Falling into place

Today was a great day at clinicals. For the first time, all the many pieces of the puzzles were falling into place. Rather than each student providing part of the care for our own individual patient, 3 of us got to shadow our clinical instructor while she provided full care for three students. So while each of us still had our own patient, we got to see how an actual nurse would go about prioritizing patients needs, delegating, making decisions etc. It was a really good experience. Plus we got to view a lot more procedures that if we would have only been caring for our own patient. We got to participate in a blood transfusion, and I even learned how to flush a central IV line. Pretty cool stuff.

The best part, by far, was getting to see the big picture. And most importantly I saw how absolutely amazing and rewarding nursing is, and how much I am absolutely going to love it.

Tomorrow is the last day of our first clinical rotation. And we all got to choose a specialty outside of medsurg that we were interested in shadowing. So tomorrow I am going to shadow in the Emergency Department. Because my current hospital is smaller, it will be a great place to get introduced to how the ER operates. For me I think it will be a bit more manageable first step into emergency medicine than at big city ER where there will be multiple major traumas coming in every second (and explosions and helicopter chopping off surgeon's arms like on the show ER:)