I finished my OB rotation this week, leaving me with only one more 5 week class before I start “integration.” I can’t believe how fast this first year is going by! I guess I better start studying for the NCLEX…where did I put those flashcards? I keep wanting to sign up for the test now, so I have a date to work with, but I can’t sign up until I’ve done all the necessary clinical hours and gotten an official go ahead from Columbia. But I’m so antsy now!
The last couple days of clinical, I worked with this really high energy nurse. She was tiny and talked a mile a minute, and was the first nurse I’d worked with in the last 5 weeks who really included me in everything she was doing. She literally was giving me a constant running narrative of everything she was doing, and gave me jobs and goals for the day. It was great. Most of the nurses had been fairly uninterested in integrating a student into their days, which is understandable, I suppose. But our preceptor pointed out that part of the defined role of the nurse is to educate the next generation of nurses. It was nice to work with a nurse who genuinely felt that way.
Even though I spend a lot of time on the floor feeling like a little bit of a dumb ass, I do have moments that make me realize how far I’ve come since June. I remember during my pediatrics rotation kind of dreading doing a urine dip. Ew, pee! And what if I read the dipstick wrong? But Wednesday morning, one of my classmates came to me and asked if I knew how to dip urine. I was like, “YES, let’s play with pee!” It wasn’t really the pee itself that made me so excited, but knowing how to do something that I could then teach someone else. It’s not like dunking a dipstick in some urine and comparing the colors to those on the jar is that hard, but you have to know little things like how long to wait for each square to change colors, and how to hold the stick so the colors don’t run. Horizontal, y’all. It seems like common sense, but I totally held my first one vertically to line it up to the jar, instead of turning the jar to meet the stick. It made me feel better to see my classmate do the same thing. Yay learning!
Also, the sky was supposed to give us 3 to 4 inches of snow last night. WTF, weather? How am I supposed to avoid the laundromat now? Life is so hard sometimes.
