Clinicals Week Five

This week in clinicals was spent learning how to administer medications, which I’m actually really excited to do in a real, clinical setting; I think it will be really intimidating the first time I give a shot (especially in some of the sites on the body, which I’ll get to in a minute), but it was oddly fun. We started with oral medications and other forms like transdermal patches, which were interesting, but intramuscular and subcutaneous injections were where the fun started (because we finally got to use needles! Like real healthcare professionals! I felt so legit). It wasn’t all fun and games though; I’m seriously concerned about sufficiently getting air bubbles out of solutions before injecting them because if you don’t, that will straight up kill someone. Terrifying. Of course accidental needle sticks are a real possibility, and I actually read somewhere that, statistically speaking, it will happen to every nurse at some point in his/her career. Also terrifying. We practiced drawing up the dosages (more technical than you would think, but easy enough. Again, I felt so legitimate.) and giving injections on fake skin; supposedly “back in the day” nursing students practiced on each other, and I haven’t yet decided if that would be a good or bad thing. We practiced finding the injection sites on each other and on the dummies; everyone has gotten a deltoid injection (in the upper arm) with vaccines, but there are tons of other sites (the big muscle in the thigh, one near the hipbone, and one right where the back and butt meet). Even though hitting bone or a vein (you actually have to draw back on the syringe when you put it in the muscle to make sure you aren’t in a vein. I swear I’ve never noticed anyone doing that, and I watch when I get shots; they must just be that good at it!) wouldn’t be pleasant, what was the scariest, specifically about the location near the buttocks, is the possibility of hitting the nearby sciatic nerve (hit that and your patient is going to be in major pain. ::salutes and says “Major Pain:: sorry, How I Met Your Mother reference) or some major arteries (“Major Arteries.” Man, I’m on a roll!). All insecurities (and jokes) aside, I enjoyed giving the injections to the fake skin, and I hope I’m as good at it on a real person. Last year the first-semester clinicals students helped give flu shots on campus (I know because I recognized the guy who gave me mine as having been in my class the semester before haha), and I really hope we get the chance to do that this year; it would be intimidating, but I feel like after just a day of doing it, we would really have the hang of it. I’d rather learn get practice with it on young, healthy patients so I’m more comfortable doing it with sick, possibly frail elderly patients in the nursing home this semester.



While I ate lunch, I worked on some of my other assignments, did some studying, and refilled on coffee; I feel like that’s about my normal routine these days haha once we met back with our clinical group, we had our medical calculation test; now, I’m not a math person and never have been, but I did enjoy the objectivity of the math test after how subjective some of our other tests have been and will be. And I won’t complain about a relatively easy 100 either :) While each person individually went over their tests and evaluations for the week with our clinical instructor, the rest of us had a chance to talk and get to know each other better. I really do like my group; I love that we all get along so well and work together even though we all met only about a month ago. I hope that kind of camaraderie will be a theme throughout the rest of nursing school and in my career as a nurse.