Nursing School week 3/#15
Dec. 9th, 2012 09:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pantsheadAlmost done! This was our last full week of classes and Clinical for the semester. We didn't even have any exams this week! (With these 8-week long classes, each of which have 4 exams, it's a rare thing.)
Tuesday wound up being my final day of Mental Health clinicial. I was supposed to go on Wednesday as well, but Tuesday I woke up with moderate vertigo and by Wednesday I decided it wasn't worth driving down to the hospital again. We can take one 'sick' day per semester pretty easily; any more than that involves all sorts of paperwork. So, Wednesday I just slept and tried not to move around too much. The vertigo is crazy and disorienting. I'm calling it 'moderate' because I can still walk and drive (carefully, and only when I know the roads...), but I'm never free of the sensation that the room is moving. Even closing my eyes doesn't help. My gait has changed perceptibly--I usually walk very quickly, and I'd say I'm usually pretty confident about where my feet will fall. Not now! Now I have a bit of a stagger, and it's hard to walk in a confined space (like, say, the house) because doing so involves so many quick changes in direction. Anyway...it's gotten a little better since Tuesday, but it isn't gone. My doctor attributes it to the cold a couple of weeks ago--inflammation of the ear canals.
So, after sleeping for most of Wednesday, I spent the rest of the time looking up information on designer drugs (like synthetic marijuana and bath salts) for a presentation we needed to give on Thursday in Mental Health. The presentation was only worth 5% of our grade, so I don't think anyone in our group really cared. We never even rehearsed it as a group! However, we did okay and now it's over. Other group topics--which I thought were more interesting, but my group was really into the designer drugs thing--included PTSD/veteran suicides and historic treatments for mental illnesses--such as strapping the patient into a spinning chair to stir up the blood, and infecting schizophrenic patients with malaria. [Maybe I was just especially sympathetic on the spinning-chair-thing this week...]
In OB/Maternity, we learned about postpartum complications and spent a short time talking about perinatal losses--which includes everything from a loss of fertility to a stillbirth or neonatal death. This is a side of OB that we didn't really see during our Clinical--our instructors tried to give us healthy patients with healthy babies so that we could learn what 'normal' looked like. One student apparently did see a birth during which the baby had to be resuscitated, but as of our class time, the baby was doing okay. Our last day in OB we learned about women's health promotion...or at least touched on the topic. Obviously, it could be a whole class or field of practice!
On Friday we had our computer-exam in Mental Health, which means that class is officially done except for my Clinical evalutation with the instructor next week. Next Tuesday we have our 3rd exam in OB, and then the computer exam in OB on Wednesday. And then I've signed up to do a Clinical elective like I did over the summer--5 days on a Clinical floor, with no paperwork to do! I think it will be good for me--we don't get to use a lot of our hands-on skills during the 4 classes I just finished, and I know we're going to need them when we start our final semester. By the end of that, it will be the 21st and almost Christmas...good grief!
Tuesday wound up being my final day of Mental Health clinicial. I was supposed to go on Wednesday as well, but Tuesday I woke up with moderate vertigo and by Wednesday I decided it wasn't worth driving down to the hospital again. We can take one 'sick' day per semester pretty easily; any more than that involves all sorts of paperwork. So, Wednesday I just slept and tried not to move around too much. The vertigo is crazy and disorienting. I'm calling it 'moderate' because I can still walk and drive (carefully, and only when I know the roads...), but I'm never free of the sensation that the room is moving. Even closing my eyes doesn't help. My gait has changed perceptibly--I usually walk very quickly, and I'd say I'm usually pretty confident about where my feet will fall. Not now! Now I have a bit of a stagger, and it's hard to walk in a confined space (like, say, the house) because doing so involves so many quick changes in direction. Anyway...it's gotten a little better since Tuesday, but it isn't gone. My doctor attributes it to the cold a couple of weeks ago--inflammation of the ear canals.
So, after sleeping for most of Wednesday, I spent the rest of the time looking up information on designer drugs (like synthetic marijuana and bath salts) for a presentation we needed to give on Thursday in Mental Health. The presentation was only worth 5% of our grade, so I don't think anyone in our group really cared. We never even rehearsed it as a group! However, we did okay and now it's over. Other group topics--which I thought were more interesting, but my group was really into the designer drugs thing--included PTSD/veteran suicides and historic treatments for mental illnesses--such as strapping the patient into a spinning chair to stir up the blood, and infecting schizophrenic patients with malaria. [Maybe I was just especially sympathetic on the spinning-chair-thing this week...]
In OB/Maternity, we learned about postpartum complications and spent a short time talking about perinatal losses--which includes everything from a loss of fertility to a stillbirth or neonatal death. This is a side of OB that we didn't really see during our Clinical--our instructors tried to give us healthy patients with healthy babies so that we could learn what 'normal' looked like. One student apparently did see a birth during which the baby had to be resuscitated, but as of our class time, the baby was doing okay. Our last day in OB we learned about women's health promotion...or at least touched on the topic. Obviously, it could be a whole class or field of practice!
On Friday we had our computer-exam in Mental Health, which means that class is officially done except for my Clinical evalutation with the instructor next week. Next Tuesday we have our 3rd exam in OB, and then the computer exam in OB on Wednesday. And then I've signed up to do a Clinical elective like I did over the summer--5 days on a Clinical floor, with no paperwork to do! I think it will be good for me--we don't get to use a lot of our hands-on skills during the 4 classes I just finished, and I know we're going to need them when we start our final semester. By the end of that, it will be the 21st and almost Christmas...good grief!
