Friday, January 29, 2010

Leadership Clinical

I have gotten my Leadership clinical assignment and it is..... the Neonatal ICU in Lynchburg! My plans for carpooling to Richmond didn't work out, but I am still thankful that I will be able to work with neonates this semester. I pray that God uses this clinical time to help me feel more comfortabe as I begin caring for these patients as the nurse, and not the CNE. I hope to be the kind of nurse that can be trusted by my patients (or the mommy and daddy in this case), their families, and the staff I work with! I am excited to begin my time in the NICU developing my crital care skills!

Monday, January 25, 2010

Update, Senior Year

It's hard to believe that it's my senior year already! This place has become my routine; when I go HOME I feel out of whack! I forget to take my medicine, I eat "weird" food (not raw food)... I can't wait for home to be my normal routine again. Not so I can eat normal food and forget to take meds, but so it can become my full-time life again.

This semester has been super easy so far. I am in Community nursing, where my clinical experience involves 4 Mondays of working with a hospice nurse. It will be a new experience for me, but I am curious all the same. My Leadership class will have 5 clinicals, one weekend every month, from 7a-7p. I haven't heard where I will be yet, but I signed up for the NICU here in Lynchburg and the NICU in Richmond, VA. It is most likely that I will be going to Richmond because I have 2 other friends that signed up to be in the same hospital. Our professor should want to take advantage of 3 students willing to drive and stay in Richmond together. It would be a fun weekend for us to hang out together and have time with eachother before graduating. My Advanced Critical Care class has just a handful of students in it. It is a much more personal class, where we have discussions on what we are learning and have lab days where we run through codes and trauma cases. There are no tests in this class either! Lastly, I'm in Biomedical Ethics. This is an interesting class because it will help me to be able to back up my opinions better; like how I feel about abortion, physician assisted suicide, euthanasia, etc. These are issues that I will have to face in the NICU, probably even during my interview!

Each of my professors in my classes said that we will get out of this class what we put into it, meaning that getting an A should be easy, heh heh heh. Yay! I would love to get straight A's this semester!

Just a few more months left!

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Go Ahead, You Can Laugh

The road to becoming a nurse is not without its troubles and concerns. On occasion, the learned nursing student will self-diagnose her/himself with everything that s/he has learned in class.

I am not the exception. I might even be the extreme.

Over the past 3 and a half years, I have self-diagnosed, at one point or another, believing it to be true for any amount of time, the following conditions:

1. Supraclavicular Nodes (feeling one of these is bad news)
2. A Blood Clot (that was not too long ago)
3. Leukemia (I had a total of 1 symptom)
4. Spontaneous Cerebrospinal Fluid Leak (because I had a runny nose)
5. Urinary Retention (turns out I just didn't have to "go")
6. Pre-Ventricular Contractions (actually this wasn't too far-fetched, but I still didn't have it)
7. Atrial Fibrillation (which would cause a blood clot, sooo...)
8. A blood clot, again
9. Ventricular Septal Defect (this is a BIRTH defect, I was 20 when I "acquired it")
10. Anemia (like the serious kind)
11. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (again, not too "out there", but not entirely accurate)
12. Crohn's Disease (just a little tummy ache)
13. Meningitis (my neck really hurt, okay?)
14. Umbilical Hernia (after a big day of eating...)
15. Melanoma (some people pronounce this as "freckle", as in my diagnostic case)

I won't even go into things I learned in my Psych class.

Lucky for everybody else in the world, I keep these diagnoses to myself, until now.

Also, don't meander onto GOOGLE Search when you have any of the concerns listed above, it's just not helpful... or when you have a runny nose, a full tummy, an ache or pain...