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.