Work - school - and disappearing now and then

If you haven't guessed by now, work and school seems to monopolize my time.  Very little time left for leisure or blogging.  Let me catch you all up on what has been going on in the busy life of the RN/student midwife/mother.

I'm still working four shifts per week.  Kill me now.  My feet, back, and legs hurt BAD at the end of most of my shifts.  I live on a heating pad when I get home each night.  The good thing is that I have been the preceptor for several of our OB techs on the unit.  It is so much fun teaching them about the nursing side of the job in L&D!  Our goal is to have the OB techs function more like the personal care assistants that they have been trained to be.  With actual Real Patient Care (trademark pending).  As of right now, they have only done things like secretarial work, restocking rooms, and scrubbing for c-sections.  The new and improved OB tech role is going to include more patient care and assisting the nurses with patient care and in vaginal births.  YEAH!!!!  I am super excited to see this finally come to fruition, because I work with some truly awesome OB techs.

I could humor you with some funny L&D tales, but it's getting late.  I'll try to save those stories for another time.

School update -- I submitted a somewhat dry, but interesting paper for the Health Policy course.  The assigned topic was Quality Assurance.  We had to choose an attribute of the standards of care, and choose a pre-determined set of elements within that attribute.  Then, we have to research and gather data from our clinical site.  Finally, look at something in the elements (a problem, for example) posed and addressed at the clinical site.  For this paper I chose "the provision of direct maternal/newborn care" as the attribute.  I won't bore you with the elements I researched.  The problem I chose was risk for maternal hemorrhage, and the intervention that the clinical site was the implementation of a hemorrhage risk protocol and subsequent classification of each woman admitted to L&D (low risk, medium risk, high risk).  This program is still in it's infancy, so I did not have a whole lot of data to evaluate the effectiveness just yet, but it should do for this QA paper.

One more paper left for Health Policy.  This one is the development of a budget and an executive summary for my imaginary birth center.

My advanced antepartum course is running smoothly.  A LOT of information to read, synthesize and take quizzes and exams on.  We also have forums that we discuss case studies and scenarios.  It's interesting to learn things in a case study manner, because it gets you thinking like a midwife -- the provider --- and how care is managed and why.  Very heavy on the education of the client too.  Just how I will memorize and file all of this information into my brain, I just don't know.  It is a LOT.

So, if you all don't hear from me for a week or so, you know why.  This life as an RN and a student midwife is VERY FULL and busy.

Oh, and somewhere in there, I am managing to (little by little) get all of my preparation for clinical bound done.  There is also a LOT of reading and synthesizing that needs done before July.  I'm tired just thinking about it all.

Good night everyone!!

(PS -- and yes, all of this study and struggling is going to be worth it!)