handled that experience has made me curious if I'm cut out for this line of work.