Nursing School week 2/#6
Feb. 25th, 2012 09:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pantsheadI'm feeling that sense of impending relief that comes with knowing that Spring Break is only two weeks away! Next week will be normal--two long days of Clinical in the middle of the week--but the week after will be our evaluation week. This means no early-morning clinical, but scary evaluations! (I think my instructor is happy with my work so far, but there's always room for improvement. We have to do a self-evaluation and then we meet with our instructor to discuss. After Break, we'll be assigned to a different instructor on a different unit of the hospital.)
I had an exam in Nursing this week (not so bad as the last one, I don't think), an exam in Human Growth and Development, and an exam in Nutrition (the online class). This meant we spent less time learning new content in all of these classes, of course, but in Nursing we did have a unit on orthopedics--just a general overview of some concepts. Since I was on an orthopedic unit last semester, some of this was reassuringly familiar! In Lab class we learned about how to clean out tracheostomies, which is not a skill we'll use *very* often but is important to perform correctly (since, you know, that's the only way the person can breathe!). It's also a sterile procedure for part of it, so you have to put on sterile gloves correctly, and keep your sterile hand, well, sterile while doing the procedure. This one will take some practice!
Overall, I'd say that we're getting better at putting larger concepts together--I was able to look at the lab values for a patient of mine this week and recognize that her kidneys were failing, and then know that some of the things I should look for would be edema (if the fluid isn't leaving the body as urine, it must be going somewhere), lung congestion, or abnormal heart sounds. It's nice to feel like I'm starting to get a handle on these concepts!
I had an exam in Nursing this week (not so bad as the last one, I don't think), an exam in Human Growth and Development, and an exam in Nutrition (the online class). This meant we spent less time learning new content in all of these classes, of course, but in Nursing we did have a unit on orthopedics--just a general overview of some concepts. Since I was on an orthopedic unit last semester, some of this was reassuringly familiar! In Lab class we learned about how to clean out tracheostomies, which is not a skill we'll use *very* often but is important to perform correctly (since, you know, that's the only way the person can breathe!). It's also a sterile procedure for part of it, so you have to put on sterile gloves correctly, and keep your sterile hand, well, sterile while doing the procedure. This one will take some practice!
Overall, I'd say that we're getting better at putting larger concepts together--I was able to look at the lab values for a patient of mine this week and recognize that her kidneys were failing, and then know that some of the things I should look for would be edema (if the fluid isn't leaving the body as urine, it must be going somewhere), lung congestion, or abnormal heart sounds. It's nice to feel like I'm starting to get a handle on these concepts!
