Summer Clinicals :)

This summer I spent 5 weeks on the Medical/Surgical floor of University Hospital.
This floor included mostly orthopedic surgical patients as well as several bariatric and other misc. patients.

We started Wednesday afternoon with preplan.  This was time when we went to the hospital, were assigned a patient, and got all their basic info--labs, condition, treatments, procedures etc.
Then I would head home....plop down in front of So You Think You Can Dance (FAVE SHOW!) to do my care plan.  This involved very little thought...mostly a lot of flipping through the book and copying it down...making it ideal commercial/boring parts of the show work.  After the 2 hour show I was almost always done....so I got myself ready for bed...packed a lunch and went to sleep.  BY 10PM...BECAUSE
Thursday bright and early I got up...dressed like this

PICTURE PENDING!!!!

....grabbed some breakfast and my sack lunch...and ran to the hospital.

From roughly 6:45 to 7:15 we had conference...basically hearing about our patient from our instructor.  And then we ran out onto the floor to get vital signs...and the day began!

Seeing as we literally just started school, we are not exactly the most trained nurses ever, but we did have several responsibilities.

1. Bed baths....Have you ever given a bed bath to a 300+ pound immobile person?  NOT FUN!!!!
But usually these were not too bad.  It gives you lots of time to talk with your patient..learn about them and their condition.  It also gives you an up close and personal look at them, so that if there are any physical issues you can consider and treat them.
Although another downside to bed baths was the fact that you often had to change their sheets while they were still in there.  Possible...but takes practice!

2. Physical assessments......Head to toe we had to check them out.  It is both a good and a bad thing to have a student nurse assigned to you from a patient's perspective.  Good cause you get lots of individualized attention.  But not so good because they do much of what the nurse has already done again...just for practice.

3. Vital signs and I/Os...every 4 hours we did blood pressure, respiration rates, pulses, temperature and pain. We also had to keep track of everything that went in (I) and everything that came out (O)  LOVELY RIGHT??  haha

4. Simple procedures...these usually included wound care and dressings.  But sometimes if you were lucky you got a feeding tube or catheter you got to take care of!

5. Some people got to ambulate their patient.....this basically just meant help them walk around the floor to maintain good circulation.  I never got this job, since I only had 2 of my 5 patients that were mobile, and they were specially walked by Physical Therapy.  So sad!

6. If you had a nice nurse you also got to give shots, administer medications and draw blood.  This was always very fun!

7. GOPHER!!!  Lets be honest...this was our main job.  The patient or nurse needed anything...our job!

We actually got to do quite a bit if you think about it.  Not much else was done that we couldn't do.  We were nurses...we just always had to be supervised!