semester wrap-up -- for the momma

Good morning.

I come to you this day on about 2.5 hours of sleep.

For some reason, this has been the trend all week long.

Not sure if it's the stress of my final weeks and tests at school, or the fact that I've been drinking caffeine way too late in the day. Likely a mixture of both.

Anyway, I am bright eyed (?) and bushy tailed (??) this morn and ready to face the day's tasks.

I have one day of school left--next Tuesday. I am very much looking forward to being done! It hasn't been very hard, but I do put an awful lot of pressure for myself to get the highest A possible.

My Microbiology class is going well. At this point I'd have to get something like a 20% on the final test to not get an A. *pats back*

The Nursing Assistant class has been its own challenge! It's been really interesting doing my 3 weeks of clinicals--I entered the rehab and nursing home facilities with some degree of trepidation as I was to put my recently-learned skills to use. In the past few weeks I have learned the proper procedures and protocols of:

• Ambulating with a gait belt, with or without a walker
• Putting on and taking off antiembolic stockings--this totally takes some work and I end up breaking out into a sweat every time
• Putting the resident on a bedpan
• Doing a bed bath
• Taking blood pressure, pulse, respiration, temperature
• Denture and oral care for both conscious and comatose patients
  
• Dressing bedridden residents
• Feeding dependent residents
• Measuring fluid intake and output
• The right way to wash one's hands!
• Making an occupied/unoccupied bed
• Perineal care for male and female
• Positioning residents in bed, on side, etc
• Performing range of motion actions
• Transferring patients from bed to wheel chair and vice versa
• Giving resident a shower
  

And then there's all the little things like answering call lights, keeping water cups full and trashes empty, and overall making the resident as comfortable as possible.

Last week, I worked with a dementia patient who scratched, kicked, and punched me, and then yelled at me for reading the calendar on her closet. "That's none of your business!"

LOL

I actually really like it. :) I hope I'll be able to find a PT job either this summer or in the fall as I wait for Nursing School to start -- knock on wood next January.