First Day of Clinical

My first day of clinical was this past Wednesday. We are assigned to a long-term care facility in the local area for the first few weeks...then on to the big scary teaching hospital (just kidding). So this past Wednesday we at the LTC facility we 1) met our clinical instructor, 2) reviewed our clinical paperwork/assignments for the semester, 3) met our assigned patient and spent time with him/her during the lunch hour, and 4) met for post-conference.

What I had not expected was that I would wake up with a awful sore throat that morning (but what do you do??) and then mid-morning as we were going through our paperwork, I got a migraine! Geez. Thankfully I just got the aura/optical and not the pain.  Oh, and then I had a bit of low blood sugar about 11:30 am--quickly resolved by a granola bar thankfully. Physically a hard morning, but overall clinical was not as mentally stressful as I'd imagined...but it helped that we were not expected to be doing much in the way of skills yet. That will come next week when we have to start doing assessments and some of the morning care.

I still had class on Thursday/Friday and have felt pretty lousy since my sore throat was the pre-cursor to a cold! Ugh. Today (Saturday) I started the coughing and much less of the nose-blowing. Ugh. I REALLY hope that I'm feeling miles better by next Wednesday's clinical.  On Thursday I have my first lab skills test and then on Friday we have our big Dosage Calculations Test. If you don't pass the Dosage Test the first time with an 80%, you've got one more shot and if you are still unsuccessful, then you are kicked out of the program... so we might lose a few of our cohort I suppose. I'm pretty confident in my dimensional analysis abilities. I just need to review my conversions.

There's so much more I could say about the first three weeks of nursing school...but it's kinda a blur and with being sick...I just don't have the energy.

Well I need to get some more cough meds and then head for bed.