Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Opportunity?

Does this look cool at all?

http://www.kff.org/minorityhealth/bjscholars/index.cfm

Definitely thinking about it.

Piss and Vinegar.

There are few things in this world that are more awful than orientation. Humans just aren't built for a whole day of lecture. It's not right.

So far, we have had five orientations since the beginning of nursing school in Fall of 2008. I remember the first one. The instructor assigned to lecture our class would trail off about her daughter's (Star Wars themed) wedding. This was for three straight days. Gag me with a blender.

This past orientation wasn't much better. We had a two hour lecture on child abuse today, complete with pictures. It was necessary, but really, really sad. Then we had a hour about what we talked about yesterday, school and community health. 30 minutes with the PICC team, 30 minutes with child life, and then 2 hours reviewing skills. It made me want to cry, honestly.

I really hope the pedi rotation is better than maternity. I am still awaiting my evaluation for that class. I hope I did well, because I feel like I really busted my ass trying to look busy all the time. I felt totally shortchanged and left out by that clinical. Other people saw multiple c sections, vaginal births, and interesting post partum patients. Not to mention they actually got to go to the nursery to bathe and play with babies. My turn comes and all of the sudden we're going home early. I'm not bitter or anything.

Sorry this is a huge rant. I'm just sort of pissed about nursing school in general.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

No more...

Today was the last day of Maternity. Just as we were getting comfortable with the unit and the topics, we're done. My instructor decided that today we would just do our presentations and go home. Too bad it was my day to go to the nursery and play with babies. Awesome.

Thinking back on the whole thing just kind of makes me wince a little bit. More than half the time there were no patients, but when there were, we weren't allowed to do much with them. No giving meds, doing assessments, starting IVs, or anything else for that matter. Either the nurses didn't want us to do any skills or the patient didn't want us to do it. That and every thinking process I had was wrong because none of the patients were sick, they were just giving birth.

Everything is different in Maternity. They don't use the same abbreviations. They have strange flow sheets and charting. They only have 1 or 2 patients. They are really open about talking about their vaginas, poop, sex lives, etc. It's a whole other world in there that I'm pretty sure I don't want to be a part of.

Also, is it just me or are L&D nurses extremely opinionated?