I'm done! (Well, officially once I have my NCLEX scores and license in hand...) But, I feel like I'm done! No more classes or reflections or papers. Now I can just find a nursing job (not easy).
My ABSN program was so great. I feel so well prepared for an entry level nursing job and I know exactly what I want to start out doing--emergency nursing.
I did my summer practicum in a very busy emergency department during the night shift and it was amazing. I was laughing at my previous post about IV's. Yep. Been there. Learned that. Well, I'm not perfect by any measure and I would be nervous having to poke a meth addict who needed rapid fluid resuscitation, but I can totally do it. It's awesome.
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Starting IV's!
I don't know why they didn't teach us sooner, but we finally "learned" how to start IV's. It's a pretty simple procedure, takes a lot more getting-used-to than say... using a glucometer, but I think there's a lot of unnecessary emotional hesitancy surrounding the procedure. I still haven't done it, but I've spent this evening finding the BEST resources for a student nurse learning how to start IV's, so I thought I would share. I'm excited to try it tomorrow in my second ED shift...
PowerPoints: http://sfghed.ucsf.edu/Education/Viper/VIPER_StartMenu.html
Article: (with it's own great links at the bottom of it) http://enw.org/IVStarts.htm
YouTube video:
PowerPoints: http://sfghed.ucsf.edu/Education/Viper/VIPER_StartMenu.html
Article: (with it's own great links at the bottom of it) http://enw.org/IVStarts.htm
YouTube video:
Friday, May 27, 2011
Didactic
Before my ABSN program, I had never really used or heard the word "didactic." They use it to describe part of our curriculum. Part of it is "clinical", meaning hands-on learning at the hospital or in skills lab or simulation. But the other part of nursing school is DIDACTIC. You have to read research articles, textbook chapters, read case studies and answer questions, and then sit in lecture classes and discuss what you've read. When we discuss nursing in class, we always have these sessions where we brainstorm about patient care. Given 20 minutes of discussion, we come up with an exhaustive list of patient needs and how the nurse can meet those needs or advocate for those needs to be met. Which, of course, is often impossible in a real clinical setting where the nurse is managing 4 patients.
A lot of people have said that nursing school and actual nursing are very different and that the first year of practice involves more challenging learning than in school. That is why I'm glad I chose an accelerated program. To be blunt, I can get the didactic stuff "out of the way" so that I can more quickly move to the hands-on experiential learning.
I've learned a lot about myself in nursing school. I am a hands-on, experiential learner. I could sit and study normal lab values for 6 hours and retain maybe 30% of the information. But as soon as I have 1 patient with abnormal lab values, I remember the information forever. For me, 1 experience is worth about 10 hours of reading/didactic learning.
And so much of nursing can not be learned in class or in a book...
A lot of people have said that nursing school and actual nursing are very different and that the first year of practice involves more challenging learning than in school. That is why I'm glad I chose an accelerated program. To be blunt, I can get the didactic stuff "out of the way" so that I can more quickly move to the hands-on experiential learning.
I've learned a lot about myself in nursing school. I am a hands-on, experiential learner. I could sit and study normal lab values for 6 hours and retain maybe 30% of the information. But as soon as I have 1 patient with abnormal lab values, I remember the information forever. For me, 1 experience is worth about 10 hours of reading/didactic learning.
And so much of nursing can not be learned in class or in a book...
Sunday, May 8, 2011
14 Weeks Left
Last post was week 7 of my ABSN program. Now, I only have 14 weeks left of the entire program. The idea that I would blog my experiences was a little far-fetched. I can't believe how much I've learned, though. And I'd be lying if I didn't say that I still feel like there is SO much for me to learn that I won't possibly be able to master it all before the end of the program. The more I've sat with this anxiety, though, the more I've realized that a generalist BSN/RN degree and certification does not signify that I will be a master of all skills. Each unit that I've worked on requires a different skill set. In some units, the RN's always start their own IV's. In others, they call an IV therapy team. In some units, RN's do fetal heart monitoring (labor & delivery) while in others, they do diseased heart monitoring (telemetry). At this time last year, I was talking to my friend who works on the telemetry floor and I asked her, "What is telemetry? What does that even mean?"
When I think about the utter ignorance with regards to my healthcare knowledge and experience 1 year ago and the massive amount of skills and understanding I've gained, I am sincerely amazed.
The ABSN program is so fast that a lot of information seems to fly by at too fast of a speed that I can't retain it. There are so many reading assignments that I have never actually completed an entire reading assignment. There is limited clinical time, being that the program is only 15 months, so I will not have a Pediatric clinical rotation. I still don't know how to start an IV and I've yet to insert my first Foley.
What I DO have, though, is the ability to pick up information very quickly. To see a skill or situation and then be able to repeat it with minimal further instruction. I think I always had that capacity--that's why they let me into the program. But, the thing I've gained is the confidence in my ability to do that. No matter where I get a job (a hospital job), I will have an orientation period wherein I will be familiarized with the general work of the unit. Then, I will be part of a team, and there will always be things that I don't know or understand but that is the beauty of hospital nursing--you are never working alone.
Yes, I want my first job to be in a hospital. For a lot of reasons that I won't explain now.
The NCLEX is now on the horizon and I've begun to contemplate studying for it. A lot of people in my cohort already have a study plan and are meeting in groups or studying and doing practice questions on their own. I have a book that I won and some good online resources, but I don't yet have a plan for studying and haven't really started studying.
When I think about the utter ignorance with regards to my healthcare knowledge and experience 1 year ago and the massive amount of skills and understanding I've gained, I am sincerely amazed.
The ABSN program is so fast that a lot of information seems to fly by at too fast of a speed that I can't retain it. There are so many reading assignments that I have never actually completed an entire reading assignment. There is limited clinical time, being that the program is only 15 months, so I will not have a Pediatric clinical rotation. I still don't know how to start an IV and I've yet to insert my first Foley.
What I DO have, though, is the ability to pick up information very quickly. To see a skill or situation and then be able to repeat it with minimal further instruction. I think I always had that capacity--that's why they let me into the program. But, the thing I've gained is the confidence in my ability to do that. No matter where I get a job (a hospital job), I will have an orientation period wherein I will be familiarized with the general work of the unit. Then, I will be part of a team, and there will always be things that I don't know or understand but that is the beauty of hospital nursing--you are never working alone.
Yes, I want my first job to be in a hospital. For a lot of reasons that I won't explain now.
The NCLEX is now on the horizon and I've begun to contemplate studying for it. A lot of people in my cohort already have a study plan and are meeting in groups or studying and doing practice questions on their own. I have a book that I won and some good online resources, but I don't yet have a plan for studying and haven't really started studying.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Week 7 of Nursing school
I'm now in my seventh week of nursing school. It's hard to believe that seven weeks have already passed. The classes are great, the content is fascinating, and the skills are challenging. But the most impressive thing to me since I began has been the people. I feel like I have sixty new friends and ten new aunties. The friends are my cohort-mates. Everyone is such an amazing person: the average age is 28 and many of us are married, some have kids, and many others are still single. Everyone has been abroad, worked with the poor, or done some other incredible life experience and we have so many rich perspectives to share with each other. The clinical instructors and professors are equally supportive and rich in experience. It's been a really positive social experience. So much so that I sometimes forget that we have exams and such. There is no competition for grades and our teachers won't tell us class averages or other details that would make us want to compete with each other. It's great.
We haven't done any exams or tests on any real people at this point. All of our clinical experience has been on each other or on fake simulation people (which is pretty awesome). We've learned to take vitals and to do a head-to-toe physical assessment as well as how to give injections and other types of medicine. In pharmacology we study families of medicines like "opioids", "insulins", etc. In pathophysiology, the content is hard to put into order because the human body is so complicated, but it looks like we kind of take it system by system. We're also being trained to "think like nurses" which is quite a difficult thing to teach. But we have practiced a lot of what is called things like "therapeutic communication", "motivational interviewing", and "health promotion". We do things like write reflections, have discussions, and hear from guest speakers. Although it is an arduous process, I enjoy the case studies because we get to pull questions from a real case and choose what we want to investigate, but in the end we all end up with all the knowledge when we share it.
It's not all rainbows and roses and some people are more easily frustrated than others, but all in all I think that I chose to go to a really wonderful school and that I got blessed with wonderful cohort-mates and instructors--people who really truly care deeply about other people.
We haven't done any exams or tests on any real people at this point. All of our clinical experience has been on each other or on fake simulation people (which is pretty awesome). We've learned to take vitals and to do a head-to-toe physical assessment as well as how to give injections and other types of medicine. In pharmacology we study families of medicines like "opioids", "insulins", etc. In pathophysiology, the content is hard to put into order because the human body is so complicated, but it looks like we kind of take it system by system. We're also being trained to "think like nurses" which is quite a difficult thing to teach. But we have practiced a lot of what is called things like "therapeutic communication", "motivational interviewing", and "health promotion". We do things like write reflections, have discussions, and hear from guest speakers. Although it is an arduous process, I enjoy the case studies because we get to pull questions from a real case and choose what we want to investigate, but in the end we all end up with all the knowledge when we share it.
It's not all rainbows and roses and some people are more easily frustrated than others, but all in all I think that I chose to go to a really wonderful school and that I got blessed with wonderful cohort-mates and instructors--people who really truly care deeply about other people.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
First Post
My first day of nursing school is five days away. My program lasts 5 terms--summer, fall, winter, spring, and another summer. This summer I will be taking pathophysiology, pharmacology, and health promotion (a.k.a. how to be a nurse 101).
Before I start blogging about the school experience, I want to share a little about how I got here--the application process. I wasn't for sure that I wanted to be a nurse back in December when applications for nursing school start to be due. But as I wrote the essays to apply, I realized that nursing IS for me. So, I didn't really have time to prepare much for applying. Other people spent an entire year collecting information, deadlines, visiting schools, etc. I pretty much scraped together seven applications just in the nick of time. I think that I sent every application ON the due date. I applied to 7 of the top 20 nursing schools in the U.S. and pretty much used the U.S. News list as my guide. I missed the deadlines on some of the top schools that I would have like to have applied to. In hindsight, I wish I had time to do more research about cost, funding, and programs. Some of the schools I applied to turned out to be way too expensive. In the end, I opted for my in-state school which luckliy is the number 7 nursing school in the U.S.!
Before I start blogging about the school experience, I want to share a little about how I got here--the application process. I wasn't for sure that I wanted to be a nurse back in December when applications for nursing school start to be due. But as I wrote the essays to apply, I realized that nursing IS for me. So, I didn't really have time to prepare much for applying. Other people spent an entire year collecting information, deadlines, visiting schools, etc. I pretty much scraped together seven applications just in the nick of time. I think that I sent every application ON the due date. I applied to 7 of the top 20 nursing schools in the U.S. and pretty much used the U.S. News list as my guide. I missed the deadlines on some of the top schools that I would have like to have applied to. In hindsight, I wish I had time to do more research about cost, funding, and programs. Some of the schools I applied to turned out to be way too expensive. In the end, I opted for my in-state school which luckliy is the number 7 nursing school in the U.S.!
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