Wound care, catheters, and trach tubes

I get to watch fun videos for this course. Tonight was oxygen therapy, wound care, urinary/bowel function, and urinary catheters. It's remarkable to me how bad the acting is in these videos, especially when the nurse says something like, "I'm not making you uncomfortable, am I?" while inserting a catheter. Umm... I don't think there's any way to make that experience NOT uncomfortable. You can make it LESS uncomfortable, but no one is ever going to say, "That was fun, let's do it again!"

This week I've got lab on Saturday, which is where I'll practice all of the fun stuff that I watched in the videos. We only get to do it on mannequins, though, not each other. It wouldn't be fair for the 1-2 guys in each lab group to have to suffer through every other student inserting and removing a catheter on them, after all. Funny, but not nice. Though I don't know how nice it'll be for the first real patient that I get to do it on...

Class is just plugging along slowly, trying to get us up to speed on all the basics we'll need for clinicals next week. After class today I went home with Sarah to hang out. We went out for lunch, chatted about everything, but mostly boys. We've concluded that boys are dumb (sorry, boys) but we like them anyway. Then we tried to do some homework, succeeded briefly, and continued to chat until she had to go to lab. I'll probably be going back over there tomorrow night for the weekly "get Paul and Caitlin in the same place" dinner.

This weekend I'll be spending most of my time transcribing the group session that happens tomorrow morning. I hope I'll get the audio file early enough that I can get a lot of it done tomorrow afternoon. I also hope that it doesn't take as long as I think it will, but that's not likely. Today was my last day of real relaxing fun time before the normal school craziness comes back in full force. I'm actually looking forward to it though, since I've had a little too much free time on my hands lately. I don't think I'll ever get over my need to be busy all the time.

EDIT: There are now 5 sprouts. All of them look a little different. It's very exciting.