5th/6th Days

February 26th

Today I had my own patient (again)! I know it was only one person, but to be 'in charge' of her care for the whole day was pretty exciting. I gave her all her medications and monitored her blood sugar during the shift. She did not have a whole lot going on with her, but that gave me time to figure out other things on the unit such as the charting system. All electronic charting has both positive and negative aspects in my mind, but I seem to be getting the hang of it.

She was incredibly easy to take care of but I was so happy my nurse has been trusting me and encouraging me to become more independent. The charge nurse also gave me my very own medicine cabinet key.... I felt so special!!

February 27th

Today, I got assigned 2 patients!! Whoa!! They were still the 'easiest' out of my nurse's assignments, but it was still a big deal to me. It was incredible how much just one person will make you schedule your day in a completely different way because now you have 2 sets of vital signs, blood sugars, medications, charting duties, and assessments you have to keep track of. I actually am highly leaning towards being a general med-surg nurse as my first rotation and there you have at least 5 or 6 patients!!

One of my patients was the woman I had had the day before (which was nice because she knew me and I knew what to expect with her) and the other patient was a man who had come in to get treated for fluid overload (extremely common with people with congestive heart failure and is sometimes indicative of non-compliance with meds, diet, exercise, etc....). So he didn't have a lot going on either but my nurse wanted me to get used to multi-tasking to work on my time-management.

Again, I gave all shots (PO, IV, IM) and charted and basically just tried to make them as comfortable as possible. I made one mistake regarding medications by accidentally deleting her scheduled meds from the medication scanner and my nurse had to manually input all the orders back in to the scanner. BUT, she was so nice about it and said 'we are all human and we all make mistakes'. I could not have asked for a better preceptor.

At the end of the day I was exhausted, but it was really really neat to have two patients to call my own ;)