"I'll show you deep, vein thrombosis."
Oh hi, sorry. I was spending my time looking up vascular jokes before you got here because I GOT THE VASCULAR SURGERY UNIT for my first clinical rotation! Oh my dear lord almighty! I am so pumped and excited and nervous and clammy and jittery and faint and jumpy and every other antsy and unnerving emotion you can think of! I cannot wait till next Monday.
I get to wear my stethoscope about my clavicle and prance on in, twisting my calcaneous and talus thisaway and thataway, park myself at the nurses' station and say something like "Hi, my name is Shifrah and I'm going to go check Mr. X's vital signs" or something.
And in that moment, in that very insignificant statement, my entire head will explode and I will probably poop my pants and void my bladder and my neurons will call me a moron, but I will be touching a real, live patient. And it will be beautiful.
But in reality, I just get to shadow a nurse for the first day, so I'll probably just die of excitement knowing I am almost, almost touching a real, live patient.
Have I mentioned that I am so excited? It's going to be thrilling. Even the fact that it's on days, and I will need to get up at 4AM in the morning to make it on time every day is not even harshing my mellow. My dear friend Emma is in the same clinical group as I am and we are carpooling! She promised to cook me breakfast every day as long as I got us both there in one piece. Thankfully, no sane soul will be up at the hour I plan to leave my house (except for nurses, ofcourse) and if I do hit someone, it'll probably be a fellow nurse and she'll save my life.
We had a large clinical orientation yesterday for all of the second year students and it was held to set us up for success. We met with our instructors and I am really glad that mine is so nice and wonderful and motherly. I'm really glad I didn't end up with a tough cookie because I am too nervous to confidently do anything in a hospital yet and am ever so grateful that someone has made a career out of spoon-feeding people like me into the early stages of nursing.
I had my first official class today, and of course, I was late! I didn't plan on being late at all! I woke up, gathered all my books and left the house with enough time to spare but ended up searching for parking for over a half hour. And OF COURSE my prof made an example out me. Even though she said "Im not trying to make an example out of you.." . . .
Im just sitting around in a pool of very heavy textbooks, cuddling them so that they will be nice to me when I need to extract large amounts of information with minimal effort. Im also waiting for Colin to get out of his class. I am actually super jealous of all my friend's courses this year. Jill and Emma are in a genocide class together. Another girl I know is doing a pop culture class on goth culture, and the prof used to be a DJ in the industrial goth club business so he doesn't really like work anyways and pretty much wants to breeze all the students through and teach them a few things they didn't know. Kari, another lovely friend of mine who has yet to get an honorable mention in here, took one on pop culture in the 60's. She got to listen to the Temptations, Supremes, write a useless paper and get an A! Don't get me wrong, it's not like Im aching to learn about genocide or I think genocide is "cool", or that my life would benefit so much more after knowing things about goth culture (because, let's be honest, they are quite a misunderstood crowd)... but I got stuck with a horrible political writing course that I really didn't want to succeed in but somehow managed to woo the professor and became his favorite student. That wasn't all bad until he decided to have high expectations about my interest and thoughts in politics. Seriously.... I don't even know the difference in between the green party and NDP (Jack Layton, God rest your soul, Im not trashing your name, I swear, Im just kind of ignorant).
In any case, I convinced Colin to sign up for this elective taught by the best gen. ed. teacher I have ever encountered. It's 'Intro to Environmental Issues", and not like Colin has an interest in that - he litters! But Diana Fletcher is basically the shit. Head to toe, she is bomb dot com. In between talking about how much she dislikes her mother-in-law, how annoying her husband's Mensa membership is and her daughter's constant feedback on the bullshit that is student life, she manages to make gen. ed. not a huge pain in the butt and still gets you to pay attention and learn something. The only time I ever almost decided not to like her was when she put in a long clip with Carl Sagan talking and making weird actions with his hands. CANNOT STAND HIM.
That's pretty much all that happened today, it's been pretty good. The textbooks are getting irritated with the lack of affection.. so I'll be on with my day. xo.
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