Week Six

So it is week six of nursing school. Next week i go to the hospital for the first time with my clinical group. Next week we will just be doing orientation but after that I will be responsible for patient care for a 5-6 hour period once a week. We've been practicing skills in the lab for the last 6 weeks but it is a little freaky that someone is going to be subject to my first attempt to give an injection, insert an NG tube and - gasp - administer an nema.





Speaking of nemas...





Just what you wanted to read about on a blog, huh....





Today during lab we had the priviledge of watching an instructional video on how to give an nema. Now, giving an nema is not something I'm looking forward to certainly but if bodily functions totally gross a person out then nursing isn't a good career choice. So I accept the neccesity of doing gross stuff. My issue really is that there is a woman out there who chose to get an nema as part of an instructional video. Who are you???????? How much could MedCom (the company that made the movie) possibly pay you to make you let nursing students watch you get a tube up the hiney inperpetuity? I suppose I should be grateful to you for furthering my nursing education but iyiyi, I just can't imagine!

I've had two more tests and two more A's. I have to thanks Dr. House once again for his contribution to my good grades. Seriously, two things that were on House directly related to stuff we learned about this week. Have I mentioned that I LOVE that show! Anything that reduces the study time, right!

On a happier note, it is a lot of fun meeting new people and making new friends. I've met some really nice people so far!

A baby, Finally!

Teri had her baby!

Details are here on her blog...

All ELEVEN POUNDS of him! Wow! She is my hero. If that isn't evidence that a woman can birth the body she grows 95% of the time, I don't know what is.

Welcome to the world, little guy!

Weekend Update...

It's been a quiet weekend. Hubby went dove hunting so its just been me and the girls. My friend and her kids came over for dinner Friday and Saturday nights for spagetti night and waffle night. I love having breakfast for dinner! The best waffle recipe on the planet is from Heloise, the advice columnist...

Heloise's Waffles

Ingredients:
2 Cups biscuit mix
1/2 Cup oil
1 Egg
1 1/3 Cups Club soda

Mix together and cook on a hot waffle iron. The batter will not keep but you can freeze the finished product.

I've made waffles from scratch with egg whites that are beaten stiff and folded into the batter. Heloise's waffles are much better and are soooooooooo much easier.

Today the girls and I will go to church, come home and I'll probably do some housework, laundry and whatnot, and study some. Pretty boring...

But in just a few minutes, I am going to go run. I probably have time to do about 3 miles before I need to get home and get ready for church. It is cool again this morning and I am going to take advantage of it. My running schedule has definitely suffered since starting nursing school. I miss it and my waist line misses it more. I have some new Kindlings Muse loaded onto my ipod. (The Kindlings Muse is this very cool website with podcast interviews of "thoughtful creatives" as the host calls them usually having something to do with faith and culture. I found it through Katiekind. Thanks!)

Last on my list today is to continue praying for Teri. Baby number 4 is now about 12 days over due and labor is just puttering along. Praying for her stamina and her spirits. Who knows...Maybe there is a baby already and I just haven't gotten a call yet...One can always hope!!

Foley Catheters and Dressing changes

Ya know, when you have phrases like Foley Catheter and IM injections on your blog you get all sorts of interesting google hits. So really, visitors, I'd love to know who you are and what you think. Leave me a note!

Anyway, today I practiced inserting a Foley Catheter on a mannequin no doubt. I'm sure the first time I do a real one it will freak me out but on a plastic mannequin it is no problem! Best tip from my instructor...Give everyone a little peri bath regardless of whether they need it. It gives you time to make sure you have the right hole! I'm so sorry to my non-medical readers. Probably way too much information!!!!!! We also practiced dressing changes which involves maintaining a sterile field. Asceptic technique is a very cool concept to me. Maybe my calling will be in the OR and not in L&D. We don't have a dedicated O.R. rotation so I'm hoping that as I get further along some of our surgeon friends will let me come watch a couple surgeries just for fun. Im such a nerd!

Speaking of nerds...

I got a 97.5 on my Pharm test. The class average was an 88 so everyone seems to have done well. Always a good confidence booster to do well on the first exam. i have another test on Monday in Assessment (which is basically "how to do a physical exam 101) that I need to spend some time studying for. So sinc eI don't have class again until 5 I guess I should get off my blog and go do something productive!!!

I PASSED!!!!!!

Yippee! I passed!!!!! Which means I got a 100 on a math test. Now that is definitely a first!!!!!

AND, more excellent academic news....

Hubby got final, final, final approval for his doctoral project which means come December we can all call him DOCTOR! Now that has been 10 YEARS in the making! What a happy day!

AND, one more thing, afternoon classes were canceled because there was no water in the building! This is good for obvious reasons but not so good because they will figure out a way for us to have to make this up!

Some cool weather!!!

Right around mid-september Houstonians start to get real grumpy cause its been so darn hot for so long. Well, yesterday we had our mid-September taste of December, which means it was only in the 80s with low humidity and a breeze. It was so nice. The girls played outside all afternoon. Hubby put together our new grill (without needing I.V. fluids for dehydration afterwards.) I'm sure it will be blazingly hot and humid again today but we all needed a little reminder that it won't be 95 degrees and 90% humidity forever!

Today's my math test...Dreamed I got to the test, fell asleep and woke up with 5 minutes left. Then I tried doing the problems as fast as I could and the numbers kept changing.

Nursing school: The week in review...

So here are some thoughts about nursing school as I go into my fourth week...

1. Going back to school as an adult is very different than when I did this as an 18 year old. Probably an obvious statement... But what surprises me the most is that I get all hot under the collar when the faculty starts in on being prepared for class and doing the reading, etc, implying that we are all slackers. When I was 18 I would have probably agreed that without some serious shaming I wasn't going to do my work. As I was venting about this to hubby he said, "Now, when people talk to you like that you send them to their rooms!" Very true very true. I'm totally not used to having an adult talk to me like I'm an idiot.

2. Computers have changed things. Again an obvious statement! My organizational method for school prior to this was a spiral notebook for notes for each class preferably with built in pockets for the syllabus and any handouts. Now, we have a virtual classroom on the computer where announcements, the syllabus and all the notes or powerpoint slides are posted. We are supposed to print out the syllabus before the first class and each set of powerpoint slides that go with each lecture. Using the school's computer lab that isn't too difficult, they have high speed printers and unlimited paper! The downside is that I think having the instant download option makes the faculty less organized and less forgiving. So if an instructor doesn't post powerpoints until Sunday for a 9 a.m. Monday lecture, Oh Well, you still need to have it printed. Whine whine whine....

3. I had my first run in with a doctor this week. I was waiting for the elevator to go up to my car in the parking garage and didn't realize it had come and the doors were open (there are two elevators and it doesn't make any noise when it comes). There was a guy in scrub waiting as well right in front of the opening elevator. He SNAPPED at me, as in with two fingers snapped, and then said, "GO!" He SNAPPED at me! I almost sent him to his room. In the elevator I saw his name badge said he was a resident at Methodist. We'll assume he was coming off of a 36 hour shift or something but really, SNAPPING at a person? I MIGHT let Dr. House snap at me, MIGHT!

4. I learned to give a bedbath and to make a bed this week. Must remember to thank my mom for insisting on hospital corners when we made our beds as kids. Making a hospital bed is a snap! Only trick is that you can't flap the linens to get them straight. Too much dust and linen lint gets popped into the air. We gave a bed bath to a manniquin. We'll see how that goes with a real person. Our lab time was delayed by four hours because of Hurricane Humberto (we didn't get even a drop of rain because it veered off at the last minute). And we got chastized by one of the instructors for not watching the videos ahead of time. We were supposed to watch the videos during lab but they skipped it because of the delay. Somehow we were supposed to intuit that it would be a good idea to search around the vitual classroom, find bedbath and bedmaking videos, guess that they were associated with the lab class (because there are at least two different videos on each of those topics) and watch them, because we would just KNOW instintively that they would want to skip that part after the delay. See point number 1 to see how I feel about this.

5. Met my clinical instructor. Her name is Flo. She's probably early 50s, from the East Coast so she has a New Yorkish accent. Really really like her! Very nice.

6. I have my first round of tests this coming week. Dosage calculations which is a math test and pass/fail. You get 100, you pass, you get anything else, you fail. No pressure....And I have a pharmacology test. Learned some cool stuff about pain and pain meds last week. When increased slowly and over time, Morphine has no ceiling, which means that you can give someone huge doses of Morphine without causing liver or kidney toxicity, as long as their dose was increased slowly as their tolerance to the drug increased. And I learned that in an emergency you don't need a doctor's order to use Narcan (the antidote to narcotics).

7. Learned to take a blood pressure. No not using the automatic machine! Using a cuff and a stethescope.

So that's the week in review. Any one need their blood pressure checked? I'm your girl!

Random, oh so Random

I got my Land's End catalogue in the mail today. On the cover were featured 100% cotton No Iron Sheets. Apparently when they introduced the Ultimate No Iron Sateen Sheets last year our response was "We Want MORE!!" So they are proud to offer us the largest selection of pure cotton No Iron bedding ever made available. It never in a million years ever occurred to me to iron my sheets. So who are all these people who are screaming for more No Iron sheets. Really. Who are you? If you read my blog please post a comment. I would really like to know who you are.

Teri's baby...

As you can see from my side bar, I like to watch movies. I have had the priveledge of being somewhat involved in two of Teri's three (so far) births and each of them has had a movie associated with it.

With Cayna, I was there with her acting as doula. Her labor stalled midmorning so I went to get my haircut and grab some lunch. Got back to her house to find someone had dropped off some movies for her laboring pleasure. One was "About Schmidt", Jack Nicholson's midlife crisis movie. Kinda slow, Cathy Bates is the redeeming factor. Just not really a "My friend's having a baby, let's watch a movie" kind of movie. But we watched about half of it and then labor picked up and we "Forgot About Schmidt."

Bethanie came a week after I went out to wait for her birth and hopefully revisit the doula experience. The night Teri was laboring and had been all day, hubby and I watched "Open Water", that movie about the couple who gets left behind by the scuba boat and get eaten by sharks. It was a terrible movie. The wife was so whiney that we were begging the sharks to eat her already by the end. But nonetheless, the theme heightened my rising anxiety about what was going on with Teri's labor. By the time the movie was over I had called both hospitals in Redlands just in case she had transferred. She called before I went to bed with news of a long, hard labor to bring 11 pound 2 ounce Bethanie into the world. Teri became my hero that day!

So we are on labor watch once again. My nursing school schedule prevents even an attempt to make it to this birth, darn it! But I just wonder wonder wonder what movie will be associated with this little one's birthday? Will there be a new girl to love or a boy? How will Teri's labor and delivery go? And, how big will this one be?

Praying for you as you get to the end, my friend!

Nursing school...injections 101...the mannequin didn't complain!

I got to do something nursish (is that a word? The adjectival form of nurse?) today. Learn to give an intramuscular injection. Drew it up in a syringe, and injected it into the arm and butt of a mannequin. Turns out if you don't know what you are doing you can cause nerve damage if you accidently hit the sciatic nerve when giving an IM injection in the backside. Who knew! Good thing I'm paying attention. Everyone's sciatic nerve is absolutely safe under my syringe. I'm sticking with the arm!!!!!

The old homestead is up for sale

My childhood home is for sale. My dad sent me the link to the realtor. My parents sold it in 1992 I believe. Been a few changes since then in the pictures on the listing page but a lot is still the same. My parents bought it in 1979 for $125,000 I think. They remodelled, added a pool, built on a bedroom, gutted the kitchen and multiple paint changes in the time we lived there. It is hard to imagine that my childhood home is now worth that much money!!!!!

Here's a link if you are curious....

Drumroll please...... the long awaited before and afters!

We're mostly done!!!!! Hurray!!! Mostly because there wasn't enough carpet to finish my closet but that's minor enough that we spent the last day or so putting the house back together. It is seriously like moving and unpacking. I'm so pleased with how it turned out! It feels like a whole new house. I keep wondering, who lives here?

Family room before:

Family room after:

Living room before:

Living room after:

Oldest daughter's room before:

And after:

Nursing school and elephants...

So we made it through the first week. It is still overwhelming. I am in class, labs or clinicals 29 hours per week, and then there is studying on top of that. I'm pretty good at academics so I guess I'm not too worried about passing but there's a lot to learn and there's a lot riding on learning it. (If I hear one more instructor say "This is the MOST important class you will take during your nursing education because if you don't learn it you might kill your patients" I am going to quit and become a fireman!) I'm just going to focus on one day at a time, one assignment at a time, one class at a time, and get it done. When I was expressing concerns over how i was going to do this all, my kids' pediatrician, who is also a friend, suddenly stopped me and said, "How do you eat an elephant?" I looked at her blankly then clued in, "One bite at a time!" So that's going to be my new motto, my new brand for myself, the elephant. Helps that I'm generally a Republican! hehehe

One more thing...Thanks Teri and Karen for your cheerleading and support. It really does help me stay on the rational side of life!