Baby crazy

First of all let me just tell you, if you are wondering if I am a fan of getting up at 4:45 in the morning, I am not. That being said, I actually didn't hate the majority of my orientation at Holland Hospital today. (Side note: I feel like I have gone more orientations in the past 6 months than could possibly be necessary).

Anyway, we started off by meeting the nurse educator, filling out all of our paperwork with Human Resources, getting pictures taken for our ID badges, get our computer passwords, and getting some general questions answered. So all of that took the first two hours-ish of the time we were there. Then came the big fun. And by big fun I mean most boring 2 hours of my life spent learning computer charting. It was honestly the most boring thing ever. Not that I expected computer charting to be the most fun I've ever had but GEEZE. It was boring. And confusing. And I feel like its much more than we need to know for only being in the hospital for 8 days. But what do I know. The nurse is going to hate me on the first day when I have no idea how to do charting. Haha. Then we had our lovely lunch break. This hospital is GORGEOUS. I think I am going to really like working there. We also got a tour of the unit that we will be working on, including the Pyxis room, staff lounge, patient rooms, etc. We also get an access badge that allows us into pretty much everything on the unit except for the Meds Pyxis. We also had a lactation consultant come down and meet with us and give us some information on breastfeeding which was actually really awesome, she was great. We also went over all of the assignments that we have to do throughout our clinicals and had them all explained to us so I feel much less stressed.

I'm really happy with the hospital and looking forward to having the chance to do my first rotation there. I feel like they give us a whole lot of power and access to the hospital, which is a little crazy but pretty cool. I am really nervous to have all of the responsibility for taking care of a mother and a baby all on my own. And tomorrow we are actually going to be getting assigned to patients (mothers and babies) and learning how to do assessments on them. Tomorrow will also be a lot of learning our way around the unit. Also, after spending some time on the unit today we realized that most of the people in my group are baby whores. We were all acting like crazy people trying to see them. Needless to say, I think we are all really excited for babies! :)

Fun fact: Nurses in OB get pink name badges while everyone else gets white ones. This is to prevent new moms from giving their baby to someone who could be a baby snatcher! Ahhh people are crazy! Good thing we get pink ones! :)

End of part 1!

So from the beginning of this semester I was super overwhelmed and kind of irritated that I had to be in school all summer. To help make nursing seem less overwhelming I kept telling myself that it was really like 3 separate parts, 4 weeks of lab, 4 weeks of OB Clinical and 4 weeks of primary care (there is one week between the 2 clinical rotations). When I think of it like 3 separate parts it makes it seem much more manageable.

So this week was the end of the first part! Lab was over this week and we had our simulation lab and orientation to our clinical. For simulation lab we were in groups of 4 with people from our clinical group (there are 8 of us in each clinical group). We had 5 stations that went through and in each one we got to learn about a patient, gather information about them, and practice what assessments and what questions we would ask them and then figure out what we would do for them. The third station was when we got our simulation patent's information and we got to plan what we would do for her. In the fourth station we had our actual simulation. The manikin is one of the highest levels and has a pulse, blood pressure, respirations, etc. And all the room are audio/video equipped so when we talked to our "patient" we were really talking to our professor from the observation room. She would answer questions and talk to us as if she were the patient. The fifth room was just a de-briefing room. It was a really cool simulation to do and we are lucky that we have such an amazing facility that allows us to do these things. Grand Valley's Simulation Lab is apparently becoming a pretty big deal.

The rest of the day was clinical orientation to the hospital we will be working at; my OB clinical is at Holland Hospital. This was the first time we got to break up into our clinical groups and meet our clinical faculty member. There are 8 people in my group, and most of them are people I already know. I think my group will be a lot of fun and I really like everyone in it. Our faculty person seems super nice and she is super organized. I think I will really enjoy being at Holland, even though it seems like there is a ton of stuff we have to bring with us on the first day. I am really excited to finally start doing clinicals, since it seems like this is really what we have been working toward. Hopefully I really enjoy my first rotation and not get lost or mess anything up. We are all carpooling on the first day so at least we won't get lost!

You can go here if you are interested in the hospital I will be at www.hollandhospital.org :)

Passing lab and not failing Exam One

I know its not a very creative title for this post, but what can I say, it's what happened today. Contrary to what I thought yesterday, I only had to play the "multiple choice guessing game" a limited number of times on my theory exam. I actually ended up getting an 87% on it, which is amazing, considering that I studied for MAYBE a grand total of an hour. So needless to say, I was pretty impressed with myself. And since this exam is worth a lot more than the other ones, it's nice to have a pretty solid start. So yeah, good stuff. I also passed by Medication Administration final testing today so now I've passed out of all my lab skills and get tomorrow off :) And we are done with lab for the semester! Now all I have left this week is OB Simulation Lab and Clinical Orientation from 9-4 on Thursday and I'm done for the week.

Score.

Time flies.

Well apparently my blog updating skills have been lacking later, so here goes! Last week in theory we learned more about Labor & Delivery, specifically about the postpartum client. I love love love the professor that we have had for lecture the last two classes, and she is doing our lecture tomorrow. Sadly after that she doesn't do anymore lectures for our class. Sad news. She is super great though. She works as an L&D nurse and has so many stories that it actually makes our 3.5 hour class bearable. We have our first theory exam tomorrow and I haven't really studied at all for it. Stay tuned for a rousing game of "Let's see how well Lindsay can guess on multiple choice questions." Should be a good time.

In other news, we are almost done with lab! :) Last week Tuesday we had our Med Calculations test, that we needed to get 100% on to pass. Aaaaand I passed it. Also on Tuesday I did my sterile technique testing and passed that as well. And sometime last week I tested out of injection sites. Maybe that was last Friday? Who knows. Either way I passed that one too. Wednesday I didn't have to go to lab because I rocked sterile technique testing. Thursday we did Medication Administration pretesting. This was SUPER helpful because we just got to have a full run through of the testing and get feedback on things we need to work on before the real test. The only thing I did wrong was not pick the right length of needle for my injection but I corrected myself at the end and the professor doing the testing said other than that I did everything exactly right. So my final testing for that is tomorrow @ 1250. If I pass that then I am done with everything for lab except for a simulation day on Thursday. These last three weeks have FLOWN by.

I guess I can continue my rambling on and talk about seminar. Oh seminar... Well, the "professor" that I have for seminar has no idea what is going on. She agreed to teach this class literally 4 days before the start of the semester (how have I gone this long without venting about this??). I get really frustrated when people don't know what's going because I like organization and I like to know exactly what I am supposed to be doing. What I don't like is having a teacher who doesn't have access to Blackboard, know ANYTHING about our program, or know what we are doing. Apparently it's totally fine to just pull random nurses off the street and let them teach seminars. She's a nice lady, but the class is BEYOND frustrating. Luckily the course coordinator is figuring this out and sending us emails to help us out.

So yeah, that's what's new. Bring on WEEK FOUR! :)

PS. "Time flies" is another expression that I hate.

Injections and my new badge reel!

So this week in theory we started learning about labor and delivery, and in the coming weeks we will talk about the postpartum client, the newborn, etc. Clearly since we are doing our OB rotation this semester. It was actually super interesting and I managed to actually listen for the whole 3.5 hours of lecture, which isn't usually the easiest thing for me. The professor that did our lecture this week will also be doing our lectures for the next two weeks, which is awesome because I love her. And I love babies. Duh.

In lab this week we learned medication administration and injections! Meds administration was pretty interesting but, like everything else we've been learning, super nit picky with a lot of things to remember. I understand that the things we need to do are for a reason. For every medication we give we have to match the physician's order with the Meds sheet, initial it. Check each med, then do the 5 Rights- right patient, right med, right dose, right route and right time. And we have to say each of these 3 separate times. It's basically pretty simple though, but it makes you really see how important it is to be accurate with medications, because our mistakes could essentially kill our patients. We also have to make sure everything is DOCUMENTED, because again, if it is documented it could lead to a double dose or big legal issues. So yeah no pressure or anything. It's not like we could mess up and kill people or anything...

Today is lab we got to do INJECTIONS! We got to learn with real needles and syringes and vials and everything. (I know I sound like an overly excited 6 year old, but it was really exciting so just go with it). We got to use different needles and gauges and "medications." We learned how to give intramuscular, subcutaneous and intradermal injections into a model of a leg. We also learned all the sites that we can give injections. It was actually really fun to learn, but it was a little overwhelming to try to remember all of the specifics about the different types of needles, sites, injections, etc. And it was definitely not as easy as I thought it would be. Picture a room of 22 people all hitting syringes with pens trying to learn to get out all the air bubbles. It was relatively hilarious. Good thing we have like 4 days to practice coming up! Practice is basically all I feel like we do these days.

Also, I bought a badge reel today that SNA is selling as a fundraiser. They are made from the tops of medication vials and they are SUPER CUTE. The picture at the top is of the one I bought today :) It's adorable.

One week down, a million to go

Well, this god awful week is finally over, and to be fair, it ended a LOT better than it started. The past few days I've been able to figure out everything on the Blackboard site, get everything printed and organized and learn how to keep all of my schedules for theory, lab and seminar straight. At least for the next three weeks until everything changes again. So now I feel like even though there is a ton of reading and work that I have to do, I feel less overwhelmed in that at least I KNOW what i'm supposed to be doing for each class. So as far as that part of being overwhelmed goes, I'm feeling a whole lot better.

This week in lab we are learning about documentation, medical calculations and sterile technique. Tuesday was just lab orientation and then Wednesday we started learning about documentation and why it's so important. Good stuff. We also learned about medical calculations, such as converting ounces to mL to teaspoons, etc. We also learned how to fill an order for say 15mg, if the solution concentration is something like 20mg/mL. We got a lot of lectures about how if we do this wrong, we will kill people. No pressure. It's not surprising then that we have to pass our med calc test with 100%. Good thing I got 100% on my pretest today. Boom. Sterile technique is a pain in the ass, because even though there isn't that much to it, it's so hard to remember not to contaminate your sterile field. You cross your hand over it...fail. You touch your sterile glove to your body, arm, hair, table...fail. Bring your hands below your waist...fail. Turn your back on the sterile field...fail. It's just a lot of nit picky stuff to remember. We have a lot of time to practice though, so i'm sure by the time we get to testing we will all be pros.

In other news, I miss my friends. I have 4 other people from last semesters lab (which I will probably forever refer to as Lab 101) in my new lab section. Nine of them are in one of the other sections and i'm super upset that i'm not with them. I see them in the morning briefly when they get out of lab and we are heading into lab, and I get really sad. We saw one of our professors from lab last semester and we literally mobbed her and had a giant group hug. The five of us in my lab section now are really trying to make new friends, and I do like a lot of the new people in my lab so hopefully I get to know some of them. I just really miss my 101 friends. I didn't think it would be this hard for us to be split up...It's fine, I know that is unbelievably lame.

Nursing marathon: Day One

After this god awful day, the last thing I feel like doing is writing in my blog about it, but I figure I will only have one first day of Nursing 320/321 so I should probably write about it. To clear up what I mean by god awful & nursing marathon is this: 12 hours of nursing classes, overwhelming stress and confusion, and the general feeling that I just want to cry.

My day started out with Nursing 320, which is our first theory class. All 64 people in my class have this one together, so I love that I get to see all my lab 101 favorite people at least once a week. It's taught by 5 different professors, with each one teaching certain lectures and making up separate sections of our exams. So in case getting used to one professors teaching style isn't hard enough, let's have 5 professors to get used to. So fine. Theory is from 8:30-11:50. The next thing we have is lab. We have lab 4 days a week for the first 4 weeks of the semester. Then we stop having lab and have 4 weeks of OB clinical and 4 weeks of primary care clinical, which isn't confusing at all right? So lab is from 12-2:50. I have 4 other people from last semester in my lab this year, which is going to be nice. In lab this semester we will learn medical calculations, passing meds, sterile technique and injections, along with a few other things. We then get a WHOPPING 40 minute break until we head to seminar from 3:30-5:20. Our seminar was ridiculous. Our professor had NO idea what was going on, knew nothing about our program and just honestly had no clue. It was so frustrating after our insanely long day. My last class today was Nursing Research, which is an online class so luckily we only meet twice all semester. So I had that tonight from 6-8:15. Holy Jesus.

The worst part about this semester is that the Blackboard site is AWFUL. It's so much information, just thrown into folders all over the place and it takes forever to navigate and figure out what is happening. After several hours of printing and organizing today I am starting to feel like I am getting a grasp on all of the sections and how to organize them. So that is making me feel a little better and a little more in control. Please take note of the picture of my binder. This literally has taken me the ENTIRE DAY to organize. As in I started it yesterday and finished it about a half hour ago. It has EASILY over 100 pages already printed in it.

320/321 is the semester that I have been being warned about since LONG before I even got into the nursing program. Everyone says that this is the hardest semester of the program and that getting through it is hell. I know going into this semester that it is going to be insanely hard, but i'm hoping that if I stay on top of everything and plan ahead I can survive without pulling my hair out. I'm hoping that I will be able to look back on this semester and think "Well that sucked, but I made it though." I think optimism and organization are going to be the key points in this semester. Ugh. We can do this.