Theatre Days

I am towards the end of completing my final placement for my Bachelor of Nursing. As you know (I hope) I am working in theatre, which is the area where I want to work in the future. It's fantastic, I am absolutely loving it. There's so many exciting things going on and I'm learning so much from the amazing staff. I have seen some awesome and quite gory operations (which doesn't bothere me) and have even gotten to 'scrub in' for heaps of procedures! And yes I get to wear scrubs!

For those of you who aren't theatre savy, to scrub in is a process in which you prepare yourself for an operation. You might have seen parts of it portrayed in movies or medical shows where you see the surgeon scrubbing the heck out of his hands.

So it is easy for you to follow, I'll show you what it means to scrub in in a graphically and highly stylised manner.

Yeah - that's how you do it... sort of.

When you are scrubbed in, you are sterile from the neck down - and you have to stay that way.

You cannot touch anything that is not sterile. So if you have an itch - you have to deal with it.

Also, when you're scrubbed in, everything seems to jump out at you - trying to break your sterility.

So you pretty much have to be on your guard all the time and never lose focus.

Before I was able to scrub in, my job was separating the paper from the plastic which held the instruments. The hospital likes to recycle everything. I'm pretty good at it now.

Now I am in my final week and I've gotten to do HEAPS of stuff. It's so great. I feel really good about becoming a theatre nurse now - eeyay!

I would talk about some of the procedures I've seen but they're pretty gory - like when I saw all these cysts and then the surgeon accidentally popped one and it explo- ... sorry.

My apologies also for the long gap in between posts. I thought once study was over I could find more time to blog - but working 10 hours a day kinda takes it out of you (this post also took a lot longer than I anticipated). All I wanna do is sleep and eat mountains of food and read volume upon volume of Immortal Rain. Ohhhhhhhh so good.

I'll finish this post with a picture of what I looked like after spotting a real hottie who was assisting the surgeon during a procedure.

I never saw him again after that *sniff* Oh well, I move on quickly ;D

Oh and here's a picture of me as Nurse Caz - the super hero. She's armed with the Mood-Launcher. Awesome.

The Week That Has Been

With exams and the unholy raised levels of anxiety related to getting a Graduate Year now over, I was given a week off until my final placement. This was a time when I should've been relaxing and content with the fact that there were no assignments, exams or impending doom with figuring out Grad Year results. Fortunately for me I got my first preference - eeyay.

I think it was on Sunday when I got sick.

Maybe I got sick because my body was under the impression it could let its immune defence down during the relaxation process after being under so much stress for so long.

Maybe it was also due to the fact I went out two nights in the same week (a rare thing for me) causing me to become even more run down. It was a lot of fun at the time though...

Or, most likely, I became sick when older sister Courtney dropped by for a visit - bringing a nasty cold along with her...

It could have been a combination of things... anyway, getting sick during my one week off wasn't the most ideal way to enjoy it. It was a nasty cold too - talk about being the mucous queen for a day. Sorry, you probably didn't need to read that.

Moving on. Despite being sick, Mum and I were still able to enjoy some quality time together. We played some scrabble.

We were both very tired at the time.

Not too long after, younger sister Caity came to check up on us.

Due to my sickness I didn't really get out much. Except for a trip to the doctors to get some antibiotics. Not very exciting but at least the consultation didn't take too long. However, whilst waiting for the pharmacist to prepare my amoxicillin I received a call from the doctor I just visited.

If doctors forgetting to ask whether or not you're allergic to anything does not inspire confidence I don't know what does.

Anyway that will be all for today. I'll leave you with an image of me doing one of my favourite past-times (performed throughout most of the week that has been)... sitting in front of my bookcase - looking for a DVD to watch.

This task can take hours...