This week was supposed to mark the beginning of my second round of clinicals for this semester - Pediatrics. Which it did...sort of.

The Monday before Spring Break we had a meeting to prepare us for clinicals and to meet our instructors. At this meeting we had a small bomb dropped on us (it was dropped on the clinical instructors as well) - the school had to pull all clinical groups out of SFGH due to low census numbers (not enough patients for the 10 students) and therefore had to move them to all the other clinical groups. Which is fine..except that my clinical already had 10 people, and now had 13. And Children's Hospital Oakland (CHO) only allows 8 students at a time on the floor. So there was a problem.

And how did the School of Nursing address this problem? They decided to launch their Simulated Lab a semester early...which means I got to spend two days this week in a trailer with 9 other classmates running simulations with a computer and a robot baby. Which could be very cool except this is the SFSU School of Nursing we are talking about here...and they really weren't ready to do this, thus we are their guinea pigs as they develop this program. (Oh, and the husband and wife team are too much...and not in a good way. She's the nurse, he's the techie. And he is one big annoying fuck. Ugh!!)

Also this week was supposed to be two days of Orientation at the hospital itself. But thanks to this new Sim Lab thing, we missed the first day yesterday (we're actually not supposed to go to clinicals AT ALL the weeks we are doing the Sim Lab). But the 4 of us who missed yesterday went over this afternoon for the last day of Orientation.

OH MY GOD!! After 4 hours with the instructor, I am SOOOOOO excited about this clinical. Yes, I will get less time on the unit than I would like, but at the same time I can see that I am going to learn so much. Today she spent over an hour doing something no instructor yet has done - she showed us how to fill out the paperwork, how to properly do all the documentation we need to do. 

And then she handed out the schedule for the semester. Unlike many of my classmates in this clinical, I get to rotate off the unit to do two days of observation, in the two areas I wanted most - Pediatric Intensive Care (PICU) and Pediatric Oncology. Yeah, I know neither is going to be particularly easy, but I do know that after my time in the NICU earlier this semester I had to experience the PICU. And at the same time there is something about Pediatric Oncology that I'm drawn to...as hard as it may be at times, I also know that I will learn so much from the kids and their families. And in both cases, there is something about knowing these children (and their families) need excellent care and attention that appeals to me. Plus the fact that I HATE seeing any child suffer and would do all I could to help fix that.

Stay tuned...