A Little Bit of Caring

I finally started my leadership clinicals. I feel like we've been here forever already for this semester but it has not even been a month! It's crazy. The junior year students have already had like four clinical weekends though so I feel weird only have just having my first one!

I did two twelve hour shifts on Saturday and Sunday. Let me tell you, I was nervous to start back up again. I think we all were. Some friends and I were talking in my critical care class on Friday about how we were all nervous - it's silly since we've been doing this for so long. It was our last first-day of clinicals but then someone pointed out in class that our next first day will be our actual jobs! Craziness!

I had a really good time in the hospital this weekend. It was long but good. My feet ache - really it's my heels. I'm working on the Surgical Trauma ICU. One of my friends, Lauren, is working there as well so it's been really fun! The nurses are fabulous too. They are wonderfully helpful and so nice!

ICU nurses are typically assigned one to three patients depending on how critical the patients are. I was able to take care of one patient fully and then I helped my nurse preceptor take care of other patients with different tasks. For our leadership clinicals, we are supposed to be able to do full care of our patients with our nurse co-signing on things like our medications and assessments. We are pretty much on our own unless we need help!

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I spent the weekend assessing patients, giving medications, changing dressings, suctioning endotracheal tubes, leveling CVP monitors, checking nasogastric tubes, checking intake and outputs, and turning patients. I learned a lot. I was able to see new things all weekend which was great. I also was able to respond to a code blue with the charge nurse in which the patient survived after the CPR and defibrillation. It was neat to be able to see how the flow works in the hospital because we have been practicing running codes all day on Fridays in my critical care course. I was also to see some of the tasks that the charge nurse does which was cool to be able to see since as students we don't handle official paperwork.

Today, I put in two applications at different hospitals back home for their critical care graduate nurse internships! One of  their application processes closes this week and the other later this month, so hopefully I will be hearing from them soon! Keep my future job in your prayers, please!

Oh another big note! I ordered my graduation regalia today! I can't believe it!

Overall, I am glad to be back into the swing of things! I have five more of these double shift weekends left in the semester. My feet have to get used to it and so does my hubby ;)