It seems amazing that I'm a college senior. I'm actually going to graduate this year. A year from now, hopefully, I'll have a job as a real nurse.
I'm only taking 13 hours this semester, but I've already had serious doubts in my abilities. Sometimes I think they deliberately try to intimidate you the first week. After that first week, I'm so entrenched in trying to keep my head above water that I don't really have time to analyze anything.
Fortunately, I only have one class of great medical importance. It's my Med-Surg II class, and we're starting out with the immune system. We have a lovely professor who loves to simplify things and give us ways to remember things.
I have a research class which I'm not enthused about. The thing I hate most about researching is coming up with a topic. And horror of horrors, we'll be having to actually use statistics. HELP! This will be my least favorite professor. She's one of those professors to whom you can explain exactly what it is you are wanting to know, and they just don't get it. Then when I submit something, she writes all over it in her red ink concerning exactly the requirement I was questioning her about in the first place! GRRR
My third lecture class is on Professional nursing--Management. Shouldn't be too difficult, but we have these group projects of which I'm not a big fan. But I do like my professor.
Then we have clinicals. They both thrill and terrify me. For some reason, I felt like it was a huge adjustment taking care of an adult with multiple ailments after taking care of pediatrics and laboring mothers.
We were informed at our orientation that we would never know what kind of patient to expect because Erlanger is a teaching hospital and we get all the trauma and people off the streets. We may hear of a tragedy in the news (gang fights, MVA's, domestic violence, etc.) only to find out that this is our patient. We may find policemen guarding a room or find a patient handcuffed to the bed. We were promised that we wouldn't have to actually take care of those patients.
We will get a full 12 hour day in the ER and on a Friday, no less. I'm looking forward to that one.
We are the first ever nursing class to be allowed to work in the cath lab and actually help with procedures.
We have 4 weeks in the various ICU's (Erlanger has 7). We have 8 weeks on the floor minus 1 week for ER and 1 week for Cath lab.
The problem with clinicals is that we have to go the day before to pick up our patient information and go research all the pathophysiology on any ailment the patient has. We need to know all the labs that are out of line and their significance. And, of course, we'd better know each and every drug and its side effects (this is the hardest one for me).
So last Wednesday, I left right after class to go get my patient information since I had to go to work yet. I had just located the chart when the doctor arrived and took it right out of my hands. He proceeded to sit down and chat with somebody for 15-20 minutes before even opening the chart. I waited around for 45 minutes and realized there was no way I was going to get that chart before I had to be at work. So I returned at midnight to discover that my patient had so many things going on with her that it took me an hour and a half just to copy down all her ailments, meds, and labs. I got home at 2:00a.m. and started looking up things. I finished at 4:00 a.m., took a 45 minute nap, and arrived back at the hospital at 6:30 for clinical. I got about 4 1/2 hours of sleep the next night, so I was totally wiped out this weekend. Today is the first I've really felt functional, and even now I could go right to bed.
So here's hoping that this week I get a patient with fewer things going on and a chance to actually look at the chart on Wednesday afternoon.
