Back to School

This week I returned to school! Here's how this week went...

On Sunday I was so excited to go back to school. Not like a college kid's first day of college excited, but like a five year old on Christmas eve excited. Yeah... I was extremely excited, and how could you blame me? My number one goal after my health related goals from the cancer treatment was to return to school. Returning to school is the ultimate indicator to myself that my life is moving forward from the destruction that this past year caused. School brings a little bit more "normalcy" to my life.

I made sure I had all of my school supplies and books etc. I double and triple checked it. I checked my registration status and my class schedule online a dozen times; Half of the time in disbelief that I'm actually going back to school, and the other half making sure that everything is ready and I didn't screw up the registration after the confusing leave of absence process. I was obsessed with making sure everything went smoothly for the first day, and as far as preparation with supplies, and enrollment went; it did.

The first day generally went well. I got to my classes on time. I was an hour early to my first class because I was just that anxious to go to school. Arriving on campus(I commute by the way), and walking to my first class brought with it many emotions. I couldn't help but think how lucky I am to be going back to school when so many other kids aren't so lucky. Some of these people I have gotten to know over the last year through blogging, and had the same cancer as me. Kids with bright futures that were cut short because of this cancer. Now I'm not sure if my scans will be clean three months from now or ten years from now, and that's why I treat every day as a blessing... That applies to school in that I treat every second of every class like its the last time I will ever be strong enough to be in college.

It was a big day for Joey too; first day of high school!

I answered questions, took notes, and did my reading. I answered a lot of questions in my first class; Computer Engineering. I felt that I needed to get that out of my system. It was out of character for me to participate so much. I probably answered more questions than I would have last year combined in that one class. It was a big confidence booster for me.

This first week I only had 3 classes. Well technically I had four different classes, but I only had three at one time. More on that in a bit. My Math professor was away so I only had three of my four classes this week. Originally I had Spanish on my schedule, but after just two days of the class I realized that it was going to be too much work and stress for me. I haven't used spanish since my junior year of high school which now makes ~3.5 years, and it seems that college spanish is much more intense than the high school stuff. I need two units of a foreign language which is equivalent to four years of high school Spanish for the Computer Science major(which doesn't make sense to me at all especially considering it is the only major in the engineering department that requires this). Well anyway, I dropped it and scheduled Econ in its place. I dropped what would have been the most difficult class on my schedule in Spanish, and added Econ; the easiest class on my schedule. To sum up the difficulty of my courses:

-Physics: My most difficult class; I'll need to work hard to get a good grade like I did with my previous Physics class.
-Computer Engineering: Easy
-Matrices: The topic is interesting so I'll do well.
-Econ: Very Easy

Your probably wondering how I did this first week physically. If I had to grade it I'd give it a 70%. Tuesday and Thursday were easy because I had only one class those days. They were recovery days for me. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday were exhausting. I'm there from 9 a.m until 3 p.m. My four hour break (which will become three hours next week with the addition of the Math class) is spent eating, studying, and napping in the library. By the time I get home I just want to eat and sleep. I could drink coffee like all of the other college students, but I'm extremely picky with putting any type of drugs or supplements in my body after receiving a lifetimes' worth of chemicals in the past year. I have to make sure I eat well, get adequate sleep at night, and keep my stress levels down. Dropping Spanish helped reduce my stress by a lot! My arm ached all week so I was popping the Advil to keep the pain down. My arm is simply not ready to be carrying a backpack, and writing notes all day yet. I think I needed at least another month for my arm to be ready for school. The last thing to note here is that using the handicapped parking makes a big difference for me. Especially since I would have to walk up a pretty steep hill if I didn't have it. This helps me not only conserve energy, but also limit the added wear and tear on the unstable hardware in my arm right now.

I have more that I want to write about, but this is already pretty lengthy...maybe I'll write another blog post in the next couple of days.

I'm so happy, and thankful to be back in school!