Hot Chocolate and Tiramisu

On Thursday nights, I have clinical.

Now to non-nursing majors that doesn't really mean anything. It just sounds like another one of those crazy things that nursing majors have to do, which is honestly true. But if you were a nursing major (and some of you probably are or know one who's just as crazy as I am), you know that a clinical is a six to twelve-hour period in which we are in a hospital assigned to a patient or fleet of patients who are forced to entrust us, mere students, with their care.

Mine's six hours. And I'm on an orthopedic unit. It gets quite interesting, let me tell you. First, I've discovered that I really don't like the orthopedic unit. It's kind of slow and a little bit tiring. Most of the patients assigned to students are not very high-risk, of course, but many of them have just come from the operating room or have just been operated on in the past few days and are really intensely doped up on their medication. Meaning that we get onto the unit at 4pm and most of them are having dinner and are pressing their little pumps for an extra does of medication so that they can just conk out and be done with it.

I'm envious.

But a typical day isn't bad. You learn a lot. You see a lot. Like the patient who was hot and whose heart rate was at 159 beats per minute. Or like the patient who only spoke Spanish that you had to communicate medications to and try and figure out how much pain she was in so you could do whatever you could for her. And then even more you get the patients who are nurses, doctors or other health professionals who obviously know fifty times more than you know and yet still give you the chance to make mistakes.

So you take their pulse and measure how fast  they're breathing. You take their temperature and have the machine take their blood pressure. You ask if they're in pain and then make them as comfortable as you possibly can and you do everything in your power to make sure they're okay. And sometimes, you still can't because there's pain a whole lot deeper than just the skin. Especially when it comes to hacking and sawing bones apart just to make new ones. Almost makes you wonder.

Then you give medications, your professor signs you into a computer chart and you learn all about your patient just from a couple of pages on the computer. You now know their height, weight and all their allergies. What they want if they're crashing, what they want in their care if they're no longer able to make decisions for themselves, you learn about what their parents had, what their siblings have, what else they've suffered from and what they can and can't do and how everyone in the entire hospital world is planning on taking care of them. And you condense it all onto a small sheet of paper that fits into your scrub-pocket.

And then you're done. And you make your way done to the small cafe in the lobby to wait for your ride and your two friends from behind the counter see you and walk on over and ask how you shift was and ask if you want a hot chocolate and a piece of a tiramisu as they're on the way to already make it for you. And you take a sip of the foam that shoots out of the top and you breathe in and then?

All is right in the world.