RN on the neuro unit towards the end of our clincials: So, do you know where you wanna work?
Me (in my head): NOT HERE!
Me (out loud): Well I know where I don't want to work. Ortho was definitely not my favorite. I'm not really sure.
I could see how med surg would give you tons of clinical and time management skills. There's also a huge variety so you probably wouldn't get bored. Of course that also means you have know a lot about a bunch of different disease processes.
Ortho was just incredibly boring for me and I am definitely not an ortho nurse!
Neuro was actually more interesting as I look back. I enjoy the knowledge behind neuro and brain/cognitive stuff is more interesting to me than a lot of other things. Neuro exams are kind of interesting, but I'm not sure I would do neuro long term because sometimes the patient's are just screwing with you... and that's annoying.
Labor and delivery was obviously my true love, which I hoped it would be. It has just enough excitement and down time (usually) that I don't think I would be bored or exhausted constantly. There's all sorts of new skills to learn with reading fetal monitoring strips and participating in c-sections all that jazz.
Mental health is hard for me. I really liked some of it and I reaaallly didn't like other parts. I liked being on the youth unit and sitting in on outpatient adolescent groups, so I could see myself working with adolescents, especially teen girls. But I think that if I were going to do mental health I'd really rather be a NP that does counseling or therapy. But I'm not going to go to school for that... so that's kind of a moot point. Regardless, there are people with mental illness everywhere so mental health will be useful in any nursing.
I'm excited to do an ER observation this fall because I'm also super interested in working in the ER.
Peds is pretty interesting and I think it would be good from the aspect that I like kids, but unfortunately kids come with their own parents and sometimes they're hard to deal with. Also, IV starts on kids freak me out.
So the current answer... I STILL HAVE NO FREAKING CLUE.
I'll let you know.
Showing posts with label med surg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label med surg. Show all posts
Friday, July 26, 2013
Friday, December 21, 2012
Clinicals
Since I'm in an accelerated program, my first clinicals took place this last semester. We had 5 weeks of clinical in the lab at school and then 3 weeks in the hospital (twice a week). Mostly the stuff at the lab was pretty boring, but we did learn how to do all the basic skills: bed baths, changing an occupied bed, vital signs, ROM, assessments, giving meds (not IV or IM), etc.
The check off's were nerve wracking... but I passed them all. I know that you have to learn the things somehow, but it seemed like things were so different in the hospital that I'm not sure how useful it all was. There's only certain things you can learn by pretending to do them on a fake patient..
My clinicals were on a general med-surg floor that also included some renal and trauma patients. Overall most of the nurses that I interacted with were really nice. Some of them were more willing than others to teach, let us in on cool procedures and take the time to help us out. The most recent graduates seemed to be the most willing to help us out and teach us, since they were just in school not that long ago. Mostly the nurses were grateful to have another set of hands, since we were basically the ones taking care of our one patient.
It seemed to me that clinicals (for fundamentals at least) pretty much consist of getting your feet wet, getting used to going into patient's rooms and talking to them. You try to see what else is going on on the floor to see if there's something interesting to see, but otherwise you feel like you're in your patient's room or stuck in the hall trying to find something to occupy yourself. The worst was that there was literally no place we could go that was out of the way, where we could sit or chart if we had free time. This was sort of okay for a 5 hour clinical but it may kill me when we start 12 hour clinicals the second 8 weeks of the spring semester. Ugh.
Procedures accomplished
- Bed baths. Managed to get lucky on my first two patients and they were ambulating and didn't need help bathing, but I helped a fellow student with a bed bath on her patient the second week and that was just plain tiring because the woman basically couldn't help us at all. My third week I had a partial paralysis guy who didn't do much of anything for himself so I had to give him two full bed baths, luckily with help from fellow students. He was also a complete gem in the fact that he was so out of it. I couldn't figure out if he had dementia (he was being treated for it), was trying to be funny, or was just that inappropriate. Whatever the reason, he was a challenging patient.
- Flushed an NG tube on a patient
- Passed oral and transdermal patch meds to my patient the last week. Not super hard... but I got to use the Pyxis so I guess that was exciting
- Sort of assisted my instructor with an ostomy. We didn't put the new one on because the ostomy nurse was called for it.
- Vital signs twice a day on each of my patients.
Procedures witnessed
- Nurse pulled a foley catheter on a woman after I got to deflate the balloon.
- Watched the nurse give IV and IM meds, give meds in the NG tube
- Watched my instructor empty a J-P drain.
- Changing out an ostomy which the ostomy nurse did (after my patient's ostomy bag exploded all over the floor while I was with her. Twice. Have I mentioned I'm a figurative and literal shit magnet?)
Care plans
Yup, they suck. They're an epic waste of time in my opinion. But they're apparently a necessary evil in nursing school and perhaps after. The hospital we're at actually has nurses doing a sort of care plan for their patients. Really they're just stating nursing goals and interventions and that stuff...
Care plans are just time consuming and boring. But whatever, they must be done and so I do them.
The check off's were nerve wracking... but I passed them all. I know that you have to learn the things somehow, but it seemed like things were so different in the hospital that I'm not sure how useful it all was. There's only certain things you can learn by pretending to do them on a fake patient..
My clinicals were on a general med-surg floor that also included some renal and trauma patients. Overall most of the nurses that I interacted with were really nice. Some of them were more willing than others to teach, let us in on cool procedures and take the time to help us out. The most recent graduates seemed to be the most willing to help us out and teach us, since they were just in school not that long ago. Mostly the nurses were grateful to have another set of hands, since we were basically the ones taking care of our one patient.
It seemed to me that clinicals (for fundamentals at least) pretty much consist of getting your feet wet, getting used to going into patient's rooms and talking to them. You try to see what else is going on on the floor to see if there's something interesting to see, but otherwise you feel like you're in your patient's room or stuck in the hall trying to find something to occupy yourself. The worst was that there was literally no place we could go that was out of the way, where we could sit or chart if we had free time. This was sort of okay for a 5 hour clinical but it may kill me when we start 12 hour clinicals the second 8 weeks of the spring semester. Ugh.
Procedures accomplished
- Bed baths. Managed to get lucky on my first two patients and they were ambulating and didn't need help bathing, but I helped a fellow student with a bed bath on her patient the second week and that was just plain tiring because the woman basically couldn't help us at all. My third week I had a partial paralysis guy who didn't do much of anything for himself so I had to give him two full bed baths, luckily with help from fellow students. He was also a complete gem in the fact that he was so out of it. I couldn't figure out if he had dementia (he was being treated for it), was trying to be funny, or was just that inappropriate. Whatever the reason, he was a challenging patient.
- Flushed an NG tube on a patient
- Passed oral and transdermal patch meds to my patient the last week. Not super hard... but I got to use the Pyxis so I guess that was exciting
- Sort of assisted my instructor with an ostomy. We didn't put the new one on because the ostomy nurse was called for it.
- Vital signs twice a day on each of my patients.
Procedures witnessed
- Nurse pulled a foley catheter on a woman after I got to deflate the balloon.
- Watched the nurse give IV and IM meds, give meds in the NG tube
- Watched my instructor empty a J-P drain.
- Changing out an ostomy which the ostomy nurse did (after my patient's ostomy bag exploded all over the floor while I was with her. Twice. Have I mentioned I'm a figurative and literal shit magnet?)
Care plans
Yup, they suck. They're an epic waste of time in my opinion. But they're apparently a necessary evil in nursing school and perhaps after. The hospital we're at actually has nurses doing a sort of care plan for their patients. Really they're just stating nursing goals and interventions and that stuff...
Care plans are just time consuming and boring. But whatever, they must be done and so I do them.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)