Swans in Trashbags

Well, I've survived my first semester of nursing school. :) Well, I still have 2 cumulative finals and a proctor test over the next 2 days, but after going through the last 4 months this just seems like a hiccup. I have learned the most extraordinary amount of information, which I guess is a good thing since as of this moment I am 1/4 of a nurse. I am 12 months away from holding fragile sickly lives in my hands. Terrifying! But we're all terrified so I'm in good company. We learn a lot, but its taught in a totally different way. Instead of rote memorization, they teach us concepts. So acing a test really isn't about memorizing lots of trivia long enough to regurgitate it for the exam, but really understanding how things work and why you need to do what you do. Which is good, because my brain refuses to retain what it deems as useless knowledge. Every question on the exam starts with, You have a 48 year old female patient with.... then gives you a scenario and they ask any number of things. So if you really know how the body works you can generally reason your way through to the right answer. That being said, its still an unholy amount of stuff you just have to know, and I've never been so happy with 3 A's and a B before in my life. I will never understand how I got an A in the class who's teacher's name has become my class's unofficial swear word, but I'll take it!

I started the downhill slide to Christmas break by having my final evaluations with my clinical instructor at the VA. Let me just mention that she is one of the BEST teachers we could have asked for. She is unfailingly patient, kind, and protective of us. We follow her from floor to floor like she's our mama hen and we are her chicks, only she lovingly refers to us as her "swans." Quite a stretch for anyone who has seen us in in what we nostalgically refer to as our "button down trashbags" (white nursing uniforms...nobody, let me repeat NOBODY looks good in these things!). In my evaluation she said she wishes she would have taken a video of us huddled around the nurse's station our first day looking terrified and green around the gills. I will admit, she kept telling us it gets better but none of us actually believed her. Just as we got comfortable with the staff, the floor, and the basic concept of manhandling old men, the semester is over and they kick us out. She did say something to me, though, that absolutely made my day/week/month/semester. She said that I have one of her top 3 all-time favorite bedside manners. That she loves the way I deal with patients and how I come across as friendly, genuine, and confident and that it makes the patients feel safe. This meant so much to me, especially since I actively dreaded every Wednesday clinical at the VA for the first 7 weeks or so, thats how far outside my comfort zone I was. Then I had this really great 83 year old guy, a stroke patient who could barely walk and only had use of one arm. For some reason I just turned a corner with him, and saw that even though most of what I had to do horrified me, he really needed my help and it felt REALLY good to help him. As he sat on the toilet in nothing but his birthday suit I washed his back for him and put lotion on and he told me how great that felt. Something so simple. Granted, at that point I was blissfully unaware that in a minute's time he would provide me with what has come to be my classmate's favorite story for me to retell over and over, complete with hand motions. They encourage us to have the patients do as much for themselves as possible because its good exercise and keeps them moving their joints. So when he was done on the toilet I handed him a warm washcloth and instructed him to go ahead and clean his "bits" while he was standing there. He was hardly stable, so I held him securely by one elbow while he did so. As you can imagine, his face was only about 12 inches from mine and he proceeded to vigorously wash himself for 3 minutes straight... looking me straight in the eye for the duration. *here you must picture me doing an impersonation of him, beady-eyed, breathing heavily, whole body shaking from the exertion* It didn't get weird until about the 1 minute mark, then I was like, uhhhhhhhhhh..... is this OK?! Just then my instructor, Nicole, popped her head in the door and said, "Kayte, you doing ok in here?" I said a perky "Yep!" with only a slight note of hysteria in my voice. After working with these old guys all semester you see that very few nice feeling things happen to them and I'm much more understanding of an extended tryst with a warm washcloth.

My next fun patient was, I kid you not, the cutest old man any of us had ever seen. Even my instructor said so! He was 85 with Alzheimer's, but just the most pleasantly demented person you ever could meet. When we got to the floor and were waiting to get our nurse assignments, a nurse standing next to an old man strapped into a walker-slash-chair contraption said, "This one belong to any of you?" Sure enough, there's my patient, placed in front of the nurse's station so they can keep an eye on him. She said, "Good luck with that!" when I claimed him. A moment later one of my classmates tapped me on the shoulder and informed me he was trying to escape. I looked over and he was working at his seat belt with his breakfast fork. Yup, it was gonna be that kind of day. Within minutes he was out of his belt, had figured out how to open the walker's gate, and was headed down the hall. It took 3 of us to get him headed to his own room, but he was laughing and giggling the entire time so that makes up for part of it. I ended up dragging a computer station into his room so I could do my charting at his bedside because he was a 90 lb. version of Ayden when he was 1, constantly on the go. At one point I was unable to persuade him to stay in his own room and we ended up in another patient's room, where my patient proceeded to climb in this poor guy's vacated bed. The whole time I'm pleading with him and trying to convince him this is not his bed, he's looking at me with what my father would have perfectly described as a "shit-eating grin" on his face, and told me, "Now THIS one is comfy!" as he gently bounced his bottom on the mattress. I actually had to go get my instructor and tell her my patient was in somebody else's bed and I can't get him out (I may never live this down). When I got him back to his room I handed him a newspaper and put his reading glasses on his face in hopes it would keep him entertained for a minute, which lasted all of about 5. After that I asked his roommate if we could use his playing cards and proceeded to play poker with my patient, who kept hinting that he knew how to play strip poker then would collapse in a fit of giggles and snorts. After about 30 minutes of this, his roommate's wife came in and I overheard her complaining that she couldn't find her husband's reading glasses anywhere. Panicking, I took the glasses off my senile patient's face and sneakily slipped them onto the bedside table behind me, only to hear her 10 seconds later turn toward me and say, "Oh, here they are!" OMG. I had my patient wearing another man's glasses while he didn't even own any glasses himself.

Here is a picture of my clinical group and instructor on our very first day at the VA, trying not to look as terrified as we felt. Nicole, my instructor, is the pretty blonde on the left.