Half way through the semester!

So again, I have to apologize for not posting sooner, but this time I really do have a legit reason for such a gap...because I have done nothing. Yup, that is the sarcastic honest truth! So after my last post (which explained switch day and the time I spent for the day at Forest View) not much has happened regarding my psychiatric clinical. Several times our clinical was canceled because of circumstances I can't explain, but then we had to make up the days we missed. One day we had to go all around downtown and find health resources for the type of residents that live in the Herkimer Apartments and then the other day we spent again at Forest View Mental Hospital. Let's just say that the psych clinical was really disappointing and a huge mess. I'm glad that it is now over. And I am starting my second clinical rotation for the semester this week so watch for an updated post about that soon.

Class has been going well. Currently we are in the mist of having to turn in our 2nd paper this week, so I spent the majority of the weekend writing it. It is kind of an interesting paper. We got to pick a medical dilemma situation and in the first paper we had to write about our personal values and profession values regarding the dilemma and in this 2nd paper we had to write about ethical and legal issues surrounding the dilemma. I chose to do my paper about an adolscent male who wishes to receive no more chemotherapy treatments and his parents want him to continue to receive the treatment. We have one more paper to write during the semester that kind of integrates all the information from both papers together. Although this picture captures the feelings I have had when writing this paper!



Last week Monday and today we had our skills labs which I thought were both pretty interesting. Last Monday we had an ECG simulation with one of the manikins who was in the midst of having a heart attack. I feel like I learned a lot about that situation and what to do. And then I thought our lab today was pretty cool. We learned how to do opened and closed suctioning and provide trach care. And then we also got to finally learn and practice how to start IVs. Even though it was on a fake arm...I had been looking forward to that for a while. And I even got to try it out on this computerized simulator thing which was pretty awesome!

Namaste

You got it...two posts within one week. Yeah I was feeling a little bad for slacking off with keeping up with posts. So I thought I would create one more blog entry this week devoted to the one day of clinical I had this week...Thank you snow day! Anyway Thursday was a switch day for part of my group. Normally I am at Herkimer apartments for my rotation, but this week I got to spend Thursday at Forest View Mental Hospital (which is another psych clinical placement) and half of the students that are normally at Forest View went to Herkimer for the day. It was a great switch!

It didn't start off that well because traffic getting to the hospital was horrendous. I guess of course after the blizzard everyone was driving safe, even though the main roads were clear. So once I arrived I found out that I would be in the general part of the hospital. I mainly got to go to the groups that the patients went to and sit it on them to see what they were like. The first group was just a general meeting about the overall schedule of the day. The second group was yoga. The therapist that taught yoga was fine with nursing students going to it as long as they participated and did the yoga...so yup I did yoga in my nice dress clothes.

Then after that I got a little tour of the hospital by the professor and attended the third group of the day. I can't remember what the group was called, but the patients were asked to look at certain parts of their life (like work, leisure, ect.) and see how well balanced these aspects were. After that class we had lunch, which was really pretty good. Then we went to the last group of the day for the time that the students were there (the patients still had more groups throughout the evening, but obviously the students don't stay there all day). The case manager that taught this group was real energetic and did a really good job engaging the patients in the discussion. His class was called "the laws of nature" and he talked about 15 different laws or prinicples and applied them to people with a co-occuring disorder (like someone with a mental illness and substance abuse issues). He talked about gravity, snowballing, flight or fight, sin and flesh, and several others. The class was really neat because he gave the patients a different way into looking at some of their problems.

So the day ended up being really great. I was nice to see a different perspective.

And thats about it because after that I went home, and the traffic was much better!

How can I describe this semester...lets just say interesting.

So is it totally bad when the most favorite class your taking for the semester is called "death and dying." Interesting enough, this class has been my favorite and its even a 3 hour long class. The prof. is great and makes class go by so fast and makes it interesting. We have been discussing a lot of legal and ethical issues surrounding death and end of life care, and as you can probably imagine people have lots of different feelings about this so class can get interesting fast.

Lecture has been okay. We have talked about asthma, neuro problems, cardiac, and musculoskeletal issues in the child. And we have now moved onto anxiety and personality disorders.


Clinical at the Herkimer has been interesting too. We play lots of games with the residents like yahtzee, cribbage, apples to apples, and last week one of the residents brought in a dart board. We also had dog day on Thursday so the nursing students could bring in their dogs for the residents to see and pet. We only had two dogs come in but the residents really seemed to like the dogs being there since they aren't allowed to have pets. And I think the dogs liked all the attention too.

This week we had a SNOW DAY! So clinical was canceled for Wednesday. And tomorrow I have a switch day...meaning that we get to switch our clinical site for the day with the students at Forest View Hospital so that we can get to see what that is like.

I feel like I'm not writing a lot, but really there isn't a super lot going on for me right now. I actually feel like this rotation is a break in the rush of all things nursing school, so that has been a huge benefit! Sorry for not updating sooner...I'll try to stay on top of it better!