(no subject)
Hey journal, whats up?
Let me tell you something boy, the first few weeks of this school year have turned out to be quite the emotional hurricane. Today is a fabulous example of the kind of thing I mean. at precisely 0930 I was realistically contemplating ending my life solely because of dr. fetzer handed out another quiz of doom (the kind that spans 3 chapters that you need to study all week for- even though when it comes down to it, its one lame crapshoot anyways as far as how many you get right.) By 0945 I was in tears and chewing so hard on my bottom lip that I now have cuts on the inside of my mouth. awesome. I was dead convinced that I had managed to fail (fail = <74 for my major) another quiz and therefore was setting myself up to fail the class. Failing one class = getting kicked out of the department. 1130 I'm sitting in stillings across from Alex who knows nothing about nursing and IV drip rates and hes explaining the equation to me from the quiz that made me want to die. If you need someone to calculate how many gtts/min to set your IV for, call Alex, he's fabulous at it.
Right, so 1130 I'm crying into an m&m brownie in the dining hall, which is helping NOTHING. I call out of work, blah blah. 1400 professor Shippee-Rice tells us that our teaching plans won't ACTUALLY be due until thursday, which means I robbed myself out of 2 hours of sleep last night post-clinical.
Then theres all kinds of scandal about the quiz we took. The answers were posted somewhere online, some students saw them before the actual quiz and never told the professor... (I probably should have prefaced this with explaining how the nursing department is absolutely fantatical about academic honesty and every nursing class requires you to sign a contract and sit through a lecture on what academic honesty means in the start of every semester. there are also several former-senior nursing students who are currently repeating junior-year classes because they were busted for academic honesty. SUCH scandal.) blah blah blah, anyways I go to the website and the answers are still posted and it turns out I only got one goddamn question wrong. The equation problem that I flunked because I see numbers on exams and my BP bottoms out. Vasovagal response or something.
So I went from considering dropping out of school and enrolling in culinary classes to being in the highest percentage of my class in this way hard class. And so it goes. This is nursing. We are "learning to live with ambiguity" or at least thats what Dr. Saltzburg said. I think we're learning to live with anxiety disorders because both molly and I are having tremendous difficulty breathing on a regular basis. I actually had to use my inhaler twice today because I felt like my trachea was pinching shut. Totally normal. I'm going to investigate the easiest way to get myself some Valium or Paxil this weekend.
My clinical leader this year is fabulous. Shes an incredible woman and I loved her right off the bat. Shes good people, a superb OR nurse, but she's never been a clinical instructor for students before. So we walk into the unit and no one in the hospital told them we were coming last night (cool) and we don't know any of the nurses so things were really chaotic. Molly and I managed not to become incontinent with laughter, but only barely. We stood around most of the shift, to tell you the truth. I got to observe the charge nurse and a physician insert a central line (hoooot)! the physician was a fuckhead as I'm finding out several of them are. Shouting at a patient who had only mild hearing loss, failing to educate the patient's family about the fact that this is a strictly sterile procedure and therefore they shouldn't be touching the drapes covering the patient, taking off his gown and throwing it on top of the garbage can instead of inside of it (? what the fuck is that, the CHARGE NURSE had to clean up after him. I almost intentionally tripped the jerk on his way out. I probably should have.) But whatever, the nurses I got to work with were incredible.
There was one nurse, Court (who was actually the charge nurse that night), who was walking with a post-op patient up and down the unit and thinking of the most incrediblely comforting things to do and say. another nurse ran by and told her something that another patient needed, and the post-op patient she was with said "Do you need to go and take care of another patient?" And Court looked at her and put her hand over hers and said "No, of course not, I'm with you." It was so simple but it meant so much, and the smile it put on the patient's face... I don't know. Thats why I stay in this program. I want to be able to do that for someone.
I followed Court to see all of her patients, not just mine (who happended to be asleep for most of the shift, and I don't blame the poor man, he'd been through hell.) She asked one student and myself to check on a patient half an hour after we'd given him some narcotics for pain. BP HR pain assessment, standard stuff. The other student had been an LNA all summer and was going to do the manual BP while I took the HR and talked with him about his pain. We were just going to Dynamap him, but he told us that no one had been able to get it to work on him. "Oh is that true? How odd, has anyone told you why?"
"Well, my blood pressure has been high lately."
"Alright well let us find a manual cuff, we'll be right back." (new unit, we dont know where the hell ANYTHING is.)
We come back in, my partner starts pumping it up and going through the whole deal. I can't talk to the patient while the manual BP is being read because it makes it hard to hear the systolic beats (not to be confused with sick beats). My partner couldn't get it, so hands me the cuff and tells me to give it a try.
This was the best moment of my nursing career so far. I took the cuff and before I inflated it and got started again, I checked in with him to make sure his arm was okay, especially for patients who have been hospitalized for a while it can really start to irritate them. So he says he's good to go. And suddenly I just kind of figured it out.
"You said before that your blood pressure has been high lately, do you know around how high it was earlier today?"
"somewhere around 190/90 I think."
"Okay, I'm going to have to inflate it higher than that in order to hear your blood pressure but if at any time what I'm doing is uncomfortable or hurting you, just let me know."
I'll be damned if his blood pressure doesn't come in clear and loud as any I've ever heard. You normally don't pump a BP cuff any higher than 160 (max, 160 is really high) and thats why my partner couldn't hear anything. They were opperating with false assumptions. It was the first time I wasn't so frozen with the prospect of having to complete a task for a nurse that I couldn't think about what was acutally happening with the patient. it was this very amazing moment where I was like "wow, this isn't so scary anymore. I know how to problem solve and synthesize information. I'm not some robot after all."
I strutted my scrub covered ass down to the nurses station and gave her a mini-report "His BP is 194/96, he says his pain is down to a 7/10 but says that that amount is tolerable for him and that he's comfortable."
These stories are so lame, I'm sorry Journal. I'm not sure exactly why I recount every blessed second of every shift. I truly hope no one read this far because I sound so full of myself, but I swear to god I'm not. 90% of the time I'm sure that I'll never know everything that a human being needs to know in order to be a nurse. That was just one moment where I felt really fabulous. "I am competent and confident" That's Ralene Shippee-Rice's mantra, and I'm adopting it too. Even if I'm not exactly unbreakable, I'm too tough for the nursing department to ruin me. Hell yeah.
Okay journal, speaking of clinical, i need to get to bed so i can get up early and get stuff done before hitting the hospital floor again. its been real.
ps. all women look hot in scrubs. who knew stethoscopes were an aphrodisiac?
Let me tell you something boy, the first few weeks of this school year have turned out to be quite the emotional hurricane. Today is a fabulous example of the kind of thing I mean. at precisely 0930 I was realistically contemplating ending my life solely because of dr. fetzer handed out another quiz of doom (the kind that spans 3 chapters that you need to study all week for- even though when it comes down to it, its one lame crapshoot anyways as far as how many you get right.) By 0945 I was in tears and chewing so hard on my bottom lip that I now have cuts on the inside of my mouth. awesome. I was dead convinced that I had managed to fail (fail = <74 for my major) another quiz and therefore was setting myself up to fail the class. Failing one class = getting kicked out of the department. 1130 I'm sitting in stillings across from Alex who knows nothing about nursing and IV drip rates and hes explaining the equation to me from the quiz that made me want to die. If you need someone to calculate how many gtts/min to set your IV for, call Alex, he's fabulous at it.
Right, so 1130 I'm crying into an m&m brownie in the dining hall, which is helping NOTHING. I call out of work, blah blah. 1400 professor Shippee-Rice tells us that our teaching plans won't ACTUALLY be due until thursday, which means I robbed myself out of 2 hours of sleep last night post-clinical.
Then theres all kinds of scandal about the quiz we took. The answers were posted somewhere online, some students saw them before the actual quiz and never told the professor... (I probably should have prefaced this with explaining how the nursing department is absolutely fantatical about academic honesty and every nursing class requires you to sign a contract and sit through a lecture on what academic honesty means in the start of every semester. there are also several former-senior nursing students who are currently repeating junior-year classes because they were busted for academic honesty. SUCH scandal.) blah blah blah, anyways I go to the website and the answers are still posted and it turns out I only got one goddamn question wrong. The equation problem that I flunked because I see numbers on exams and my BP bottoms out. Vasovagal response or something.
So I went from considering dropping out of school and enrolling in culinary classes to being in the highest percentage of my class in this way hard class. And so it goes. This is nursing. We are "learning to live with ambiguity" or at least thats what Dr. Saltzburg said. I think we're learning to live with anxiety disorders because both molly and I are having tremendous difficulty breathing on a regular basis. I actually had to use my inhaler twice today because I felt like my trachea was pinching shut. Totally normal. I'm going to investigate the easiest way to get myself some Valium or Paxil this weekend.
My clinical leader this year is fabulous. Shes an incredible woman and I loved her right off the bat. Shes good people, a superb OR nurse, but she's never been a clinical instructor for students before. So we walk into the unit and no one in the hospital told them we were coming last night (cool) and we don't know any of the nurses so things were really chaotic. Molly and I managed not to become incontinent with laughter, but only barely. We stood around most of the shift, to tell you the truth. I got to observe the charge nurse and a physician insert a central line (hoooot)! the physician was a fuckhead as I'm finding out several of them are. Shouting at a patient who had only mild hearing loss, failing to educate the patient's family about the fact that this is a strictly sterile procedure and therefore they shouldn't be touching the drapes covering the patient, taking off his gown and throwing it on top of the garbage can instead of inside of it (? what the fuck is that, the CHARGE NURSE had to clean up after him. I almost intentionally tripped the jerk on his way out. I probably should have.) But whatever, the nurses I got to work with were incredible.
There was one nurse, Court (who was actually the charge nurse that night), who was walking with a post-op patient up and down the unit and thinking of the most incrediblely comforting things to do and say. another nurse ran by and told her something that another patient needed, and the post-op patient she was with said "Do you need to go and take care of another patient?" And Court looked at her and put her hand over hers and said "No, of course not, I'm with you." It was so simple but it meant so much, and the smile it put on the patient's face... I don't know. Thats why I stay in this program. I want to be able to do that for someone.
I followed Court to see all of her patients, not just mine (who happended to be asleep for most of the shift, and I don't blame the poor man, he'd been through hell.) She asked one student and myself to check on a patient half an hour after we'd given him some narcotics for pain. BP HR pain assessment, standard stuff. The other student had been an LNA all summer and was going to do the manual BP while I took the HR and talked with him about his pain. We were just going to Dynamap him, but he told us that no one had been able to get it to work on him. "Oh is that true? How odd, has anyone told you why?"
"Well, my blood pressure has been high lately."
"Alright well let us find a manual cuff, we'll be right back." (new unit, we dont know where the hell ANYTHING is.)
We come back in, my partner starts pumping it up and going through the whole deal. I can't talk to the patient while the manual BP is being read because it makes it hard to hear the systolic beats (not to be confused with sick beats). My partner couldn't get it, so hands me the cuff and tells me to give it a try.
This was the best moment of my nursing career so far. I took the cuff and before I inflated it and got started again, I checked in with him to make sure his arm was okay, especially for patients who have been hospitalized for a while it can really start to irritate them. So he says he's good to go. And suddenly I just kind of figured it out.
"You said before that your blood pressure has been high lately, do you know around how high it was earlier today?"
"somewhere around 190/90 I think."
"Okay, I'm going to have to inflate it higher than that in order to hear your blood pressure but if at any time what I'm doing is uncomfortable or hurting you, just let me know."
I'll be damned if his blood pressure doesn't come in clear and loud as any I've ever heard. You normally don't pump a BP cuff any higher than 160 (max, 160 is really high) and thats why my partner couldn't hear anything. They were opperating with false assumptions. It was the first time I wasn't so frozen with the prospect of having to complete a task for a nurse that I couldn't think about what was acutally happening with the patient. it was this very amazing moment where I was like "wow, this isn't so scary anymore. I know how to problem solve and synthesize information. I'm not some robot after all."
I strutted my scrub covered ass down to the nurses station and gave her a mini-report "His BP is 194/96, he says his pain is down to a 7/10 but says that that amount is tolerable for him and that he's comfortable."
These stories are so lame, I'm sorry Journal. I'm not sure exactly why I recount every blessed second of every shift. I truly hope no one read this far because I sound so full of myself, but I swear to god I'm not. 90% of the time I'm sure that I'll never know everything that a human being needs to know in order to be a nurse. That was just one moment where I felt really fabulous. "I am competent and confident" That's Ralene Shippee-Rice's mantra, and I'm adopting it too. Even if I'm not exactly unbreakable, I'm too tough for the nursing department to ruin me. Hell yeah.
Okay journal, speaking of clinical, i need to get to bed so i can get up early and get stuff done before hitting the hospital floor again. its been real.
ps. all women look hot in scrubs. who knew stethoscopes were an aphrodisiac?