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!