whew…I need a drink!
Ok. Done and done. So before we can go back to clinicals this semester we have to recheck off on all previously learned skills and if you mess up, you get 5 points off your clinical grade and have to come back and redo it. Yesterday was med administration, iv, phlebotomy, and NGT insertion and feeding. In theory it doesn’t sound that bad, in reality - it’s way bad. As soon as the instructor calls my name and I walk into lab, I develop Parkinson’s and start shaking like a leaf on a tree- when today was all the sterile field checkoffs, that is never good. Needless to say, wound care, catheter, and trach care and suction were all passed and with ten minutes to spare (we had 30 min for all).
But of course it didn’t just go perfectly - this is nursing school, if something can go wrong it will. I choose to do wound care first because I figured that would take the longest, then cath, then trach. So I’m cathing and I go to test my balloon and it fills up just as nice as you like and then somehow my syringe falls off, with the balloon still inflated. At this point every four letter word in the book runs through my brain, b/c my left hand is holding my mannequin and not sterile, and my right hand has to somehow reattach the syringe to the tubing (oh by the way, I am left handed, but all the stations were set up for right handed ppl.) Well, that took two min and some creative thinking, but we got past it. So after that I’m thinking nothing else can go wrong. Well, the rest of the cath went well, trach suction - no problem, and all I have to do is trach care. So I take out the trach and I am cleaning it and I go back to put it back in and there is this really long piece of hair hanging off the “sterile” part of the trach. I have my hair in a bun - I don’t know how in the hell it got there. At this point, I look up at my instructor and say “Uh, I’m going to need you to take off that hair…and pretend it was never there.” Pass.
So I still have a 100 for my clinical grade and next week I just have head to toe assessment and documentation check offs, which shouldn’t be horrible. So time to put on my pajamas and do OB, pharm, and some MedSurg all day. Oh yea, and facebook.
