Clinicals and Care Plans

I believe an update is in order! Despite being really sick and miserable the last week or so and having to miss work, I’m in a good place right now. I started clinicals a couple weeks ago and WOW I love it!! I’ve been able to suction tracheostomys and clean around them and crush meds and give them through a gastric feeding tube and do head-to-toe assessments and I was also able to watch a bunch of people get catheterized! Some people find it so weird that this kind of stuff gets me excited, but I absolutely love it!  

                For clinicals we have to do these intense assignments called Care Plans, where we basically find out anything and everything there is to know about a certain patient. We have to do a health assessment, figure out everything there is to know about their current list of medications, look up all labs and surgeries performed and figure out what labs are abnormal and what that might indicate, gather data on their history of present illness and any past medical diagnoses, write a paper on the pathophysiology of their main diagnosis and then once all this data is gathered we have to come up with our own nursing diagnoses and prioritize them based on Maslow’s pyramid.   These care plans are about 10 hours each and I was stressed out sooo bad but happy day I’ve actually finished my first care plan and got a lot of stuff done in the last few days and I’m still getting good grades so I’m happy!....For now anyway. Lol.

                I feel stressed all the time lately because all I do is wake up, go to school for 6 hours, come home and study and do homework, eat, sleep a few hours, and repeat. I work every other weekend so I usually only get about 4 days off each month. I love my friends and miss them so much and I hate having to tell them that I can’t hang out because of school stuff…but I hope they understand that this has been a goal of mine for as long as I can remember. With that being said, this year is going to be a year of sacrifice. I’ll have to sacrifice some sleep, time with friends, fun, boys/dates, money, and at times my sanity lol!