IV's

There are many ways in which the Lord has blessed my road to get where I'm at. I think that unlike others, my path to nursing was delayed/altered because the Lord understood what would work best for me. These past nine months working at DH have been instrumental in helping me to understand a lot of what they are saying in class, to grasp concepts a little better because I'm immersed in the culture and system already of the hospital. Had I not had this experience, I feel that I would be floundering right now.

Yesterday was a great case in point, however, of the opportunities that I get that help me to be successful in my program. In pharmacology we are currently learning antibiotics, anti-fungals, anti-mycobacterials, and anti-infectives. Of course, being the case I was trying to hunt down patients being administered antibx to quiz myself. As well, I started asking the two nurses I was working with about IV's. More specifically inserting an IV, etc.

DH is a teaching hospital, that is great about helping to teach others, each other, and the patient. Therefore they both looked at me and said "let's do it, you can do it right now!" Upon my protests, their response was that we didn't have much to do (in fact we really didn't, we had one patient and were awaiting two patients being transferred to the floor).

So there I sat, IV tray in hand, with them walking me through how to insert IV's!!

Needless to say, it was scary and frightening all at the same time, as one day soon I'm going to be doing that exact thing in clinicals on a real patient! But it was so exciting to get to learn it and have two willing and excited nurses wanting to help coach me and teach me!! I loved it!!

Definitely helps me to feel more prepared for when we start learning IV's in foundations. Now I just need to learn about catheters a little bit more ;-)