School, Challenge and Juicing

Wow...I have been a real slacker with the blog this week.  It's been a long and stressful week at school.  We had 2 simulations, a mom hemorrhaging and a baby going into respiratory distress.  We have the simulators, which is a mom and baby who have all of the vital signs and we need to find out what is wrong with them, and play it out like it is happening in real life.  We assess, call the doctor, administer medications and then we’re graded on how we handled the situation. The teacher sits behind the one-way mirror and is the voice of mom. The entire time the simulation is recorded and then afterwards we watch the video and critique what we did and how we handled it and what we should have done differently.  The entire thing is very stressful, and now that it’s the end of the year there are quite a few more that we need to do. 

Disclaimer: No mannequins were hurt or killed in the simulations mentioned above, Yay me!  

We have a pediatric fracture on Monday, neuro on Tuesday and a code blue on Wednesday.   I also have to take my Med-Surg ATI on Thursday, which I need to get an 80%.  Talk about a stressful week, so I may not be around much.  We'll see how I do with stress and avoiding the junk food.  Now that's the real test for the week.  All I have to say is I'm so thankful that Friday is a holiday.

WARNING: The next paragraph is me unloading and complaining about a certain teacher.  It's my own therapy to keep me away from the box of Oreos in the kitchen.

This last week I’ve been an emotional mess. We received our grade for our mental health rotation, which started after the first of the year and ended at Spring break.  Now, I have no problems with my grade.  I have a problem with the way our mental health teacher handled everything.  This is her first year teaching the subject. She handed us our guidelines on what we needed to do for each clinical rotation, and talked about how we should pick one person and do a SimChart, which is basically doing an assessment and care plan on an individual.  Most teachers tell us exactly what we need to do, like how many care plans, or do a psychosocial evaluation, but this teacher did not.  I spoke with an individual for a short time and got just enough information to do my charting.  I got it back with a 92% and she wrote a note that said, “I know you were only with this person a short time and you did excellent charting, but you could of included more information like a care plan, nursing diagnosis, and objectives.”  Now this confused me, because I had all of the above, so I emailed her.  She replied, basically saying that other students had 3-4 care plans and other assessments and I didn’t have as many as them.  This ticked me off!  Their experience was different then mine.  One of those students sat and talked with an individual for 4 hours, I talked to my guy for maybe 20 minutes and his answers were “yes” and “no” to all of my questions.  How can you compare my experience with anyone else. If you wanted us to do certain assessments or a certain amount of care plans, she should of told us and I would have done it, but because someone did more than I did? So, if I did 2 and someone else did 3 does that mean they get a better grade?  This was just one thing.   

Then she grades my journal entry and gives me an 80% because I wrote about my experience, but didn’t go into what I brought away from the experience and putting myself in their shoes.  If I would have known that’s what she wanted me to do I would have wrote about that.  She put write about your experience at …….!  I know this seems petty, but it’s just dealing with this person the last 3 months and the way she handles things have just irritated me.   

Okay, she gave me a 90% over all for my Mental Health Clinical and I couldn’t figure out how she came up with that grade.  All of my journal entries were 100%, one was 80% and my two Sim Charts were 92% and 98%.  How did she come up with an overall grade of 90%?  I emailed her about this also and she said that each assignment carries different weights and that’s why it doesn’t even out.  She never did give us the breakdown because she was afraid that we may do more work on the assignments with the higher points and blow off the lower point papers.  I’m so glad she has so much faith in us. For all I know she pulled that grade out of the air.  I’m sorry to be writing all of this, but I just need to unload and get it off of my chest.  The rotation is done, the grades are in and I just need to move on.  Okay I feel better now.  **stepping down from my soap box.**

As far as how my week went with the challenge. I started out strong with keeping track of my calories, but by the end of the week I started to slack. I exercised and it helped me to stay away from the junk food while I was stressed.  It’s amazing how wonderful walking feels and how it relieves the stress so much more than eating the junk food. 

I started following the calendar on running and walking and it was so hard to keep looking at my timer, because I don’t have an alarm.  I had a stopwatch and would run a minute and walk a minute and it was really stressful, and I couldn’t really enjoy the run.  My friend, who has been an absolute life saver this week with everything that has been going on, told me that what she always did was set landmarks and would say that she was going to run to a light pole or a bush and run and walk until she was eventually running the entire way.   

The route I run/walk is a country road that is never really traveled much, but is really beautiful. You can see pictures and read about it here. It’s a 2-mile route. The way country roads work is that each road is 1-mile long, so if you go around the square section it is about 4-miles.  I go down and back this 1-mile road, which ends up being 2-miles.  I figured that from now on I will walk ½ a mile, run/walk 1-mile and then walk again the last ½ mile, until I’m eventually running the entire thing.  It just seems less stressful. 

 

I found on a blog I read an interesting film, which is free to watch until midnight tonight.  If you haven’t seen it I would really urge you to watch it.  There is some great information and I’m even thinking about purchasing the film. It also has convinced me to buy a juicer and start juicing.  Here is the link to the film.

The friend that I talked about above, her husband grows lots of different veggies and I may join the CSA coop and start purchasing fresh vegetables, meat and eggs.  Do any of you juice?  If so I would love to hear your favorite recipes.  Also, do you have any opinions about a good juicer?  I have $100 at Amazon from selling books and I’m thinking about using it to purchase a juicer.  Let me know what you think.  I know this is long and hopefully I can eventually post more during the week so it's not all in one post. Thanks for putting up with my rant!