♫ Say ahhh (ahhh) Say ahhh (ahhh) Say ahh (ahhh) NOW SPIT! ♫

If you've even seen and/or been in "Little Shop of Horrors," the title of this entry will make sense to you. If not, just trust that it's from a musical and go with it.

This week in nursing lab we learned about HEENT, which is head, ears, eyes, nose and throat (I know, look at all the cool acronyms I'm learning). Friday in our lab we learned how to do an assessment of the ears, mouth, nose, neck and lymph nodes. For ear assessments we got to use the otoscopes (those cool things they use to look in your ears) to look in our partners ears and then everyone else in our class' ears. It was actually really cool to see how different everyone's ears looked and what the inside of the ear should look like. We also did a nasal assessment (Yes nursing really is this glamorous). We had to look in our partners nose with a penlight, make sure it was symmetrical etc. Then we did a quick assessment of the mouth, where we pretty much just rooted around our partners mouth with a tongue depressor. We had them say Ahhh (Hence the title, because during this part of class all I could think of was the Dentist song from Little Shop). We also had to feel around in their mouth for any pain, tenderness, etc. Again, other majors wish they were this glamorous. The last thing we learned was how to check a patient's lymph nodes. This was actually really cool also. We learned the ten places that you are supposed to feel for the lymph nodes and how to feel for them in a routine motion so you don't miss any when you do the assessment. There was a TON of information that we had to learn for this week, about 130 pages of reading's worth of information, followed by an overwhelming amount of extra information given to us during class. Luckily we have a skill's practice day next Thursday so we will get a chance to try to put together our general survey and mental status assessment with the two days of HEENT assessment stuff. It's just so much that I'm not sure how it is all going to fit together, but I guess that is why we practice! Also, my partner had 2 AMAZING "That's what she said" jokes in class today that I feel morally obligated to share.

(When putting the otoscope in my ear and trying to see my eardrum) "Am I going too deep? I feel like i'm always going too deep."

(When going to feel inside my mouth during the mouth assessment) "Okay if you can open up I'm going to stick my fingers in there."

Seriously, I couldn't make this stuff up.