Nursing School week 3/#2
Sep. 1st, 2012 11:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pantsheadThe dreadful cold that PoC has been fighting seems to have caught me within the last 18 hours. Good thing it's the weekend, right?
Cold aside, this week seemed a little more manageable than last week, though my procrastination habits caught up to me between Thursday and Friday. On Tuesday and Wednesday, I had Pediatrics clinical at the Children's Hospital. As I mentioned before, we're on a surgery floor. In general, it did seem (as I imagined) that most patients were otherwise-healthy children who needed to have surgery for a particular reason--broken bone, appendicitis, correction of birth defect, etc... Some students in my group had patients who were chronically ill and/or had congenital conditions that contributed to their illness (ex: A patient who had trouble swallowing correctly developed aspiration pneumonia--when material goes into the lungs--and needed to have a feeding tube placed in the stomach). We saw a lot of patients who were there with their parents, but some parents simply can't stay in the hospital 24 hours a day--they have other children at home, or jobs, or both! Dealing with parents was probably my biggest concern about pediatrics, and I can say I think I had a really great experience with one parent and a so-so experience with another set of parents this week. The one parent was very supportive of the child, but also no-nonsense...didn't try to "bargain" to avoid a procedure that needed to be done that the child was frightened of, but just stayed with the child the whole time and offered reassurance. The other set of parents were very wary of anything being done to their child that might possibly cause pain--which I understand, but it wasn't clear how they thought they would take the child home (the next morning) without pain since they wouldn't even let anyone take the child out of bed!
We have less paperwork to do for Clinical in Pediatrics--just a 12-page packet each week on one of our patients (if we have more than one). Completing the packet is supposed to help us take good look at all of the factors involved in that patient's health, and to evaluate whether the patient is at a "normal" stage of Growth and Development or is delayed. We also need to show written medication calculations for each patient (and each med) demonstrating that the prescribed dose falls within the safe dosing range. Children (at least these children) don't take nearly as many medications as adults, thank goodness! (I had an adult patient last semester who was taking ~35 separate medications.) We also must do an extended write-up one week called a Tanner's Model. The Tanner's Model is intended to help us 'think out' our clinical decision-making process--we have to write about an incident that happened, and how we responded to it. They aren't necessarily medical incidents--I did write one last semester on a hypoglycemic patient, but I also wrote one about talking with a patient who had been giving a life-limiting diagnosis. This semester, they must generally be on a topic that deals with communicating with the patient (or family) or promoting health. I wrote one this week--we'll see if my instructor accepts it! (If they're borderline, we can usually revise them. If not, we have to do a whole new one on a different topic.)
In our theory classes (Thursday and Friday) we learned about caring for children with GI and Cardiac conditions. We also reviewed math, because every semester we have a math test that we must pass with 100% in order to pass the class. It's always about medication adminstration--If Tylenol is supplied as 160 mg per 5 mL, how many mLs are needed for a 500 mg dose? This semester, however, we first need to calculate whether this dose is a safe range for the child (SDR = 10-15 mg/kg/dose). Then, if it's an IV medication, we'd calculate the rate of the infusion. We've also learned to calculate minimum daily fluid requirements and the IV rates for them. So, our math test was on Friday morning and covered all of that! I passed! (We get 3 chances, but I'd rather not need them...)
In our Community class, we learned about Transcultural nursing. I did not fail this week's quiz, which makes me feel a little better, but I still think that class is going to take up a disproportionate amount of my brain until after the group project is over on the 20th.
And now it's Saturday! Time to do next week's reading, homework assignments, and start studying for our first exam (Friday).
Cold aside, this week seemed a little more manageable than last week, though my procrastination habits caught up to me between Thursday and Friday. On Tuesday and Wednesday, I had Pediatrics clinical at the Children's Hospital. As I mentioned before, we're on a surgery floor. In general, it did seem (as I imagined) that most patients were otherwise-healthy children who needed to have surgery for a particular reason--broken bone, appendicitis, correction of birth defect, etc... Some students in my group had patients who were chronically ill and/or had congenital conditions that contributed to their illness (ex: A patient who had trouble swallowing correctly developed aspiration pneumonia--when material goes into the lungs--and needed to have a feeding tube placed in the stomach). We saw a lot of patients who were there with their parents, but some parents simply can't stay in the hospital 24 hours a day--they have other children at home, or jobs, or both! Dealing with parents was probably my biggest concern about pediatrics, and I can say I think I had a really great experience with one parent and a so-so experience with another set of parents this week. The one parent was very supportive of the child, but also no-nonsense...didn't try to "bargain" to avoid a procedure that needed to be done that the child was frightened of, but just stayed with the child the whole time and offered reassurance. The other set of parents were very wary of anything being done to their child that might possibly cause pain--which I understand, but it wasn't clear how they thought they would take the child home (the next morning) without pain since they wouldn't even let anyone take the child out of bed!
We have less paperwork to do for Clinical in Pediatrics--just a 12-page packet each week on one of our patients (if we have more than one). Completing the packet is supposed to help us take good look at all of the factors involved in that patient's health, and to evaluate whether the patient is at a "normal" stage of Growth and Development or is delayed. We also need to show written medication calculations for each patient (and each med) demonstrating that the prescribed dose falls within the safe dosing range. Children (at least these children) don't take nearly as many medications as adults, thank goodness! (I had an adult patient last semester who was taking ~35 separate medications.) We also must do an extended write-up one week called a Tanner's Model. The Tanner's Model is intended to help us 'think out' our clinical decision-making process--we have to write about an incident that happened, and how we responded to it. They aren't necessarily medical incidents--I did write one last semester on a hypoglycemic patient, but I also wrote one about talking with a patient who had been giving a life-limiting diagnosis. This semester, they must generally be on a topic that deals with communicating with the patient (or family) or promoting health. I wrote one this week--we'll see if my instructor accepts it! (If they're borderline, we can usually revise them. If not, we have to do a whole new one on a different topic.)
In our theory classes (Thursday and Friday) we learned about caring for children with GI and Cardiac conditions. We also reviewed math, because every semester we have a math test that we must pass with 100% in order to pass the class. It's always about medication adminstration--If Tylenol is supplied as 160 mg per 5 mL, how many mLs are needed for a 500 mg dose? This semester, however, we first need to calculate whether this dose is a safe range for the child (SDR = 10-15 mg/kg/dose). Then, if it's an IV medication, we'd calculate the rate of the infusion. We've also learned to calculate minimum daily fluid requirements and the IV rates for them. So, our math test was on Friday morning and covered all of that! I passed! (We get 3 chances, but I'd rather not need them...)
In our Community class, we learned about Transcultural nursing. I did not fail this week's quiz, which makes me feel a little better, but I still think that class is going to take up a disproportionate amount of my brain until after the group project is over on the 20th.
And now it's Saturday! Time to do next week's reading, homework assignments, and start studying for our first exam (Friday).
