Friday, February 18, 2011

Week 17: N150, 2nd Semester, The ELIMINATION round!

It's Good to Be Back
It's been over a month since my last entry.  I had intended writing a Week 16.5 entry (where I would write about stuff that happened during the break, such as my fall down a mountain), but I got lazy.  I had intended to write the Week 17 entry when it was Week 17, but I got busy.  Being busy is not going to change this semester and I can no longer being able to produce entries in a regular fashion.  I'm motivated to this project.  There will be an entry for each week, but I may not be able to produce the same detail as I have in the past. I'm already finished with the 3rd week of school and I'm just posting the 1st entry.

Blog Title Redesign
I was looking to create a fresh look for my blog title.  After 1 semester in nursing school, my perspective has changed a little bit.  Originally, the title was trying to be clever.  Did you notice that the acronym for "Really Now" is R.N.?  R.N. = Registered Nurse.  But I began thinking back about my life and how nursing school has got my life out of a standstill.  The title "Life in Neutral: A student nurse's forward-moving progress in life while looking back and retelling the stories of each week of nursing school." fits much better to where I have gotten to in life.  Hey, I might change it again next semester.  Oh yea, I also moved the blog entries themselves to the left side of the page from the right side.

N150:  What Ever Happened to ME time?

When it comes to the schedule, they didn't hold back.  It was an incredibly busy week.  In coversations with many students in the nursing program, there are reasons why they call this semester the "Elimination Round."  There's more to learn and the nursing instructors for 2nd semester expect us to handle more difficult situations. The bar has been raised exponentially and they are not going to baby us through the program anymore.  I just hope that I've learned something from N100 and have built up my nursing and critical thinking skills for this round of nursing school.

So What's Going to Be Different this Semester?
I'll have two 8-Week Rotations during the semester.  A rotation in Medical-Surgical and a rotation in Women's Health. 30 of us will continue learning theory behind medical-surgical while the other 30 will have begin learning concepts in Women's Health (aka, Labor and Deliver).  Which means I only see half of my classmates during lecture hours.  Yes, our classrooms are next to each other and we have the same lecture hours, it's just different not seeing your whole class there.  During lab hours, we do get to see each other again (though we are busy practicing new skills, supposedly).

A list of other differences:
  • 4 Teaching Instructors (2 in Med/Surg and 2 in Women's Health) as compared to 3 in N100
  • Med/Surg gets to pass out meds and Women's Health gets to watch babies be born.
  • All the fun people are on my side of the class (lol, I'm the life of the party)
  • There's a few new students.
  • Everybody know who I am, so its not like the first day all over again.


We Hit the Ground Rolling
They definitely didn't hold back.  In the midst of all of the scheduled time at school, we had to begin studying.  Honestly, looking at the schedule, I don't know where I'm gonna have the time to study.  The schedule above does not list everything I do in a week.  I work as well, and all of that is up there too.
  • Monday:  2 Lectures
  • Tuesday: 2 Lectures and Lab
  • Wednesday:  2 Lectures
  • Thursday:  Math Test, Lab, and Lecture
  • Friday:  Lab
One of the last lecture this semester as a whole class.  Lecture Topic: The Nursing Process.  I love the Nursing Process.  I live and breathe the Nursing Process.

New Nursing Skills:  The Intravenous Piggyback (aka IVPB)
I figure I'd stick to writing about Med/Surg rotation.  I'll eventually get to showing a little bit more of what the other half of class is doing when I'm actually doing it in the next rotation.  In a nutshell, we learned to give medications orally, topically, opthalmic, and as injections.  Now we're learning how to infuse medication through an IV or a saline lock.  A patient normally has some type of access to their veins (hence intravenous).  Sometimes they have some type of fluid going into them (aka, the primary IV line).  Medications can be infused through this primary line when you connect a secondary line to an access port on the primary line (hence why it's called an IV Piggyback).

We're learning it the old-fashion way.  Not using an infusion pump and calculating a drop factor on our own.
Priming the secondary line.  It takes some concentration to not lose more than 1 drop of medication.

Priming the line for the first could be messy, if you open the clamp too much.  Next thing you know, half your medication is on the floor.

You probably don't want to make this big of a mess when you're working with an IVPB.

The Math Test - Everyone PASSED!
This probably won't be a common occurrence in the future.

Finally wrote about the 1st week of school.  4 day weekend is upon us, maybe I can actually catch up with my blog entries!!!!!!

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