Leadership fun!

I have been telling people about my leadership rotation all week so this post should be pretty easy :) I started my leadership rotation on Monday last week, then went Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. Leadership means that instead of doing clinical in a group, you do clinical all by yourself and you have a "preceptor" which is a nurse that you work with everyday. You work around her schedule, and she is solely responsible/in charge of you. The goal of the rotation is that by the end of 6 weeks, you should be doing about 90% of your nurse's job all by yourself. My nurse has an AWESOME schedule. She works Monday-Friday from 8-5 (or some really close variation of that, i.e sometimes it's 730-430). This is great because of a few reasons: a) I don't have to get up at the legitimate crack of dawn like I have for other clinicals that I had to be at by 630 b)I have no problem getting all of my hours in c)I can get all of my hours done in 5 weeks. So basically it's a really good deal for me. Everyone is fairly jealous of my schedule. And I'm okay with that.

So what am I doing for my leadership you ask? I am at Helen Devos Children's Hospital (by far the coolest hospital in Grand Rapids and essentially my dream place to work once I graduate). I am working in the Pediatric Sedation Unit. So basically what we do is sedate kids for an procedure that would be be painful or that requires the kids to lay perfectly still. They do a lot of lumbar punctures, bone marrow aspirates, biopsies, scopes (egd's and colonoscopies), castings, MRI's and other scans, central line insertions and port insertions and removals. I've gotten to see a TON of really awesome things. The role of the nurse in all of this is to very similar to the role of the OR nurse, except they do much more teaching and assessment than an OR nurse. The patient comes down to the room and meets the nurse there. She then tells them all about the procedure and teaches them about the medications we will be using, how fast it will put the child to sleep, how long the procedure will take and what to except after. She then gets the child all prepped and hooked up to the heart monitor, gets a pulse ox on and lets them pick a bandaid for after we take their IV out. Then she starts the IV (I can't do this because students aren't allowed to do IV's in pediatrics. At all. Ever). I do however get all the supplies out to start the IV, help the nurse start it, then as soon as its actually in the vein I do everything else. So I guess it's okay that I can't actually start them. So then during the procedure the nurse records vitals every 3 minutes and monitors the patient, and helps the doctors with anything they need. Right after the procedure the nurse is the one that stays with the patient as they wake up, takes all the leads and tape off, removes the IV and then talks to the family about what to expect for the rest of the day. She also gives all of the discharge instructions. So the nurse is DEFINITELY very busy during procedures. She also gets and draws up all of the medications, that's sort of a crucial thing I forgot. The medication we use to sedate is called Propofol and it puts kids to sleep in about 15 seconds, which is actually pretty funny to watch sometimes. It is jokingly called "Milk of Amnesia" because it has an amnesiac effect and after you come out of it you have no memory of the procedure. Fun Fact: It is also what Michael Jackson used to "sleep" and what killed him. When I Google-Imaged it I found mostly pictures of MJ, including a whole series of really hilarious by insensitive shirts that say "GOT PROPOFOL?"

So this week I started doing all of the vitals, getting the patient hooked up to the monitors, and doing discharge instructions. Next week I will add drawing up meds to the list, as well as all of the teaching at the beginning of the procedure. By the end of next week I'm hoping to be doing at least 50-75% of what my nurse does, with her supervision of course. I really like the unit that I'm in. We get to travel all over the hospital to do procedures sometimes, and I get to see so many different things and work with doctors, PA's, NP's and lots of other people. It's very cool and I'm very happy with it so far :) Next week I am going on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday then heading home for a long Memorial Day weekend!

76 days to go.

The Beginning of the End!

At the end of NUR 315, my first nursing class, I got all mushy at the end of my post and talked about how nursing school would never be better than it was then and how it would never be the same as it was with my friends in that class. I said that it wasn't the end, but it was "the end of the beginning." Well here we are now, and I was completely wrong about things not getting any better. In the past 3 semesters since then I have made so many more great friends, gotten to know almost everyone in my class, and had so many amazing times. That brings me to today. The beginning of the end. Today was the first day of our LAST semester of nursing school. It feels so surreal that we have come this far. Yesterday I volunteered to go into NUR 320 (The hardest semester of the program and the semester everyone panics about) to talk to the students about the class. Basically the professors leave the room and let a few of us just take questions and give advice on how to get through it, what they should and shouldn't do, if they can work during clinical, how to study, is it really that bad, etc. It's kind of fun and kind of funny to think that it's already been a year since we were in their shoes. Today was my first day of class. This semester, well for the first 6 weeks, I have seminar from 8-920, which is a group of only 5 of us that meets to talk about clinical and all kinds of stuff. Then we have theory from 9:30-11:40, then a break, and then theory again from 12:30-2:40. It's a lot of class in one, but then I remember that it's still not even close to as bad as NUR 320 was. Haha. I spent a lot of time today just getting organized (shocker) so that I can feel like I have some control over my life. Everyone in my class makes fun of my obsessive organization but I think secretly they're just jealous. First days are just always so overwhelming that if I don't get organized then I feel like I can't handle it. As far as first days go though, today wasn't that bad. We had a med calculation test due today, which was 20 questions of calculation IV drip rates, flow rates, how long it will take IV's to run, etc. And we had to get 100% on it. I did. Boom. And it was nice to see all of my friends again. The worst part of this semester will probably be that we have to write a Capstone paper. 16 pages. Minimum 25-30 references. Not looking forward to THAT. But hey, such is life! I think this semester is gonna go by super fast. I start my leadership rotation on Monday, so stay tuned for that.

Picture is of the paper chain when we had 100 days left, but now we only have 86 days to go! :):):)