Clinical Experience #1

All i have to say is “wow” this is what I will be doing. Due to Privacy of patients I can not say anything. Sucks doesn’t it? Well maybe I can at least say the work I did.

At first I’m thinking what am I suppose to do? I have less than 3 months of experience in the medical field and I’m suppose to touch a patient? Are you crazy? Well thats what I did and i survived.  I had to listen to Breath sounds and it was even harder than I thought. What if the patient keeps talking? Well I guess thats exactly what happened and I hard a hard time listening. However all my listening gained me some experience. I seem to get how to do pulse rate pretty well. I managed to get the same as the pulseoximeter. (spelling?). But it was great and i learned a lot today. I also saw some treatments done through a nebulizer. In a perfect setting like in class, a patient will NEVER take off the mask. But in a hospital setting… you walk away for 5 mins and you come back and the patient took it off. As crazy as it seems that is exactly what can happen.

I am not trained to do an EKG (electro cardio gram) or ECG. They are basically the same thing but one is like german or something. Anyways I was able to put the leds in the patients arm and chest. At first I’m thinking.. what if i put it on the wrong side or wrong led. It seems that it would not do anything but give a wrong reading. In my head I thought it would shock the patient but I guess not. Worst scenario is doing it wrong and giving the wrong readings to the lab.

Now the hard part was Charting. HOW THE HELL CAN A PERSON READ THAT?! SERIOUSLY!. Is it really that hard to write in a legible way? I was told to look for the medication and I’m like ?????? The only thing I can make up was Albuterol and I think it was QID not sure but something like that. Basically I read the physicians order and read pages of pages. Charts are crazy!!.

I also did Standard Precautions and all I have to say is “that is the most wasteful thing ever”. It is worth it because you can catch a disease. But within a few hour span I probably used up 10+ pairs of gloves and average time of using it was like <5mins. I guess thats healthcare.

I have some studying to do and well I will leave you guys with some advice.

“If you don’t know the answer, just simply say “I don’t know”".

No one expects a student to know everything.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 10:52 pm and is filed under The Student Experience SRT. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.