short post

Short post tonight as it's the night before clinical and I really should be doing nothing but prep work...

Tomorrow: Newborn Nursery! woo hoo! gotta get some practice before my precious niece gets here!

Precious niece: coming soon! March 10th (or sooner if Stacey would just get in gear- hehe)

Current mood: actually pretty grumpy and discouraged thank you very much.

Still to do tonight: 1 drug card and a few small changes to 2 more, shower, get clinical supplies ready, get Anna ready, get Anna's lunch ready, get Anna's clothes laid out for tomorrow, get Anna's bag ready, finish any remaining housework that needs done.....fall exhausted into bed.

Thoughts about postpartum floor: loved it- want to work there at some point- don't care if its the lazy floor or if that makes me a loser for not being the rock star nurse

Aggravated about: so many things...among them tuition schedule changes and the fact that they keep scheduling field trips on Wednesdays when I can't go...and ...people...certain people...oh and definitely hygiene/dental presentations to 4th graders at a local elementary school - ugh that is such a yuck assignment.

to do this week: too much to even type here

Molly- could fall under the the aggravated about category

Lower back, rear end, and down my leg: hurts

Sickness: better!

Need: girl night- any volunteers?

Labor and Delivery

Labor and Delivery clinical was AWESOME- I really want to do my last half of clinical mgmt there next semester. We shall see if that works out. I got to watch a woman labor from the beginning of my shift to about 2 when she had her precious baby boy with me in there watching the whole thing! Those nurses up there are so incredible. I was really, really impressed by their skill. They go from totally calm and talking about their day to top speed action in the blink of an eye and then right back down to no big deal calmness! Next week I go to the postpartum unit. I am very much looking forward to this unit as it is another area I think I might like to work. I had to laugh because my instructor told me that it has a bit of a reputation as a lazy nursing floor because most of the patients are happy and healthy and looking forward to going home quickly with their new little ones. After all this work I don't want the reputation of being a lazy nurse! Ha! But I do really love the new babies and new mommas and being involved in their care. And the nurses that were with me right after I had Anna are the ones that initially inspired me to go into nursing in the first place. So, I guess we'll see where life leads me- and if it leads me to postpartum then I'll just be happy being a lazy nurse on a super happy floor! The super crazy action floors like ER never appealed to me anyway - although I have GREAT respect for those that work them. Just... not for me. Give me the pregnant ladies, happy mommas, new babies, or the older population every time!

School

Up to my ears in school and other things. Everyone being sick has put me so far behind I can barely even see where I need to be! I'd like to say I'll catch up all that housework and homework and everything tomorrow but I have a clinical prep and a few more drug cards and a computer something or other to do up at school and all this will pretty much take up my entire day. Then I'm hoping the snow will hold off or at least not be horrendous cause Wednesday is my clinical in labor and delivery!!! Then I'll sleep all day thursday and friday from sickness and exhaustion...yeah right!!! Hopefully I'll be spending those days catching everything up so we can have a normal (well as normal as we get with me in school...so not so normal at all) household again.

Anna's been up to all kinds of things and I need to get them all written down as this ole' blog here serves as some of my recording of her day to day life. Next blog!

The dreaded flu caught us

Anna was sick a few weeks ago with just a slight cold or something. In my usual worrisome state, I took her to the doctor to make sure it wasn't strep or something. My mom said something along the lines of "I just don't think she's sick enough for it to be something like strep..." and I didn't really know what she meant. Cause Anna hadn't ever really been super sick since she was a tiny baby. However, I know now!!! My goodness, what a sick little girl she has been! And this was just the flu! I cannot even imagine what parents of seriously ill children go through. She was sick for 7 days straight with the flu and then double ear infections and a throat infection just to top things off. Fevers in the high 103's, laying on the couch most of time, snotty nose, stuffy nose, ouchy throat, body aches, irritated eyes, restlessness, crazy sleeping for hours on end, terrible cough, yikes. I'm so glad she's getting better. I think the worst night was when I woke up to give her medicine, she sat up, cried about having to take it, then her nose started streaming blood (first time for me) and when she opened her mouth it was all bloody inside and her poor eyes were so red that they looked for a minute like they were bleeding!!! Holy cow, I screamed for Adam which of course scared him to death. Geez..... that took about 10 years off my life. Even after I figured out it was just a bloody nose and not some awful side effect of a terrible fever or underlying illness...ugh... enough of that. After that night Adam called his friends, Laurie and Steve, a nurse practitioner and an EMT, to come to our rescue. They ever so kindly came in the middle of our blizzard and looked her over, diagnosed the double ear infections and throat infection and called us in medicine to treat her. She is doing so much better. Laurie is so my hero- I want to be her as a nurse. Smart smart lady.

So, now that Anna is recovering, Adam is sick and I feel yucky myself... however, I must get back to my studies and all the other stuff that has piled up the last week. My house is a disaster, the laundry is mostly done but all piled up and needing put away, I have a test on Monday that I haven't even looked at, 4 case studies that have to be done tonight, about 10 more that need done by Monday, so many chapters to read that I literally don't know if I can get it done, bills to pay and organize, an incredibly messy desk, Katelyn's letters for her room to decorate - am hoping for some inspiration to hit on those! and various other things to get done asap. So, with that said, I shall depart to begin work on case studies! good night!

I'm behind already

School started again. I'm behind already. Again. Monday was the first day of class. We discussed STI's (I guess STD's is no longer pc?) and the many, many types of contraceptions. We even got to break off into groups (I think most of you know how I feel about group activities) and write a small blurb on a particular type of contraceptive, how it works, WHERE YOU PUT IT, I think we all see where this is going. The best part was when everyone actually held up their particular contraceptive so everyone could see what it looked like. Ah, the things I'm learning.
Wednesday was my first clinical. PEDS rotation. Surprisingly uneventful. I had two patients for the first time. It was a long shift- 615 to 5. And Anna nicely kept me up (didn't realize she was getting sick) most of the night before. I was up most of last night too. I've spent most of today barely conscious on the couch with her.
I guess not much else to report. I have a lot of catching up to do for school so while I'm up checking Anna's temperature every 5 mins tonight I'll work on some of that.

The Bug

No, not the cold bug that has currently taken up residence in my bloodstream...the scrapbooking bug! A new friend I met while volunteering at Anna's school lunch program is an avid scrapbooker and seeing her blog and hearing her talk about scrapbooking has infected me with the DESIRE TO CREATE! Ok that was maybe a little dramatic. However, I am looking forward to going to her scrapbooking day coming up soon. In the process of putting my desk together, I got out almost all of my material. Plus I'm helping my sister make the letters for Katelyn's room that we've been talking about for several months. All of this has shown me how sadly depleted my supplies are and how badly a trip to Hobby Lobby is needed. ;) :) :) Hobby Lobby deserves more than one smiley face. Hobby Lobby and scrapbooking supplies deserves a whole post of smilies. I have a whole bunch of pages torn out of magazines and saved to my computer of pages I'd like to steal ideas from. The truth is that I have way too many supplies as it is- more supplies than I could use in a lot of pages. Yet somehow... I need more!!! That's the nature of the bug!

Snow Day

My day has turned changed directions about 4 times already and its only 10:30. I was supposed to be enjoying the company of a friend that I never get to see and her babies but the snow put a stop to that. (stupid snow trapping me inside). At the thought of being trapped inside alone all day with a restless and full of energy 4 year old while feeling like sh.. less than optimal, the feelings of insanity began to rise rapidly. I put out the call for rescue and my sister promised to come over and hang out and work on some decorations for baby Katelyn's room. Yea! No more craziness for Amber! Since I knew some company was in sight, I leaned into the snow day and for some reason (perhaps the crazy had set in a little without me knowing) I decided it was a great idea to start about 10 projects. So I opened up my catchall back bathroom and started pulling out all the accumulated stuff to throw away, put away, or whatever else needed to be done. As I started that I found more and more things that fit in quite well with the decorations I have started for my bedroom and bathroom so I pulled all that out too! The bathroom is about half cleaned out, I have 3 small painting projects halfway done sitting on my kitchen counters, various other things scattered around that need to be put away, my desk is rapidly gathering a large amount of paperwork, my school stuff is half done and school starts Monday, something I need to hang in Anna's room is sitting on my kitchen counter, and laundry is about a quarter done, and I just made the mistake of sitting down. And the crappy sick feeling set in right away of course. I guess I forgot that you should never sit down in the middle of a large project! At least the carpet is vacuumed!

Skills testing

WOOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOO! Skills testing is over and done with for another semester. Only one more of those awful days to do before graduation! I passed all my skills so don't need to return for another try. :) Now to relax the rest of the week, finish up projects, get organized for school and did I say relax?

Short clinical stories - number 2

Since you all seem to enjoy hearing about me making an idiot of myself, I thought I'd throw some more fuel on the fire. I'm pretty sure everyone that knows me knows that I hate drawing attention to myself. Not a big contributor in class, don't like being in front of people really, not a big ceremony type person because of all the eyes staring at you... you get the point. Well, let me tell you, one really good way to make people come running to look at you is to set off alarms. In a hospital. Yep... I did that. More than one actually. Cause why do things halfway?




The first alarm I set off was actually at the nursing home where we did a rotation. I was helping a rather feisty older lady go to the bathroom. There was an alarm on her chair to make sure that if she fell someone would come running to make sure she was ok. Well, to get the poor lady on the toilet, and she of course needed to go RIGHT NOW, I had to detach her chair alarm. I did NOT however realize that these alarms are impossible to turn off. Seriously, I mean impossible. I guess I was thinking I could just remove the alarm piece that is attached to the person from the piece attached to the chair and then hit a switch or turn a knob or whatever and make it stop the awful noise. No no no... of course not! No, this thing had no switch, no knob, no NOTHING to make it stop the caterwauling. So here I am, with a none to steady lady sitting on the toilet, a wheelchair crammed into this very small bathroom and I cannot figure out how to make this alarm shut up already. Of course, hearing this alarm, a nurse comes bursting into the room, expecting to find someone laying on the floor in pain from falling. Once I explain to her the situation she tells me you just have to detach the piece on the patient from said patient, replace the piece on the patient to the piece on the chair and it will go off on its own. Of course it will. As she left the room I heard her remark in a rather irritated and exasperated way to another nurse "...its fine, its just a student in the room..."

The second alarm I set off was literally the very next week. This time I was in a patients room that was being monitored closely for the oxygen level in her blood. If she wasn't breathing deeply enough and often enough it make a completely different awful sound. I have never seen this machine or been taught how to use it, how to turn it off or down, and definitely not how to avoid setting it off. I went in first thing and took her blood pressure on the arm that also had the monitoring device on it, because her iv was in the other arm and you're not supposed to take blood pressure on the arm they have an iv in. What I didn't realize was that if you take blood pressure on an arm that is hooked up to that monitor you have to remove the monitoring piece first or it sets off the machine. Which if exactly what it did. BIG SIGH. Again with the running in and the explaining that I'm sorry I'm an idiot, please forgive me for not knowing how to work every bleeping machine in the hospital that I've never seen before.

The third alarm encounter happened later that day with the lady in the bed next to my patient. NOT EVEN MY PATIENT PEOPLE! She badly needed to use the bathroom (what is it with me and this scenario?), and had a bed alarm on. I couldn't find her student nurse to save my life and she had to go NOW. Of course, trying to learn from my mistake of the week prior, I was hesitant to just take start detaching pieces of the alarm. By this time I am getting severely pissed off that we haven't had a course in the thousand and one ways you can set off an alarm while doing clinicals class. Luckily, I managed to snag a passing pca to show me how to work this alarm before I set it off. Again, with the exasperated "really?" look however. Love those.

So perhaps you think that was the end of my alarm stories? Oh no no no. The SAME day, I was coming out of the supply room, hit the big red exit button that allows you to open the door, and the blasted door alarm (which I didn't even know existed in that room!) started going off! At this point, I am thinking "you have GOT to be kidding me" and "is this some sort of sick joke?" I look everywhere, EVERYWHERE to figure out what the heck had even set off the thing! I've gone in and out of supply rooms all semester. They're all pretty much the same- hit big red button, open door, leave. Nothing to it. Until that day. I did not know what to do. I tracked down a friend in clinical with me, dragged him down there, and begged him to make it stop ringing. I'm not sure he gave it much of a try because of the laughing. Finally, I had to just leave the room and wander the halls looking for a friendly face to tell me how to turn the da*n thing off. Turns out, that particular room has a problem with the big red button getting stuck halfway down.

Good, good times.

Short clinical stories - number 1 -Medicine mishap

One bright, sunny clinical morning I was in the med room minding my own business, getting my medications all straight and ready to give. One of my bestest friends walks in and starts to draw up morphine. Normally, you draw back the same amt of air that you are going to draw up of medicine and push the air into the vial of medication. I honestly have no idea why- pressure maybe? Anyhow, she starts to draw up morphine from this little tiny glass tube, realizes she has forgotten to push in the air, starts over. Pushes air into the tube and the end of the tube literally explodes across the room. Apparently, you never push air into those types of tubes!  Morphine flys everywhere, including all over my face. I told her next time to let me know ahead of time and I'll open my mouth!