Clinicals

There are a million things I would like to do with my life.
They're probably simple common things that everyone wishes to do in their lifetime.
None of them occur when I'm in clinical.

For those of you who are lucky enough not to be nursing students, clinical is where you work in the hospital or community setting with your instructors breathing down your neck. I've never felt like clinical sucked before now. But, heck it must be senoritis or something, I cannot get motivated to be there. There's nothing wrong with waking up at 5am for school, I've done it most of my life. Maybe thats one reason why I chose nursing. So that's not it. Its not the high pressure from the instructors, I'm fine with that. It's feeling like I have nothing to do and no reason to be there. Somehow I feel like my hands are bound when I'm in clinical. I don't have access to half the things I need to be a good nurse to my patients. The hospital we have clinicals in now (we rotate being A university that is not associated with a particular hospital) is mostly computerized charting and completely computerized medicine records (EMARs.) Well, student mode of the computer doesn't allow access to past records, and we don't get to use the EMARs (little walmart scanner-like things) because we didn't get trained on them.

So essentially, on a med-surg floor. It's pointless. I can't give meds without another nurse, and I can't read histories without access. Bah.

I feel terrible but when I'm at clinicals I wonder why I chose nursing. I've never come up with a good answer (a real one that's not cheesy) and clinicals make it that much harder.

Moving on.

I turned my portfolio into the department today. It's a 5 inch binder with every piece of paper I've ever touched in nursing school. Our University seems to think it will help us get jobs if we take it into our interviews to show them how competent we are. I wonder how many evidenced-based papers I'll be WRITING with my Bachelors... Alas, being a sarcastic, people pleaser, I took it to my ER interview. What do you know? I got the job. Back to the portfolio, if they don't have a record of it, I don't get to graduate. Ha ha, I hear that so often from the school. It will be odd once I don't have those words in the back of my head.

Happy news.

I'm sitting outside on the dinky porch that's barely attached to my cheap apartment building. I'm barefoot and happy breathing in the sunshine. I don't see the sun much. Already genetically pale (cursed Irish genes) I enjoy every chance to be outside. So Tuesdays suck because of clinical, but I get out by 3pm and that means 4 hours of sunlight!

I sort of fell asleep reading Cory Doctorow's Little Brother and got a sunburn. (BTW I am a HUGE fan of Doctorow, anyone who publishes under Creative Commons now days is for the win in my book. http://craphound.com/) If you've never read him, do it. This book (downloaded on my iphone courtesy of Stanza) is amazing. It really makes me appreciate my life and want to build dorky techy things all at the same time.

Enough plugging. I think I'll work on something else now, but not my clinical paper work. Not yet.