The sixth sense (or how all nurses are a little bit psychic)

In the world of nursing there is a long accepted "nurses intuition" or sixth sense, which means that even when all the evidence points to the contrary we can often look at a patient and say:

"Now ... I don't like the look of him."

Not in the sense that we think are patients are ugly you understand, but in that once you've seen a fair few sick people everyday for a few years, you start to get a feel for when someone's taking, or about to take, a turn for the worse. They could have perfectly health observations but something about that patient tells you to do an ECG or bleep a doctor or at the least keep a closer eye on them for a while.

Which is great, psychic nurses - excellent!

This becomes a difficulty however, when you realize that a patient looking "a bit iffy" isn't exactly quantifiable, we live with a medical system, and I work within one, which relies on things being quantifiable and score-able. In the NHS we have the EWS or Early Warning Score system, which gives you a score for the patients observations, which ideally is 0 - anything above a three and a doctor must be informed.

If you are curious - an EWS chart!

Which is great, it's a fairly fail safe way of monitoring a patients overall health and spotting a problem quickly. However, it really doesn't account for the sixth sense, in which many nurses, doctors and other health care professionals can look at an outwardly healthy patient and know that there is something up. If you can't justify investigations then the general consensus is that you shouldn't be doing them, which is fair enough - you don't replace your car's battery just for fun, or re-tile your roof just for the sheer hell of it. So why would you do an ultra-sound on a patient with no signs of cardiac problems?

But I worry, surely we're ignoring a vital skill that health care professionals pick up subconsciously, a vital skill bred from long experience and acres of knowledge. We're in danger of forgetting that that patient is a human being, with a very complex body that can do all sorts of crazy stuff to confuse us, and see them as a car - which doesn't need to go to the garage until that red light starts flashing. Tools and charts and scoring systems are good, when used in conjunction with common sense and humanity. But rely on them solely and you will a) loose the heart of the NHS and b) miss out on excellent medics who know something is wrong - but can't do anything about it.

A&E - or - how I was saved by organised chaos

For those of you from over seas - A&E is Accident and Emergency in the UK, and what is probably better known as an Emergency Room in America ect. Before Christmas (yes - this is overdue) I had a month on A&E as my placement, which was brilliant - I absolutely loved it!

I am one of those people who believe that it isn't a crisis until it can't be fixed by WD40 and gaffa tape! So I feel that A&E is perfect for me, it's all about "sorting stuff out", a patient comes in and we "sort them out" before they are either sent home or moved on to somewhere else in the hospital, we have 4 hours to patch them up, get them in a safe position and then we ship them on.

I learnt so much, there are moments when I feel helpless and hopeless and A&E just made me feel so hopeful and helpful! I was making a difference to people's lives at the moment when they need the most help in the world, either though grief, or through pain or suffering, through sickness and injury we are there, we will sort things out. Or that's the idea anyway!

In my time as a student nurse, I've seen patients die and although sad, in my case it was patients who were, not to put it crudely, dying already, the end was inevitable and expected. However on A&E I had my first experience of unexpected death, and unexpected sickness.

"We've all had days like that, haven't we? You make one small mistake, and because of that you make a bigger one. You leave your wallet by the bed. Then you go up to get it. You trip over the rug, you break your leg. Next thing you know, you're in hospital with a fatal infection. Just because you forgot your wallet."
Waking the Dead: Subterraneans  

I encountered many things in A&E, from the bizarre toilet brush in an uncomfortable place, to the common place accidents that taught me that no-one should be allowed to open a packing case before midday, from the un-eventful vomiting bugs, to the terrifying and family destroying diseases coming to a head. I learnt quickly that things happen every day that we can't predict, we make millions of decisions every day that effect us in a variety of ways, short term and long term.

"Life is fragile.
We're not guaranteed a tomorrow so give it everything you've got."

We can predict no-thing and we can't just let life pass up by, assuming that there's always tomorrow, because as I stood there doing chest compressions on a woman who had had a heart attack, I know that her husband hadn't woken up that morning imaging that he had only hours left with her, I know that when he had slept next to her the night before he hadn't know that it was the last time he would do so. In the same vein the woman who fell of a trapeze didn't imagine when she woke up that morning that she would spend that evening in surgery, and the woman who saw her son off to work after breakfast, didn't  imagine that by 9pm that evening she would be agreeing that his ventilator could be switched off.

Life has a way of throwing up the most unexpected hurdles, and just like any other hurdle we can either jump over them and continue onto the next hurdle, or they floor us and there is no recovery.

The perfect relationship? The perfect home? The perfect job?

And all this, all of it - it saved me, while on placement you're constantly looking for the thing, the department that inspires you and that you know you want to work in. 99% of us are always looking for that perfect something, the perfect relationship, the perfect home or the perfect job - and for student nurses it is exactly the same. Every placement we are assessing whether this is something we'd want to do when we're qualified, sometimes we have an enjoyable placement, but we couldn't do it for the next 40 odd years, sometimes we have a god awful placement, and sometimes we have a brilliant placement and we know - 100% that this is what we want to do. And that's how I felt on A&E, I felt completely reassured and confident in my choice to be a nurse, I was doing enjoyable jobs; dressings, IV's, neuro obs, ECG's ect - there was no routine and I loved that! No knowing what was coming through the doors, and I loved the unknown, the surprise, and the fact that I was making a minute by minute difference.

Now I don't want you to think that I only enjoyed A&E for some kind of adrenaline kick, I don't at all, the un-known is scary. But whereas on a ward I found it all too easy to feel lost and useless and bored in the endless shifts of drugs rounds, ward rounds and 6 hourly obs, in A&E there is no routine, you can be doing 15 min obs on a patient in cubical 1, while running through an IV on someone in 2, while awaiting bloods on someone in 3, everything is happening and you can see a patient improve or deteriorate under your care and nursing very quickly, and you have to be able to react to that in an instant.

Just to clarify, I am not knocking nurses who work on wards, they are brilliant - they are putting in the time to slowly build a patient back up to health! We are all superstars, it's just that some of us are superstars who like the slow and steady, and some of us are superstars who like the fast and furious.  

This kind of thing only happens in films ...

You know that perfect scene in the film? 

The one where the boy finally declares his love for the girl ...

I actually love Andrew Lincon a little

Or the friend in the cafe gives the protagonist the perfect pep talk ...

The film that makes me grateful
for every decision I've ever been
allowed to make!

And the hero makes the right decision and someone is saved ...

"Oh you're Celtic? ... There's lovely"

All of these are cracking plot devices, don't get me wrong I love a good love declaration/pep talk/happy ending, but they're hardly realistic. Life happens bit by bit and very few of us will ever have our faith realigned in a perfect pep talk, or unburden ourselves in the snow on christmas eve to our dream partner, or ever have the chance to save an entire family and change history.

However, I did indeed have one of these strange only-happens-in-a-film moments recently:

I was sat on a train, on a spur of the moment trip home after a few hellish days, straight off a night shift still in uniform sat quietly with a book and bottle of squash. I had been giving myself a bit of a hard time and thinking about dropping out of the course a bit, mainly because I kind of lost faith in myself and started doubting my own knowledge to the point where I was making mistakes because I was second guessing myself. Anyway, feeling a bit shitty and wandering what the point was I was considering dropping out and was content with sloping off home to work my way through an assignment and then I met this woman, who was sat opposite me and who spotted my uniform, that was unsuccessfully hidden under my cardigan. And she changed everything.

She was a midwife, who had qualified two years ago at my own university, and the hour or so we sat and talked convinced me that I am absolutely on the right path, with a mixture of anecdotes which remind me of the good times, and her own stories of training which reminded me that the second year is a long hard slog that no-one enjoys and only the ones who can persevere through it are meant to get through it.

A strange moment of pure co-incidence, where a total stranger who I just happened to sit opposite helped me out and at just the right time when I was at my lowest eb where I needed to be and which was the right path (or track - geddit!) for me.

I shall finish by saying - trains are awesome, I love trains. I've met cool, lovely, funny and just plain odd people travelling around the place, always talk to people on trains because how many other times in life are you going to spend a few hours sat with a group of total strangers, unable to leave and all in exactly the same position?

Just jump in!

This was a piece of advice that I gave to a nurse starting her first placement, on my latest placement I was faced with so many opportunities to try out new skills that I had observed, like making up IV's, catheterising, dressings and passing NG (naso-gastric) tubes. But a lot of these things i.e. the NG tube, will happen occasionally and not on a lot of wards, so if you get the chance to do one - then do it!

A properly placed NG tube on an X-ray

Over my 10 week placement, but the time I reached my 9th week I had seen two NG's being passed, and while on a night shift one needed doing. So - putting on my best confident in this face I asked to do it. It was terrifying, it's easy to put an NG down the trachea instead of the oesophagus for example. (For the record - that is a bad idea!) And obviously, shoving a tube down someone's nose isn't much fun for them, and a lot of people have really strong gag reflexes, some people will try and hit you, scratch you and kick you, but after a point it becomes more important to get the tube down to their stomach to feed them than to avoid being maimed. With the 12 hour shifts and the missed breaks and the poor pay, half the fun of nursing is getting to be a martyr and striding into the house at 8am after a night shift to proclaim: "I got kicked in the stomach tonight but at least Mr Smith isn't going to go into a diabetic coma on my watch!"

Edith Cavell .
A WW1 British nurse, executed for helping Allied soldiers escape occupied Belgium. 

So my tip to the lovely student nurse I met on my (now former) ward, was to just jump in, if you see someone about to do something that you're interested in, then go on and ask if you can watch. I've watched:

• Chest drains, ( I actually became part of Dr Williams' Chest Drain Dream Team!)
• Lumbar punctures,
• PICO dressings,
• A Bronchoalveolar lavage,
• Seen some really funky wounds,
• Passed an NG tube,
• Removed cannulas 
• Watched a load of X-Rays

and many many more things besides. Speaking to the fellow student nurse, she was nervous and was a bit unsure about how to get to do stuff. I tried to reassure her and now I'm trying to reassure you guys too - the way to gain experience is to nag, wheedle and blag your way into watch procedures, because once you've watched once or twice, you can offer to lend a hand for the next few, and after that you can ask to do them yourselves.

Experience breeds Competence

I've now finished that particular 10 week placement, and it's now onwards and upwards, that pesky assignment that I was worried I had failed I passed so I'm clear to move onto the second year! I've moved out of halls (or the prison-cum-psychiatric hospital that my Mam christened it) and into my new shared house which is very exciting, it's going to be fun if a little difficult, we're all very different people with big personalities, different interests, different senses of humour and everything so I'm sure sparks will fly but we're all really close friends and we all love alcohol and bacon so I'm sure that things wont be too bad!

The idea that I'm now a second year student nurse is terrifying, 1/3 of the way through my course, my Mam pointed out that I left high school and started 6th form 3 years ago - and in 3 years time, I'll be a qualified in my blues, hopefully doing everything right (ish)

I'll speak to you all soon, and if any of you are particularly interested then my next post is going to be a "Student nurse haul" blog post, about what you will need for those of you starting your training in September.

Moving on and my addiction

"There is no standing still because time is moving forward."

Greg Lake

It's not something I've ever really considered, when you think of nursing you think how great it is to be helping someone, or how hard it is when there's someone you can't "fix" or the paperwork pisses you off, or the hours get you down. But I never really considered how we as nurses are expected to just move on.

Treat a patient for weeks, months or years - grow close to them and their family and then to lose them and within hours to be treating a totally new patient as if the previous were never there.

I lost a patient over the weekend, I worked Saturday - and Monday. At Monday handover we were told that we had lost her the night before, by the time drugs rounds had started the room was being fogged and by tea time we were admitting a replacement. And that's meant to be fine: we've lost A and in her place is B. You don't think that when you become a nurse - you don't imagine that you're going to be in a position where you just have to switch off and over so quickly, and it's hard - it's so hard, because it's not the kind of thing that we're programmed to do, we're meant to care, we're meant to care and yet we're meant to just move on without being emotional, and that's inhuman and hard.

So on I move, I smile and I welcome chat away - and then when I get home I think: think about how this works, I drink my tea I eat my pasta I watch my tele and I think.

"This is my life, I  can either think; there's one person who I did everything for to make their end more comfortable, I learnt from treating them, and here's a brand new person - who needs my help and who I can transfer all this new knowledge to. Or I can jump - go and leave and take myself  off and become a temp again."

And I've chosen - I'm staying. If you don't move on and fight it out and keep going then you're never going to get anywhere. Nothing worth having comes easily.

I am an addict.

I don't take drugs, I don't drink to excess, I'm not a sex addict - I'm a courgette addict. I mean I've always liked courgettes, but recently someone told me that courgette, prawns and tomatos make a lovely pasta sauce so: off I go and make some very nice pasta sauce with courgette in.
 And BOOM! I'm now on my 3rd week of eating courgette with everything - every single one of my tea's these 3 weeks have consisted of courgette with something - anything - as long as it's courgetty!
Agghh - it's so delicious! I'm going to assume that this is an OK addiction, I mean if you look at alcoholism, heroin addiction, smoking and hardcore courgette addiction and I'm pretty sure that mine'll come out the safest!

Nurse P's top 10 tips of being a nursing student!

So, it's occurred to me that the majority of you reading that will either be prospective student nurses or current nurses. So I thought I ought to do some kind of top 10 run down of tips since I'm almost at the end of my first year.

10 
There are no stupid questions.

This one's not just for nursing, pretty much anyone can benefit from this one. But in nursing, for that is what I know,  it is particularly important. Firstly in lectures, you're going to learn a lot of stuff ... or rather you're going to be told a lot of stuff that you're going to be expected to remember, and asking questions - helping you to understand the wider picture of the patient, the condition and the body. And when you're on placement ask questions, I don't mean be pestering and pulling on your mentors sleeves, but ask what condition a patient has then you can research it, ask the physio what it is they're doing, ask where things are because there will come the day when a doctor grabs you at the nurses station and says "Can you bring three blue cannulas to side room 8 please?" and you're going to have to fetch some and know where they are. Same goes for asking how something works, when your mentor asks you to set a litre of water to run through it helps if you're not staring at the machine like this!

9
It might feel like it's all hopeless - but it's better than you think.

Oh my God, it's not going in and, I'm going to be shit at this and OH MY GOD I DON'T UNDERSTAND! I'm prepared to put good money on every-one of you reading this will either have thought that at one point in the course or will do at one point or another. Yeah - we all have, I have, I will again, it's going to happen - live with it! Try not to feel as if it's all entirely hopeless, things, in my experience, tend to come together in time. Sometimes that thing that seemed like double Dutch to you in that lecture, suddenly makes sense once you attend the relevant seminar, or once you have another lecture a fortnight later that pieces the pieces together or even once you're on placement and you see that thing that makes no sense to you, in the flesh and suddenly you get it!
And there is no better feeling than something going wrong on the ward and going onto automatic pilot and knowing exactly what to do and sorting it. And I found that I knew exactly what to do once, just because the stuff that had been taught in lectures has seeped in and stuck without me even knowing and I was very proud of myself.

8. 
Buy a stethoscope. 

They are like gold dust, if you get asked to do the obs on your bay, and you can't find a stethoscope - you're screwed, so buy one and make it bright! Because when someone tries to steal it and spends the rest of your shift wandering around with it around their neck, it helps if you can spot it. I recommend Littmann stethoscopes - they are ace, genuinely the best ones you can buy, not cheap but like wine and shoes good things rarely are!

7.
Be positive.

Yeah a confused patient just tried to hit you as you were wiping their bum, yeah you're 10 hours into a 12 hour shift, yeah you're tired and hot and your feet hurt. But try to be positive, some days are going to be shit and some are going to be amazing, some will make you want to cry and some will make you want to sing with joy. But no-one, especially not the patients are going to benefit from you hating everything. Off load onto other student nurses when you get home, with a glass of wine and last nights Corrie, but the time when you're at work is the time to extenuate the positives. You might forget about that patients you looked after for 3 days 2 years ago, but chances are they wont forget you, and the aim of the game is for them to remember you as that cracking nurse who was really helpful and supportive, as opposed to that miserable bitch who walked around with a face like a slapped arse. Take your break alone, outside and let your armour fall with a cup of tea, a packet of crisps or a cigarette (whichever floats your boat - or all three!) and recover if needs be, but your patients need you to be strong, so try to be.

6.
You're not a normal student - so don't try to be.

You're at a uni - with many students attending it, and chances are you will bump into them, live with them, end up being filmed by them for course work, have sex with them or maybe even marry them! But the time will come when you realise that you're not like them,  they're different! Because all those stereotypes about binge drinking during the week, lie-ins and missing lectures are possible for them.

• Nurses have long years, a normal student will usually finish in or before June, and return late September or October. A nursing student will finish in the middle of August and start back at the beginning of September. And forget a 4-6 week Christmas and Easter, it's two weeks for us.

• Whereas a normal student will often have a 2 or 3 day week, a nursing student will have a 4-5 day working week in lectures, not to mention those pesky periods on placement with 5:30 starts.

• Due to some very specific training from the NMC guidelines, you can't really miss lectures, you'll have to sign a register and if you don't turn up then it's bye bye! 

I'm not saying that being a nurse is dull, or boring or anything even vaguely like that, I mean what other course means you spend your lunchtime laughing about catheters!? But if your flatmates are going out on the lash on a Tuesday night while you have 9am lectures the next morning, suck it up, swig some Horlicks and settle down to watch tele. You can still go out an have fun, trust me - I've drunk enough to feel a bull on occasion, but just remember that while you're both here to get degrees yours is a professional qualification and as a result you get to have a lot less mid-week fun. On the plus side you will quickly become the human equivalent of Eastenders Wiki page!

5.
Stop trying to look sexy - it's not going to work!

This isn't a vendetta against fake eyelashes or anything don't worry, I love my falsies for a night out! But in your uniform, when on placement,

don't think you're going to look like her, because you wont, I mean for a start the tunics make you look like a Moomin, the trousers make you like like your applying for a Simon Cowell look-a-like competition and those shoes ... well, if I say lesbian police-woman then you get the idea! But you know what, that ugly tunic and those trousers that come up weirdly high are actually really comfy, don't flash your arse when you bend over a patient and are loose enough so that you can bend and stretch. (The also have massive pockets that are great for stashing stuff in!) Those shoes are ugly as hell and as comfy and supportive as though you were standing on cherubs covered in silk wrapped feathers. It's the girls who come in with freshly curled hair, eyelashes that could knock out Joe Calzaghe they've got so much mascara on who start to slide down the warm sweaty slope first, you might not look sexy - but if you look no wors 12 hours after you started the shift than you did than when you started - then go and give yourself a pat on the back!

4.
Don't fall at the first hurdle.

What's this? You've failed an exam? Well - I'd give up now if I were you.

Yeah - not really - don't fall at the first hurdle, we all fail exams and think "OK, so this isn't for me, I'm off home." have a good cry, drink a lot of wine or eat a lot of cake, shout, rage, dance on your own with your ipod in but don't give up. Or at least not because you've failed an exam, if you come to realise that the course  and the occupation isn't for you then maybe you should re-think your options. But we all fail at least once and it's hard and soul crushing and we all wonder about dropping out. But remember why you started all this,   if you fail more than once and have to take a year out then that might be the time to consider your options, but until then - don't start to apply for the temp work just yet eh.
(For the record this also applies to placements, you might get a shit one where the nurses hate you, the patients hate you and you just want to curl up into a ball and weep, but for each shit one you're pretty much guaranteed 2 good placements. And while you're loving your next one - that annoying friend who loved their last one will be crying into the pillow because they hate this one!)

3.
Be appropriate.

I add this one with caution, because appropriate is a kind of a how long is a piece of string thing. What everyone thinks is appropriate is different, I mean I have no issue when doctors and nurses pop out for a fag break, but some other people do. However some things are probably universally thought of as inappropriate:
(these are all things that student nurses I know have done)

• Telling patients how shit faced you got last night/will get tonight.
• Telling lecturers how you used to be into drugs but you're "not in that scene any more"
• Telling people loudly in the staff room how much you hate Matron or Sister, hate them if you like but keep it schtum!

2.
It's poo - get over it! 

This one seems obvious for nurses, but you'd be surprised about how many people struggle with this, everyone has something that makes them retch and want to vomit, be it blood, poo, urine, fluid from a stoma bag, sputum, pressure sores ect. (For the record mine's sputum - cleaning out a trachy tube makes me want to do exorcist style vomiting.) But in the nicest possible way you need to deal with this and get on with it, it'll still disgust you and you'll still shudder but it needs doing, your patient needs you help them as best as you can - so you need to the job in hand. My top tips for getting through are:

• Grin, this helps stop the gag reflex - you'll look a bit manic and insane grinning wildly but hey, go for it it's worth it for not retching over a patient's face!
• NEVER NEVER NEVER inhale through your nose, I made this mistake once ... never never never again.

1.
Remember to laugh.

This is actually me - I'm really hairy when I don't shave.

You are on your way to having some of the best times of your life, some of the funniest incidents will happen to you when you're on the wards, you'll see the most bizarre things, have the oddest things said to you. And the best way of coping with all the bad stuff, the heartbreaking, the painful and the soul destroying is to look at the great, funny and bizarre stuff and to laugh, laugh on your own, laugh with the doctors, laugh with the nurses, laugh with fellow students and laugh with all your mates who are already concerned about your sanity, and will be even more so now!

So I hope that my 10 tops tips and advice for prospective and newly starting student nurses have been of some assistance, please do tell me in the comments section if there's anything you feel I've missed out!

There's a lot of love in a hospital

First off - I'm very sorry for being so bad at posting up until now!

But here I am all the same - I'm still on placement at the moment, and despite the tiredness and finding it hard to be apart from all my family I'm loving it. Which I think can generally be taken as a good sign! Someone, a non nurse, asked me what's the best thing about working in a hospital - which is a hard question, because working in a hospital is such an odd thing.

Being a nurse is hard to describe, but working in a hospital? Much much harder! So what is it like - well - it's lovely, I imagine that it's akin to working in a hotel or airport - you see people, for a moment in their lives. Depending on where you work - it could be their first breath, their last breath, a one off visit, or one of many - but either way you'll see their life in all it's gory details, families under stress, utter joy, heart break - the whole shebang!

But most of all I see a lot of love, when people come to my current ward for surgery - they're stressed and scared - quite understandably - as are their family. And it's in this snap shot that you see raw emotion and true love. When I admit a patient for surgery and see their friend, their parent, child or spouse say goodbye, see them crying or just having a silent hug I know that what they have really is love, it's the tie that bonds and that can't be broken. I'm not naive - I'm not for a moment suggesting that no-couple has ever broken up after going through something like surgery. But that true love that I see then, it may fade it may not, it may even go - or it may stay, but the love in that moment - that love that covers all relationships - and is all consuming - that cannot be broken. It's a little like the opening scene of Love Actually, attached below if you haven't seen that scene!

I often ask people how they met their husband or wife, I think it puts them at ease and makes them forget about being scared of the surgery: so here I have my top 3 favorite answers!

1. "I was playing tennis with an friend in 1936 while I was on holiday in Wales, and this beautiful girl walked past the court, I turned to my friend and said what a pretty girl I had just seen, and he told me that the girl was his sister."
2. "She was a roadie with my rock band in the 70's ... that band was terrible!" 
3. "We were both in the Gilbert and Sullivan society at university, but he didn't notice me, so I joined the ballroom dancing society and spent a long time trying to become his dance partner."

Surgery

Today, while on the ward I was "spoked" out into theater, I got to watch surgery. It was scary and not something I would want to work in, HOWEVER it was bloody fantastic to see, one operation was the filling away of inflamed cartilage in a patients knees, it was a laparoscopy so in terms of blood guts and gore there wasn't much on offer, and it was very interesting, to see all the bone and cartilage, and fluid and how it all sits together, but - watching a man file away at some cartilage was horrible, however good it is for the patient, it still looked like they were raping her knee. I was demoralised and feeling sad I hadn't enjoyed it, especially since I was looking forward to going in to watch some surgery, but a saviour came in the form of Bob the anaesthetist, who sent me off to Theater C, after the first knee had been completed, theater C had a hemicolectomy, the removal of a portion of the colon. This was far more up my street.

The colon is part of the bowel, and so before surgery the patient must have an enema to "empty the field" it was only after I had left the theatre that I realised that this particular patient had been admitted by me this morning, and I had watched him have his enema - not glamorous or exciting but I did like the circle of life quality of my day! Seeing the guts of this man out on the table was incredible, however many diagrams and photographs of the internal organs one sees, you never realise how much there actually is inside of you, in terms of sheer volume, there is shed loads let me tell you! I'm amazed that it all fits in, it makes you think "OH - that's why I haven't got a flat tummy!" because there is so much inside of you that makes you work, I mean you could fill buckets with the amount of stuff there is going on in there - honestly! I'm quite small a person, and I'm amazed that there's room.

Before the first surgery I helped to put the patient under, I held, the mask in place, and pushed the tube to help her breath once she was anaesthetised into her windpipe. If you want to know what one looks like: it looks like a rubber vagina on the end of a tube ... obviously!

I'm just about to come to the end of my first placement, and it had honestly been a completely fantastic fortnight, I've learnt skills, I've made friends, and I've met so many great patients who I hope are all now well on the way to recovery! I've met the worlds sexyest anaesthetist this side of anywhere, (who doesn't wear a wedding ring, and I've put my colleagues on the task of finding out if he's married haha!) and I've learnt the pain of putting TED stockings on patients, TEDs are the work of the devil and are evil to put on people, (think insanely tight flight socks) but are useful in preventing DVT's.

Oh - and I've become the queen of doing blood sugar testing!

Today is why I became a nurse!

Not a particularly original topic for my blog I grant you, but none the less. Today, the 4 mile round trip on my bike in the pouring rain at 6:00 was all worth while, it's so easy as a student nurse to get bogged down with exams and assignments that fill our lives, it's easy to feel useless and shitty when you have no idea what you're doing - but today a patient almost died, and I helped save his life, not much, I mean I wasn't performing open heart surgery or anything, but I was on hand, and taking obs and when the family were crying and thanked us all as they left, I though - yeah, I did that, that's why I want to be a nurse, to look after people.
I'm no fool - I know that it wont always be so easy, and the outcome wont always be so good. And in all honesty, that patient was seriously ill - us saving them now, isn't going to give them another 20 years. But we did a little something - and sometimes that's all you can ask for!

Being a real nurse for a fortnight!

I've been a little down recently - I don't really feel much like a student nurse at the moment, a prime issue with an academic course for a practical occupation of course is that you spend an awful lot of time studying things and not an awful lot actually doing things.
But on Monday - Monday will see me on my first placement at our local hospital! I'm very excited - I have a uniform (which is very exciting since the mayhem of getting it in the first damn place ) - I have a fob watch - I have a slightly grumpy mentor  and now - surely - maybe - possibly - I'll start to feel more like nurse!