Medical-Surgical Nursing

The first eight weeks of Spring semester managed to fly by, leaving me exhausted and feeling a little brain dead. My rotation was at St. Anthony's North in Westminster, Colorado. There were a few really great things about this rotation. First, it was a very short drive, about twenty minutes. Second, I had a great clinical instructor. I was hesitant at first, because my clinical instructor was a guy, and I thought he'd be really hard and for some reason I had the irrational fear that he would be arrogant. He was anything but this, and having him as a clinical instructor was a great experience.

I was really hoping to have some oncology patients, but most of my patients were post-surgical carotid endartectomies or liver failure (from alcohol). A carotid endartectomy is when there is a clogged artery in the neck that needs to be cleaned out and a stent is sometimes inserted to keep the artery open. My liver patients (and I had several of them) were usually young (40-60 yrs) and having multiple organ failure. I was astonished at the number of end-stage organ failure patients we had. I also had a couple of patients who were admitted for another reason, but turned out to be alcoholics and the only way we found out was about 30 hours after they were admitted they started having tremors, sweats, hallucinations, etc.

Highlights of this past rotation were probably removing my first JP drain (this is a long plastic piece of material with holes in it that runs along an incision site to help with draining after surgery. It has a little "grenade" bulb at the end to collect drainage and is emptied). To remove it, I just clipped some stitches and pulled it out! It was crazy. The tube was about seven inches long and accompanied by a huge blood clot that scared the crap out of me! I was also able to practice starting I.V.'s, although never on a real patient. My friend Erin, and another student, graciously allowed me to practice! Eric will have nothing to do with this.

Unfortunately, we lost two of our six students this clinical for one reason or another, so that was kind of sad. This next eight weeks our class is divided for the first time since the start of our program. Half of us are in psychiatric nursing while the other half of us are in pediatric nursing. This past eight weeks we have all successfully passed pharmacology also! Yay!!!