Cups O' Pee

Nice title. Now you wont try my corn muffins, will you?

So, every nursing student blog has the gratuitous photo of the required books stacked to the heavens and, heck, who am I to go against the genre? So there it is. The quarter in the lower left is to give the behemoth some scale. And, I'll add here, I did not fluff this stack up with any extraneous textbooks from, say, Anatomy or Microbiology, though I have them around and I use them all of the time. And, I must say here, most of these books have tissue thin pages and fonts of a size I thought unreadable for their microscopity a few months ago. Um, maybe I still think they're unreadable, but the flow charts in some of these books! Oh, the flow charts. They are...baffling/beautiful. And, for your information, the book buying is not done. That's just this quarter (not the one for scale, the one that is a breakdown of the academic year).

I had my first clinical last Friday. We went to an elder care facility and took blood pressure and glucose readings on some folks. And then we interviewed them. A good time was had by all and I only had to re-do two out of the three "client's" glucose tests. And two out of my three "clients" had high readings which made me feel a little sad about the festive and out-sized donuts sitting there gleaming w/ sugary coatings. They were brought by my instructor. Whoops. The quarter for scale would have been itsy bitsy next to those monster-donuts. They would have eaten the quarter.

My favorite class is Skills Lab. We get to do fun stuff like: blood pressure readings until you're blue at the fingertips! Make an unoccupied bed! Make an occupied bed (oooooh!)! Poke your lab partner's fingers for glucose tests! Do it again because you were too chicken to press hard enough and they were whining when you tried to "milk" the blood out of the first stabbing! The real fun was perineal care on the mannikins. They have interchangeable genitals so you can practice washing the man and then - switcherooneee - washing the woman. It's a Code Brown! And then there was peeing in cups. We had to practice dipstick readings w/ our urine. And the bathroom is a quarter mile down the hall. On the way from the bathroom w/ full cups we could just pretend we had small drinks, but on the way back down the hallway to empty the cups o' pee we were wearing our gloves and it was pretty obvious that the cups did not contain beverage.