Goooooooddd Morninggggggg Neverlandddddd!

Holy cow, internet world.

It's 9:30 pm and I have just risen from a 4 hour afternoon hibernation sesh. Talk about feeling like you're in the twilight zone.

But in my lazy bear defense, it's not just me. These early morning clinicals are seriously draining even though they really aren't too high stress. My girl Ashley who is in clinicals with me just texted me saying that she fell asleep at the pool. Anneliese who NEVER takes naps took two naps last week. I think all of our bodies are just in shock from waking up at 5AM.

For those unfamiliar with what "clinicals" are, they're semesters of in-hospital training days where you get assigned one or two actual patients on the floor and you are their sole care-provider for the day. Here's a snippet of what my day was like today:

- Haul ass to my unit because I am officially 7 minutes late at 6:37 am.
- Dash in to my patient's room to get her vital signs (Blood pressure, oxygenation levels, pulse, breaths per minute, etc).
- Patient needs more crackers, ginger ale, extra maple syrup
- Chart chart chart.
- Get nurse's report
- Review patient's history, consultations, allergies, etc, etc, etc. Nothing too unusual: history of depression, drinks a pint of alcohol a day, smokes a pack of cigarettes a day, schizophrenia, going through a messy divorce, lawyer found patient sitting in a pile of her own feces and called 911.
- Time to prep medications. My patient has 12.
- Time to give patient her bed bath and change her linens. She is not compliant and puts up a fight. I call for backup.
- My instructor goes in with me and pretty much says, "You're getting a bath whether you want it or not." You'd think the patient would enjoy the bed bath. It's pretty much a free sponge bath. You just have to lay there.
- I have a difficult time bathing this woman. She keeps falling asleep on me and I have to manually turn her 250 pound body. I'm sweating up a storm under my isolation gear and face mask (The patient is under isolation precautions because she has a bacterial infection that spreads rapidly and causes seriously loose stools).
- I change her out of her stool stained gown and realize she has a diaper-rash like irritation all over her lower flank and buttocks. Turns out she has a fungal infection.
- I cream up her affected area with some topical antifungals and change her sheets.
- Chart chart chart.
- Another round of medication administration
- Lunch time!
- After lunch, things aren't as busy and the day is pretty much over. I empty the patient's foley catheter, empty her nephrostomy bag (she had a kidney obstruction) and clear her IV lines.
- The patient complained of her pain being a 6 on a scale of 1-10 and so I gave her some percocets and it knocks her right out.
- I give my report to the nurse who is taking over after me.
- End of the day meeting with my clinical group and instructor to recap on how our shifts went, turn in our assignments.
- FREEDOM!!!

Never a dull moment in nursing. And tomorrow I get to do it all over again. Lucky for me, my weekends start on Thursdays so I'll be back to summertime shenanigans after tomorrow!