Millie's Blog

I hope everyone is enjoying their summer! It’s definitely been hot around Austin Peay, but we’ve still been giving a lot of tours. A lot of people are making good use of our pool– I haven’t been over there yet, but I plan to go before the summer’s out. We walked by there on the tour to see it yesterday and I must say that in the 95 degree weather it looked very inviting!

If you’ve been to our campus lately you’ve probably noticed that there’s a lot going on around our campus right now. If you come by you’ll see a lot of construction going on….but it’s a “GREEN” move, at least. The power plant is using the summer to replace all our steam lines around campus. It’s suppose to make our power usage a lot more energy efficient. It’s good that they’re doing it now when campus isn’t as busy.

This past weekend I went to Louisville for a short vacation. While I was there, we went to Six Flags with some friends I hadn’t seen in a long time (but got rained out early while we were in the water park….kind of ironic). The next day we went to the Lousiville Zoo, which was hot, but they had a lot of great exhibits. I’ll be sure to post pictures of all the animals later. We also got to take a horse and carriage ride in the downtown part of Louisville. The horse we rode in had a carriage attached to it that was lit up and looked like the carriage from Cinderella. I had a really great time, but it just made me realize how much I want a real vacation! I’ve decided I definitely need some time at the beach!

Go check out Rivers & Spires April 17th & 18th. It’s in downtown Clarksville– lots of entertainment and it’s FREE!

Austin Peay will have a booth set up on Franklin St. so come by and see us (and get some free stuff!)

http://www.riversandspires.com/

Saturday, I went to a place called Kentucky Down Under. It’s near Mammoth Cave in Horse Cave, KY about two and a half hours away from Clarksville, TN. It’s somewhat like a zoo, but they have animals from Australia like exotic birds, kangaroos, dingos, etc. It’s more for people with small children, I think, but it was still pretty interesting to get to see the animals so up close. When you go into feed the birds they will definitely land on you– the second group of birds we saw were in love with my hair and sunglasses and wouldn’t get off me. My favorite part was the kangaroos though. There was a mother who was nursing one joey and then had another one about 2 months old inside her pouch. You could actually see it moving around when she stood up! There was a small kangaroo that was there also and she’d come up to everyone and act like she wanted them to pet her. We were told not to pet her though so she wouldn’t expect it everytime she was around humans once she got bigger. The male kangaroos we saw were about six feet tall and can hop at up to 40 mph! There was also an emu there that would let people come right up to him and pet him, which is weird since I thought most emus were really mean. While we were there we also got to take a cave tour and we went about 125 ft. below ground. The cave is still growing and forming so it was really wet down there and it felt like you were getting rained on most of the time and some of the spaces were kind of small to get through, but it was really cool to see.

So if you’re ever looking for something different to do around the area go check this place out. They give military and family discounts and there’s places to bring a picnic lunch if you don’t want to spend money on food.

The weekend of Spring Break I got to go to a concert in Nashville. Brad Paisley was the headliner and Dierks Bentley and Darius Rucker (former lead singer of Hootie and the Blowfish) were with him. The concert was awesome! Before we watched the show we got to have dinner in the suite level of the Sommett Center in Nashville. They had several different chef tables that you could go around to and get a variety of food. It was really cool to come in a special entrance and not have to wait in line and to just be able to go to the concert arena without leaving the building. Brad Paisley played for over two hours and each song probably took ten minutes since he did a guitar solo on pratically every song. It was definitely a blast and a great way to end the break.

Oh and just a side note….always pay attention while you’re driving– don’t look over at your phone or down at the radio because it just takes a second to do something that causes a ton of damage. For instance, this weekend, we were driving down a road near our house and someone who had been cutting down trees had let a huge log roll into the road. We didn’t have time to swerve to miss it and it bent our wheel, blew our tire, and messed up the tire rod end and the alignment on our truck to a tune of about $500 to fix it all! Guess you never know what your going to experience on our lovely Clarksville roads!

Spring Break is here! It’s hard to believe we’re already to that point– this semester is flying by and it’s been a much easier semester for me than last (as far as being stressed out over my classes goes). I don’t have plans to go out of town so I’m just going to take it easy. I had wanted to go visit family in Alabama, but that will have to wait until the summer. They live right on a lake and have a Pontoon boat so it’s always a lot of fun to go down and visit them.

As far as nursing school goes, I finally got to see one of the sessions of shock therapy I mentioned in one of my previous blogs. They call it ECT (electroconvulsive therapy). Bascially, the person has a small seizure, but their muscle movements, respirations, etc. are all carefully controlled by an anesthesiologist. The therapy helps people with depression, but is often a last ditch effort for people who don’t respond to medications and other forms of therapy. Going through ECT makes a person lose some of their short term memory and the patients who wake up from it are pretty disoriented and have no clue what they just underwent. All of the staff in the ECT area were super nice and ready to tell us anything we wanted to know to make sure we knew exaclty what was going on. All of them really have it down pat– they’ve just gotten into such a routine and everyone knows their job so it seems to run really smoothly. When I saw it, it wasn’t what I expected. I thought it’d be a big seizure or like what you see on movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. or something, but it’s very small and mostly the facial muscle just twitch a little. It hardly takes any time to perform it and soon the patients are back to breathing on their own and in their own bed very quickly. All of these factors allow the team to do several treatments in a day.

I will say that some people are skeptical about this type of treatment and so was I, initially. I’m not saying this works on every single person, because it doesn’t, but I did get to see somewhat of a success story while I was there: My first week I saw this woman on the floor who looked very depressed and withdrawn. She didn’t want to speak to anyone and just sat in the corner by herself staring at the ground. The woman refused to eat, also. Well, when I was in the ECT room (which was 2 weeks later) she was returning for her second treatment. You wouldn’t have even believed it was the same person. She had a huge smile on her face, was conversing with everyone, and no longer complained of all the pains she had previously. When the doctor pointed her out, I was like “No way is that the same woman I saw two weeks ago!” She had actually been discharged and was doing really well living in her home with her family. I was really impressed at the change I saw in her.

Here’s a picture from MSNBC to show you what ECT looks like:

MSNBC ECT picture

Oh, and I am no longer an Army wife! His last official day was March 4th…. It’s good and scary all at the same time. I’m really glad to not have to deal with deployments, but the whole economic situation is not exactly the best time to be looking for a job!