Last.

Last night was my last OB clinical, and I was sad to leave. I have truly enjoyed the experience due to my amazing instructor, who has a wide range of experience and tries so hard to let us see and do things we've never seen an done before. She is amazing. My friend said, "If I could have all of my clinicals with her for the rest of my school career, I would". I agree, she's just so wonderful, and I'll miss her.

The hospital we were at is not one of the magnet hospital in this city, it's a general hospital where the low income population and everyone else who has no insurance go to. I knew of the fact that I will not have an encounter with, as my instructor said when we started, "the Gerber baby family" who lives in the suburbs, 2 cars, 2 stories house with a front and back lawns and white picket fences surrounding it. It's an entirely new and different experience for me, but I'm so grateful I had the experience.

It taught me what being a nurse is about, that when you care for your patients, you see past what society has labeled them and you just see them as persons who need you and your care, and that is who they are. Their history may say they're drug addicts and the CPS is going to take their baby away, or they're brought from jail with one leg chained to the bed, or they're 37 weeks who've had no prenatal care and not taken any prenatal vitamins, or they're unmarried teens with their 2nd baby, but you don't dwell on that piece of fact. They don't deserve less medical attention based on what their history says, they still need the doctors and you, as their nurse to care for them. I love what my nurse said last week, "When you take care of a patient, you take care of them like you take care your family. You'd want them to be comfortable and you'd make them comfortable". And that is one of the things I will take with me throughout my career.

Last night was great for a last clinical day. I got to draw blood and saw another C-section, this time less traumatizing for the mother--and me for that matter. A complete opposite of the C-section last week, phew. The mother was actually my patient that was admitted to the triage. They were going to admit her to Mother-Baby, but at last decided she would go for a C-section due to a few circumstances. Then after the baby was out, the surgeons lifted up the uterus for us--4 nursing students lined up against the wall--to see and showed us the ovaries and what not.

One other thing to mention about that, is it was very nice of the surgeons to do that, but my friends and I still joke that they did so because they felt guilty about kicking us out of the OR in the beginning. It was all good though, we knew they were really concern about the amount of people in the OR as they were prepping and fear of contaminating the sterile field. So after one of them contaminated her gown when one of the staff accidentally touched her, she ordered us to "stay outside and come in after the baby was out or something". We were like "What?! Until the baby out?! What the heck?!" So we watched from the window until they made the first cut, and she actually sent a nurse to get us back in before we were going to sneak back in regardless of waiting until "after the baby out or something". Afterward, as we were about to start post conference, she came to find us and apologize for earlier, so that was very nice of her. See? Doctors and surgeons are nice, and I like them a lot when they're that way.

So that is it. That is the end of OB clinical this semester. Wow, I can't believe Junior II is ending in a matter of 4 weeks. Yesterday, I also registered for next semester as Senior I. It's surreal, time has really gone by fast. It seems like it was just yesterday that I started this blog to journal my journey (heeey, rhymes!) as I started nursing school.

Senior I. Dang.