So Much Going On Already

Well, I'm already behind on updating.  Last week was a LOT of craziness!  On Monday, September 3rd (mine and Dale's 30th wedding anniversary and my first clinical day of the semester), my employer informed me that he would be closing business at the end of the month. Shock cannot describe how I felt! I got so upset that I actually hyperventilated. So now the search for another job that will provide me with the flexibility to continue this journey and STILL pay our bills. I'm hoping to get into one of the local hospitals, but that is not going to be full time and certainly will not be even close to what I am currently making. I've had a wonderful time in my position here and a boss that has been so accomodating to allow me to alter my schedule each semester enabling me to start college for the first time in my life and then to actually keep this up as started into the clinical portion of the nursing program. I'm definitely going to miss this.  

So in the meantime after getting this news I had to head to the hospital for my first clinical day. This day was strictly orientation with the unit we will spend this rotation on. Unfortunately our unit is moving to a brand new location with the same hospital during this rotation. As soon as we figure out where things are we will have to do it all over again. We didn't have any patient contact last week as it was only one day (due to holiday on Monday) on site.

My clinical group started in the regular 'med-surg' area so we had to show that we were still able to do the skills we had learned last semester. I spent two afternoons in the lab going over things to make sure it was all still up 'there'! I had an issue with one of the 'Sim' dummies, I was not hearing any bowel sounds and we have to differentiate between, present or absent, hypo, normal or hyper. I was doing well on blood pressure, heart sounds, lung sounds but just could not hear the bowel sounds (and was freaking out).  Turns out that the Sim I was working on was NOT working properly!!! Thankfully when it was time to do my assessment, I passed with no problems.

Later in the week we had an IV lab where we had to learn how to hang various IV's (regular IV, secondary bag and also syringe pump). I was so glad I paid attention to the lecture as it really did go fairly smooth (I just always second guess myself and have to stop that).

I'll definitely be back the end of this week to update all that we were learning this week. Thank you again for following along on this journey.