So today was my 2
nd day at the nursing home for clinical rotation. I HAD A BLAST!!! I never thought in a million years that I'd ever actually say I enjoyed myself while I was there, but I did.
The day started off kind of slow. I went to check on my assigned client for the day and she was a sleepy and not very responsive. We had met yesterday
breify and I told her that I would be coming by today to work with her. As I went in I brought her, her breakfast tray and asked her if she needed any
helo with anything and she said "no", kinda of sternly, but not offensive. So I let her eat breakfast in peace and let her get dressed. Well while I was waiting for her to get ready, I offered to help deliver breakfast trays to other rooms. Well I only got to deliver one tray. I went into a room and brought Mr. "D" his breakfast. He was awake, but not quite ready to get up. He didn't want his breakfast, he wanted to talk. So I stayed with him and talked with him for a while. He gave me the abridged version of his life and then asked me a bunch a question about myself and why I wanted to become a nurse. He seemed happy, but lonely. He said that he has no appetite and all they feed him in this place is "old people food", which made me chuckle. I slid him his bowl of raisin bran and said..."you can't go wrong with raisin bran, how is that old people food"? We laughed and he said he liked cereal alright, but he was not gonna eat
thos gross eggs! I found him to be very enjoyable to talk with, I wished I had more time to talk with him. I hope he is there when I go back next week. I just made myself my 1st new friend for the day and it was only 8 am.
I checked back in my patient for the day and she was up and ready to go. I offered to make her bed and accepted graciously. After that was done, she had a question about how to use her cell phone and I helped her program the numbers in it that she needed. Then we were down to business. She wanted to know what the plan for today was. So I explained to her what I wanted to do with her and asked her if it was OK. She was totally cool with it all. I looked over her chart yesterday and just had some holes in some of my paperwork that I needed to get answered. She answered all of my questions with great detail and was very friendly.
THen she let the whole class and my instructor come in and watch "me" do her vital signs and baseline assessment. As we were wrapping up the OT gal came in to take her to therapy.
We were just wrapping up with taking Blood pressure and she had all kinds of wonderful tips for us and explained everything is great detail about what we should and shouldn't do. She went over the skin assessment with us told us things we might have missed.
I went with her down to the PT/OT room and it was jammed packed!! I'd say most of the residents in the place were going in there for some sort of rehab. It was very cool. They made her lift weights, stand and rotate a hula hoop through her hands and then made her manipulate a bunch of silly putty to get all kind of "hidden" items out of it. The
therpist was awesome and explained to me why she was having
JC (my lady) do all of those things.
JC was in this place because she had just had a left hip replacement about 10 days ago. She's 78. This is her 2
nd hip replacement, she had the other one done about 8 years ago. While she was doing her exercised we chatted about her life and I asked her all kinds of questions. We talked about travel and all of the places we've been. She told me that if she was confident enough that she could get back in the boat, she wanted to go white water rafting again! I thought it was very cool.
She has made some friends in the home and I was chatting with them as well. I learned about their ages, why they were there and I even got to speak some German with one of them. By the time I left PT (
JC was still working out), I had made myself 3 more friends that day.
After lunch, we basically focused on paperwork, which was fairly easy to complete. A couple of the other students didn't get a chance to perform a baseline assessment on their clients because they either refused, or they had other appointments for the day. My instructor thought that it was pretty important for the others to have an opportunity to do a baseline, so I went into the rooms of each of my new "friends" and asked them for permission to let another student do their baseline
assessment. They happily agreed.
It was a great day, I almost wish I was going back tomorrow .
