Second Semester - Week One

This week was our first week of school, and even though we started on Tuesday instead of Monday I feel like it counted for a whole week. This semester I'm taking both Nursing 102 and microbiology, so it's going to be a bit busier than last semester.

The first day of school was a clinical day, but we weren't in the hospital yet. We were on campus and had 6 hours of lecture/administrative work, as well as a nursing critical-thinking exam. That was a bit confusing, I think, because we were told ahead of time that we'd have this exam but not why, or if it counted towards our grade, or what it was all about. It turned out it was a metric for the school, not for our grades, so after that I didn't really worry about it. Which served me well, since I got a 920/1000. I have no idea what a good score is but that sounds high so I'll take it.

I have a different instructor for my nursing class this semester, so I am also getting to know her style as well as a whole new set of classmates - only one of my classmates from the first semester is in my class, and he won't be in my clinical group. As always it's interesting to get to know a whole new group of personalities and see where we mesh and where we divide.

We had our first skill lab, too, and started learning to give injections! They are not starting us slowly, that's for sure. We managed to cover intramuscular and intradermal injections but didn't have time to cover subcutaneous, so we will cover that next week. We had real needles and dummy body parts on which to practice. It was quite exciting. Here's a picture from skill lab:



My microbiology class is proving interesting already - we've already had a lab and been assigned our microscopes to use throughout the semester. Mine seems good, which is a relief, and I like that we'll keep the same one so we get to know the instrument. Everyone told me that this professor really teaches you to use a microscope properly, so I'm hoping that in this class I'll finally learn how to not get headaches when I look through one for more than half an hour. I really enjoy microscopy and the nerdier aspects of science, so getting my brain on board with that would be nice. Plus, microbiology really is interesting, as a topic.


On the whole, while I'm anxious about the amount of time I'll need to study this semester, and the workload, I'm still excited and ready to go.

Winter break - update on the end of first semester

I realize I haven't written in a while and one of my goals for the New Year is to do better, so I'm hoping to start off right! We had finals in early/mid-December (is it bragging to mention that I did get an A, and did well in my clinical evaluations?) and have been on break since, and I will say I have needed the time to recover and get ready for the next semester. We start the day after MLK day, so just over a week now. I am looking forward to it but besides Nursing 102 I'll also be taking microbiology, so that is definitely going to keep me busy.

We signed up for a new clinical rotation but I ended up at the same hospital, so I'll be back at the University of Chicago. I would like to have opportunities in other hospitals to get a wider variety of experience, but I also liked U of C so I think it'll be ok. The other difference is that this is a 6:30AM - 12:30PM slot, instead of 7AM - 1PM, so I'm going to have to wake up even earlier on Tuesdays! (The benefit to this? Minimal traffic on the way there. It's kind of fun to drive on the Chicago roads that early in the morning.) 

One of the most interesting things we did at the end of last semester was work with the Medi-man that's located in the school. The Medi-man looks like a mannequin, but is hooked up to a computer system and has quite complex internal workings. The Medi-man breathes, has a pulse and blood pressure, can pass bodily fluids, has pupils that contract and dilate, and even responds to things like pills you put in the mouth, oxygen, and the AED. They can run different scenarios on the patient so that students can practice responding in an emergency without, you know, having to worry about killing an actual person. Or waiting around for the right emergency to happen. While we were in there they had him crash and two of the students had to do CPR to revive him - and it worked! (Our professor told us she had the person who runs the lab set it so the Medi-man wouldn't "die" for the first-years, because it can be too emotionally upsetting.) 

Anyway as I'm sure you can imagine I found this utterly fascinating and asked if we could see the controls. There's actually a two-way mirror into the room so the person who runs the lab can watch from the control room, so we went back there and saw the computer and systems that run it. The software is pretty interesting - the whole system is set up so like in real life you can't just change one variable; if you change the patient's oxygen levels that affects other things, and the software figures it out for you. The lab manager said that when they first acquired the system they had to build their own scenarios for each simulation they wanted to do, but now there are also off-the-shelf ones you can buy from the company (I couldn't believe they didn't do that right away - it seemed like such a logical money-making opportunity). The Medi-man also has things like room gas sensors so it knows how to respond to the oxygen, and there are actually big tanks of oxygen and other gases in the back hooked up to the Medi-man so it can behave properly. We also saw the servers where all this is stored. (My IT security training kicked in and I started wondering why it wasn't locked up more than it is but I refrained from mentioning it.)

So that is a whole side of HIT that I never even thought of before I experienced it, but right away I realized what a valuable tool it was. I can't wait until we get to do more simulations in our second semester!