My butt has been kicked and handed to me in so many new and innovative ways...

I have come to the realization that nursing school administrators believe students operate in a dimension where time stands still. The amount of work that I have had to do in the past few weeks (and namely this week and the weeks to come) is mind boggling. After spending two weeks on "frontloading" which is a nice way of saying "cramming as much information down your throat as we possibly can", clinical started this week. Some folks are starting in Mental Health where they get to go sit and chat with a mentally ill person for 2 days a week (did I mention the no-prep-work part of the mental health rotation? I am soooo looking forward to that!), and other folks (like yours truly) started in Med/Surg. Among that group some lucky ducks got to start in the ICU where they got to take care of one really sick patient and do all that super cool, super OCD ICU nursey type stuff, and others (like yours truly) got to start on the Med-Surge floor. Insert heavy sigh here.

Our professors were nice and apparently realized we hadn't taken care of two patients except for one weekend last semester, so they let us ease into it by taking care of one pt on Tuesday and then picking up another one to take care of on Wednesday, so that we'd end up with 2 on Wednesday. Can I just say that the evil part of this plan was the TWO NIGHTS IN A ROW of doing my clinical prep. OMG.

For starters, I'm at a new hospital this semester and know next to nothing about the electronic charting system. So, it took me almost 4 HOURS to get all the pt info I needed to even start my prep. Don't ask my how it took that long, but I think I just spent a lot of time searching for stuff on the EMR, getting all paranoid that I was going to miss something! Oh, did I mention my first patient had 39 meds??

Clinical the first day wasn't bad, except I'm pretty sure I was charting my assessments in the wrong place all day (oops), but the RN I worked with figured it out and all is good. I did better by the end of the day, thanks to the aforementioned awesome RN I was working with.....but still...a more thorough and detailed training on how to use the EMR is definitely in order.

So, after taking care of one pretty demanding pt all day, I had to pick a second pt, then go home and write that patient up. I do not do well on 4-5 hours of sleep...I just DON'T. By the time end of day Wednesday rolled around, I felt like I'd been abducted and probed by aliens for the past three days. I logged 42 hours of work for ONE class in those three days. ONE CLASS! I have three other classes, and one more starting this week. WTF and I going to do???? Clone myself????

Anyway, that's enough bitching and moaning...now on to the good stuff....clinical was awesome! I definitely got into more of a rhythm on the second day, and was able to "almost" keep up on all of my work. I got to do my first suppository (ok, maybe "got to" isn't the proper way of putting it), hung two piggybacks (my CI had to help a lot for the first, and only a little for the second, so I'm hoping to get checked off on that completely next week). I learned I am a really slow bed-bath giver and how to say 'thank you' in Russian. I learned that some patients SLEEP WITH THEIR FREAKING EYES OPEN, and that some people just want to be heard. All in all, a good week.

Math Test? Nailed it!

Ok, so maybe I should study with wine more often. Got 100% on the math test!!!! Yippee skippy!

After the test we had 4 lectures back-to-back...talk about a looong day. We had two lectures on respiratory disorders, one on mechanical ventilation and one on the communication needs of the ICU patient. Lots of info really really fast. So tonight I am typing up my respiratory notes...we'll see how much of that I can get through. Tomorrow is ABG lecture along with central lines and drains...and that's the end of the "frontloading" lectures for M/S. Whew!

Next hurdle: soft check-off on 7 skills this Thursday, then mental health exam in three weeks.

More wine anyone?