Week 6 as a Level 2 Nursing Student

This week was packed! I had my first shift on Monday night until 2315 at the school gym and then had an early morning class on Tuesday at 0830. Luckily, I was able to do a tonne of studying for patho between my patho lecture and work on Monday. You sure can accomplish alot in a 6.5 hour break!

Lab was great this week! We got to practice landmarking for injections! Woohoo! Note to any potential nursing students, for this lab, wear pants and if possible, tights! They're great for feeling the muscles you need to landmark.

Wednesday was the dreaded patho/microbi midterm day! I joked with David (our instructor) saying that they purposely schedule two midterms on one day just to see if student nurses could handle stress. Haha, if you can't handle two midterms on the same day, get out of the program. Haha! It's like their screening or filtering process or something.

I was fortunate enough to go to the OR again on Thursday, so I didn't have any patient research to do on Wednesday night, woohoo!! It was such a nice break, I went home, napped, and pretty much did nothing except for my pharmacology posting. And of course, the much anticipated CRIMINAL MINDS season premiere was on Wednesday, so I obviously watched that. You have to find time for yourself. Mental health = often overlooked but very important.

The OR experience was neat, don't get me wrong, I was able to watch a bilateral ureteroscopy with lithotripsy. In short, it was a kidney stone removal from both sides using a scope. Haha! Medicine and its fancy terminology. I really got to know my patient this week, but I pretty much just observed the entire time, so I would have preferred doing something hands on, myself. I'm sure I could've asked to do more, but I wasn't sure if I should or not? So I was in pre-op with the patient, went to the OR and observed the procedure, then went to the post-anesthetic recovery unit with them as well and back to surgical daycare before the patient was discharged. I actually had a better time in the eye surgery clinic because I was able to do more and see more operations and admitting/discharge procedures. Anyway, it's exciting because we're starting to do injections in the hospital on real patients now, so it feels more nurse-y. Oh! And we missed clinical on Friday, so I haven't had two patients yet, but everyone else started with 2 patients this week! Yay!!!

This week is pretty relaxed, I think. No assignments due other than the regular lab readings and questions. I do have to do some assignments for PBL, though, but that shouldn't take too long and I can do that on my 6.5 hour break tomorrow. Woohoo!!!