Last day of MedSurg clinical

We survived, guys...

Wednesday was the last day of medsurg clinical. It feels so good to be done and to have one acute care clinical under our belt. It feels kind of surreal because part of me is not ready to say, "I'm in my 2nd (and final!) year of nursing school". Part of me feels like I don't want to ever leave the safety of school and another part of me feels like "I don't know anything yet!", but a third part of me thinks I need to make some money and pay off student loans.

The great thing about clinical groups is you become really close with the select few who are at the same hospital as you. In a cohort of 80-some people, it's nearly impossible to meet everyone in lecture, but clinical is small and intimate, and you are so out of your comfort zone that I think people bond over it. It might be having shared the common experience of a code brown or starting care plans only to find out your patient was discharged the second clinical day (AKA start over and throw out 4 hours of work). But I think it usually comes down to grumpy people- grumpy patients, grumpy nurses or grumpy family members. You bond over the fact that you dealt with the same grumpy nurse who saw hated having a student and talked about it in post-conference. It's like group therapy, only free. I really feel like there is a special connection within each clinical group because there's an understanding that each group has that the rest of the cohort doesn't. It's kind of weird to think that we're the only ones that got to experience this hospital, and that our group of 6 will never be together again (well, possibly in another clinical, but highly unlikely). 

I started to realize that nursing school is a different experience for every single student, even those from who go through the same program, and even more so than the nuances that students in other non-nursing programs experience. Sure, we all have the same classes to take and clinical to do, but all our clinicals are at different places, caring for different populations, working with different nurses, clinical instructors and patients. There is a lot of variability in each student's experience. It can become frustrating because sometimes it just seems like others are getting so much more out of clinical than you are. Some students are just in the right place at the right time and get all the patients needing an NG tube or a foley cath. I just remind myself all the time, "It's okay!". As long as I'm learning something still, I'm progressing and that's fine with me.

PS. I did a couple really cool things this quarter and I'm going to list the notable ones for my own memory's sake! I really need to write down these stories in a separate post, but for now I will list them so I'll remember: giving a suppository, dressing changes, taking out an NG tube, a serious code brown