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| I made this meme from a free online meme generator I found on Google |
In the fall of 2015 I began my very first clinical course. I was also signed up to take Pharmacology, and Patho at the same time - which, if you've taken any of those classes before you're probably thinking: "How did you survive taking all three of those at the same time?!?"
The short answer is: It was extremely difficult.
I was so excited to finally start an "actual" nursing course (Health Assessment didn't count in my book haha), and had absolutely no idea what to expect. My class was so large that they had to split us up into two different sections - which at the beginning was taught by two different instructors.
My fundamentals professor was a new professor to the nursing program, and everyone genuinely fell in love with her right away. This professor made my Fundamentals class extremely interesting because she brought real life examples from her own clinical experience into lecture.
As the weeks went on with fundamentals, we learned introductory nursing topics such as:
1. Proper hygiene
2. Patient kinetics and proper body mechanics
3. Basic nursing skills, why they are used and how to perform them (i.e the famous indwelling catheter)
4. Basic diabetes nursing interventions
5. All about OR nursing
The exams for this class were like nothing I had ever seen before - they're not lying when they tell you that nursing school exams are difficult. No one in my class was really prepared for what we were up against for our first exam, but the process got easier as we went along. We figured out that questions were primarily based on the proper Nursing Interventions and the Outcomes we wanted to achieve. Being a properly trained nurse is all about knowing why you are doing something - that way you can be the perfect patient advocate when the time is right.
We had exams on a consistent basis, so adding Patho and Pharm into the mix meant that I had no time to breathe. I was genuinely lucky when there was a week when I had only one exam, not two or three.
Clinical for fundamentals is an experience that I will never forget. I went to both a local hospital and a nursing home; My schedule was split up into mulit-week rotations, with each rotation being on a different unit. I was able to experience the Geriatric Unit, one Medical Surgical Unit, and the OR (We got to each spend one day each in the OR, the same-day area, and the Endoscopy unit).
Due to the fact that sometimes the opportunity to do skills as a nursing student is hard to come by (Take what you can get), it was such a big deal to me when I had to straight cath a patient when I was sent back to the OR. Thank goodness this patient was already anesthetized for the surgery, because having them be awake and watching me on my very first catheter placement would have been too much to handle. It was bad enough that I had the scary surgeon in the room listening to the OR nurses coach me.
Overall, my first ever clinical experiences were positive. I overcame initial shy and nervous obstacles, and was able to piece together class material with real-life examples. Being on a hospital unit as a health care professional in training was a very cool experience, and it certainly began my love affair with this profession.
Pharmacology was basically almost the death of me in nursing school (and I'm saying this after not having passed my last clinical course by 0.45%).
If you have ever taken Pharmacology before you might agree with me, but in the moment I felt so overwhelmed by this nursing school subject. A lot of the drugs sound the same, and after a while you have the same clump of side effects with a few odd outliers sprinkled in.
It took me a very long time to realize how to actually study pharmacology, and my experience in that class greatly improved once I joined a solidified study group that helped me memorize all of the information I needed to know.
The tactic that helped me the most with studying pharmacology was focusing on each different class of drugs as a whole. The hypertensive medications, your Type II Diabetes oral medications, antibiotics, and then diuretics. There are so many details in each and every individual drug that falls into those different classes - you'll drive yourself nuts trying to memorize every single little detail.
Finding the meat and potatoes from each overall class, with identifications of common side effects, administration directions, and most common drugs prescribed lead me to success on each exam I took after finding that tool.
Another component to pharmacology was also learning how to do pharm math correctly. Dosage calculations are honestly one of my favorite exam questions to answer. With some practice I was able to discover that the proportion method works best for me, and I have whizzed through pharm math questions on every exam since. In my program, each exam throughout the program has to have at least 5 math questions, which should be easy points to all. Pharm math is very important because you are dealing with dosage calculations and being the final check before you, the nurse, administer that medication to your patient. Knowing how to do things correctly and finding someone to help you double check your work for accuracy is very important.
Pathophysiology was the last course that I took my first semester of nursing school. I would have to say that looking back, this course was in the middle range of difficulty, with Fundamentals being the least and Pharmacology being the most difficult during my semester.
Learning about the reasons why certain disease processes occur was very interesting, and opened my eyes to a lot of conditions I did not really consider previously. Much like Pharmacology, these exams were not NCLEX style questions, and were more straight forward knowledge based. This made the exams easier to take because knowledge based exams were the only format that any of us had taken before, outside of Fundamentals.
The big disease processes I learned about in Pathophysiology were:
1. Diabetes
2. Various cardiac issues
3. Gastrointestinal problems such as Chron's disease
4. A basic overview of cancer cell patho
5. Lupus
Overall, this semester was extremely difficult because of all the amount of work that had to be done at once. There was always at least one exam a week, and if one class did not have an exam there was a handful of mini quizzes that needed to be completed as well. Despite the endless studying that took place this semester I began very close relationships with a group of classmates, and together we pushed through to winter break and all moved on to our second semester of nursing school.
One giant tip I have for anyone reading who will be entering nursing school is: Form a reliable study group and do not let go. Study groups are so important in nursing school because you are able to bounce concepts off of other people, and have different ideas be introduced to you. They are also useful for splitting up the work when making study guides, and they will probably naturally become very good friends to you. I know for sure that I would not be the #BSNbabe I am today if it were not for all of the friends I have made so far in nursing school.
I hope that this post was interesting and helpful to read! I plan on shedding light on my other semester experiences in further posts!
Thank you so much for reading!
- Michelle
#BSNbabe
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