Stab! Stab! Stab!

We had a venepuncture training course at work today. It was quite useful, but we were only practicing on fake arms, and it is quite different to the real thing. I did my first stab on a real person about a week ago, and I was so nervous! I just didn't want to put the needle in there, for fear of hurting her. I think it probably made it worse that it wasn't some random person, but a girl at work who I still have to see every week, and if I'd completely stuffed it up I'd feel bad every time I saw her!

One of the big problems I had with the dummy arms was that the blood running through them was a very pale colour, so it was practically impossible to tell if there had been any flashback, and thereby, see if you were actually in the vein or not.

My first go at taking blood on a real patient will be next week. I'm nervous, but hopefully my nerves won't be so bad that I chicken out altogether and just get one of the other girls to do it! The only way to learn, I'm told, is by doing it, so I better just get stuck in and stab as many veins as I can while I have the opportunity.

Kicking off

We had our first class with our new clinical coach today. I was so nervous - completely unnecessarily of course! I'm just very used to how our coach last semester ran the sessions, and had become comfortable with her expectations. The new coach is lovely, though - and we just so happen to share our first name, so hopefully that means we will get along swimmingly. I think what I liked about her so much is that she's very approachable, and I already feel comfortable asking her questions. None of the intimidation I was so scared of!

Tonight was also the first med revue rehearsal. Being a mere first year, I have just a couple of bit parts and will be singing in the choir, but I'm really looking forward to it. It seems like a great way to meet a bunch of people in different years. It has been so long since I've performed, I'd forgotten how much fun it is! I even got a kick out of doing the audition on Monday night - just getting up in front of people and making a fool out of myself gave me a bit of a rush. Ah, but the theatre life is no longer to be mine.... although I believe that won't stop these brief annual forays into that world!

Sliding Back Into Old Habits

The holidays sure flew by. We're halfway through our first week back already, and I'm still not quite too sure how that happened. It's been a struggle to get back into the rhythm of studying, but I finally managed to crack the books this evening, and feel like I've made at least some progress. It's tough this week, though - we seem to have very few contact hours this week, and yet there seems to be a very large amount of material to cover. Ah, the joys of self-directed learning.

Every semester begins with the same old vows to attend every lecture, pre-read for the labs, summarise notes from the day every night so come the weekend my weekly summary is easy to write... Usually it takes me at least a few weeks to break all of my resolutions, but it only took me a couple of days this time. I skipped lecture this morning, didn't prep for the lab today, and certainly haven't looked at any notes from Monday yet. Oh well, maybe next week will be better?