Eeny meeny miney mo!

Question of the week!......what do Furosemide, Hydrochlorothiazide, Spironolactone, and Mannitol have in common? They are all diuretic medications! Which one is used to decrease intracranial pressure? Eeny meeny, miney mo....Mannitol! This is what I have been busy doing, finishing up medication modules (basically quizzes) over different medication that affect different body systems.

Theory class has been interesting lately. We have talked about the child with cystic fibrosis, the child with upper GI alteration, and the child with lower GI alterations. My experiences in clinical are helping to make this info sink in! The GI (gastrointestinal) stuff has just been interesting! We have our third exam this coming Monday so I am hoping that I am able to get some studying done this weekend. I need to do better than I did on the last exam.

Clinical has been going okay. Last Friday was a little bit challenging, but I got through with some much needed encouragement! Today (Thursday) was a great day! I had a wonderful patient that seemed to like me better than any of the other health care people that came into the room (that made me feel good!). Anyway I will have this patient again tomorrow morning so I'm looking forward to that, and might ask for second patient.

Research continues to be pretty boring, but we have a project coming up that each group has to present so hopefully it will get a little more interesting the next couple of weeks. And my LEI projects is done and turned in for the semester. So glad that is out of the way! It's hard to believe how fast this semester has gone by.

As The Time Flies By....

SO first off I should just apologize for not keeping up with the weekly update. I was doing great for a while and then I hit a busy run and forget to update. So my time at Helen Devos Children's Hospital has been pretty great. It's hard to already believe that we are halfway through this rotation. I have had number of great learning experiences and have gotten to work with a variety of ages of children. And most of them have had very different issues which I think has been great to enhance the learning. Most of the nurses have been great, once and while you may have one having a bad day and they sort of shrug you off but I don't think its intentional (or at least I'll give them the benefit of the doubt). AND my clinical professor is awesome! This coming Thursday I get to spend the day in the pediatric intensive care unit which I am excited for!

Theory class (just a reminder- theory class is like a normal classroom setting with a professor who teaches us about certain topics) has been okay. Since the 2nd exam, which I didn't do as well on as I hoped to, we have been talking about a lot of psych stuff like: mood disorders (depression, bipolar), eating disorders, and children with mental health problems. These weren't as interesting as I hoped, probably because I already knew a lot of the info with working at pine rest. This week our classes were on the child with respiratory alterations and the child with cystic fibrous. With cystic fibrous we watched a short video which was really frustrated me (I just had a hard time getting past the thinking of the mother, but I guess as a nurse I am just going to have to be able to get over this kind of thing). We also had a paper due this week on Monday. We had to write on a professional nursing issue, so I chose to write about nurse-patient ratios. It was actually really hard to write about considering the amount of varying research results that I found, but I got it done!

Besides all the learning and what not, I think the part of school that I enjoy the most is getting to see all my friend on both Monday and Tuesday (and Thursday and Friday if your in my clinical group), as well as someone special a little extra! But I thank God everyday for bringing me to this place in my life where I have been able to meet some pretty amazing friends and professors and have them as part of my life.