Sniffle...

We sat down to our big, fat exam today, and my psyche prof. decided to do the whole, "Close your eyes, relax, pretend you are somewhere else" stuff. So, we all had our eyes closed when I suddenly heard a sniff.

“Sniff, sniff, sniff.” It was coming from the front row. One of my eyes popped open.

“Sniff, arggle, sniff, ugh.” Now it was getting louder—was someone laughing or deep breathing? It was hard to tell.

"Now, pretend you are at a waterfall, no, an ocean...yes...and you are relaxed..." My prof. rambled on.

“Garble, garble, sniff, ohhhhh, sniff…” Nope, this was definitely not meditation, someone was crying!

Spotted the culprit…she had her head down on her arms and was really starting to boo-hoo. The class was coming out of their “trance” pretty quickly and starting to stare. My instructor stopped blabbing on and on about “letting the knowledge flow” and asked the crier if she needed to take the test at a later date. (Of course this made me want to cry in hopes of the same reprieve.)

Girl and instructor went out in the hall and howling was heard as girl explained, “I’llllll *slurp* wannnnerrrrr gowl *garble-slurp* hommmmmeeeee ifsl okaway???” (Translation: “I would respectfully like to request an excused absense from this class and exam today. Thank you very much.”)

Girl left and I felt sorry that the exam had stressed her out so badly. Later the typical rumor mill started at lunch as to why what happened happened. It was a bad situation. Sad.

Note: This person didn't make it through the nursing program. I ended up feeling horrible for her--she was really in a tough situation and gleaned little sympathy from the faculty and her classmates (including me).