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!