poop tube

 I am gonna start off by saying... please forgive me if this blog does not make sense. I just woke up from a nap and honestly just a little out of it, but hey its sunday so that means I gotta blog - no matter what. This week was lots and lots of school - as usual. I did however wake up on Wednesday morning to this...

As you can tell I wasnt the happiest in that moment haha. I sent this picture to Erin and this was her response, "Dont be angry, god is blessing us. Bout time you had to experience what northern utah is like in the winter lol." Its true... we need the snow so that kind of changed my mood until it made me 30 minutes late to class! It usually takes 35 minutes to get to school... I left my place at 7:40 figuring that was plenty of time to get there by 9. Ya no... took me just under 2 hours to get to class agh. Luckily a lot of people were late and its my not so important class. This week I also had my second Med surg test... I was nervous after how my last test went. I did study harder this time around and it kinda paid off haha I got an 82 which is still not awesome, but its at least passing and ya know what? Thats all I need to do at this point. Thursday I hung out with the gals at another hockey game...

A good way to spiff up the week. And dundundundunnn friday started another weekend of night shifts. yahoo. Friday night I had two patients... one lady (my first ever woman patient) post op L4-5 fusion with some radiating nerve pain down her L leg. She was pretty independent and just needed meds every few hours. Super nice lady. Our other patient was admitted for a cold that had exacerbated his COPD (even though he denied he had COPD lol) He was quite the grouch, but also I loved it. We could hear him hacking up a storm all night long. I also got to help out with my first ever flexiseal - that was an experience. TMI so maybe skip over this part but a flexiseal is pretty much a poop tube. This patient couldn't get up and go to the bathroom on his own for multiple reasons and he also had really bad diarrhea so they had placed a tube up there to catch everything. Well, it had leaked - a lot. So two nurses, two CNA's and I came to the rescue. It was an hour of turning, cleaning, repeat and finally dressing his pressure wounds. Poor guy. Its definitely dirty work, but super rewarding. My nurse, Kellie, really gave me full range of the patients and I loved it. The nurses on the unit keep asking me if I know where I want to work yet and my response is still..."no clue" so they've started telling me that I should work with them. At first I was like ugh the commute, but honestly, Ive been really starting to think about it. So we'll see!! Saturday I slept like crap. I woke up three times and only slept a total of 5 hours - Im kind of just expecting sucky sleep at this point. 

And even after no sleep - feeling ready to head back in for another night! Look at the sky! Saturday night we got back our COPD patient. Its nice having the same patient - it makes report easy and its nice to already know what you're getting into. He was sounding a lot better saturday night which is good because he only woke up once in the night. Our other patient for the night was a bowel obstruction patient. Belly was super distended and crampy. He also had an NG tube that was suctioning out a ton. First time dealing with an NG tube and dang emptying the canister of stomach contents... thats quite smelly. After throwing the container away I had to change my mask because the smell had seriously gotten trapped inside. We also got an admit last night which kept us busy. He had a kidney stone and possible infection. Overall super good night. I really do love it (just not between the hours of 3am-5am). I got home this morning and went to sacrament meeting. I ditched sunday school and came home to nap, whoops. The nurses have taught me to throw any normal sleep routine out the door and just sleep whenever you can haha. Whether that is a 45 min nap in your car or a 4 hour nap on a sunday afternoon. Well this weekend marks 75 hours complete of my capstone. Next weekend will be my last two shifts and its kind of sad, but also exciting to have one less thing to worry about for school. And another step closer to graduating (eek). 

In other news - my doctor is starting me on a new medication. Enbrel - a TNF inhibitor - pretty much it imitates the proteins in my body that are causing the inflammation, therefore, stopping the pain - hopefully. Fingers, toes and everything else are crossed. Im happy and actually fairly healthy so things are going well. My parents were in Cabo this week which looked relaxing, fun and sunny!! but I was content to be where I was this week.. cleaning up that poop tube. My dad sent me this quote that I loved

"There is no disaster greater than not being content; There is no misfortune greater than being covetous; Hence in being content, one will always have enough." Ive also been talking to a friend recently about happiness. Sometimes our circumstances make it difficult to be happy, but really happiness shouldn't depend on our circumstance. I mentioned that one of my favorite ways to become happy is counting my blessings. If we always make an effort to recognize all that we have and are blessed with - there really is no reason to be unhappy, ungrateful or covetous. Well time for me to take my nurses advice and go back to bed. goodnight!