Done with Year 1!

I did it! I successfully completed my first year of nursing school! As you can probably tell, I sorely neglected (okay, completely abandoned) my blog during Spring term, but my schedule was just too crazy and something had to go. My clinicals were at Silverton Hospital, starting at 6 am, a schedule that I found very challenging being the night owl that I am. However, I discovered that I absolutely LOVED the hospital and staff and will now consider applying for jobs there after I graduate. My first day there I was taken aback by how small the hospital was - for godsakes they only have 48 beds in their medical/surgical unit and only THREE in ICU, compared to the 700 beds at Salem Hospital. But by day 2 I was starting to see the perks of working somewhere so tiny. It's like growing up in Lakeview where everyone knows you. There's a feeling of community! I actually got to know the regular RNs and they were very welcoming of us students, even remembering our names!

I learned a lot at Silverton Hospital and it helped immensely that I had a great instructor. I spent one day at the hospital's outpatient clinic called STEPS where I helped with the anticoagulation clinic (they mostly just do a finger poke to see how well the patient's anticoagulation medication is working), gave a super huge hormone injection to a really skinny man with prostate cancer, and watched several wound dressing changes. My favorite was a young guy with an abscess in his armpit the size of a golf ball! He wasn't sure how it happened - it just showed up one day. He has to come in daily to get it drained and packed with absorbent dressing. The whole time I kept wondering, "Could that happen to me?" I also got to watch the nurse manager place a PICC line in a patient who was going to need IV antibiotics for 2+ weeks. A PICC is a peripherally inserted central catheter that is threaded from a vein in the arm to the heart. It can stay in place for weeks and be used to various IV therapies, instead of using the traditional IV site in the arm that has to be replaced every few days. As you can imagine, the process is quite involved and completely sterile! I got to assist by handing the ultrasound wand to the nurse while not contaminating her sterile field.

By the end of clinical, I was taking care of 3 patients at a time and came to the realization that it's not the skills that make nursing difficult, it's the time management. All three of your patients may need pain meds at the same time each morning, and somehow you have to juggle that with doing assessments and documenting your findings in a timely manner. My instructor was really big on teaching us how to prioritize. She'd come up to me about two hours into the shift and ask, "Which patient did you see first? Why?" With nursing you have to be careful to stay in a PROactive mode and not let the little crises of the day take over and throw you into a reactive mode. Once that happens, you never get caught up! While I definitely learned a lot, I came to the major realization that I have a LONG way to go. My two meager days of clinical each week can give me a basic idea of what nursing will be like, but I won't be good at it until I've been on the job for at least a few months. Nursing is something that you learn with repeated practice, and at times that can be very overwhelming. I just have to take one day at a time and appreciate the little victories.