My last paper of Nursing School reads like a blog, try it!

Georgia
Journal/Exemplar/Professional Activity/LA5
4.17.2008

Wow. I can’t believe it’s really happening! It feels dreamlike and strange--like the shock of your spouses sudden death. I’m actually graduating from nursing school! A few little things this week have started to make it all more concrete: 1. the student loan exit counseling meeting thing you have to do where they tell you it’s gonna be $500/month for the next ten years; a nice reality check. 2. The little Herff-Jones tags with my name and degree printed on them came in the mail in a yellow padded mailer. I almost cried.
There’s more, so I'm just gonna spill. Last night at the library, Adam, Tawni, Jami and I were busting out our last group presentation/project of all time. It was nerve-racking and arduous, but also very entertaining. We laughed and made jokes about frameworks and imagined up a comic book called “Didactica: One student nurses adventures in evidence-based,” but you know what’s amazing is we really have acquired a very specialized, yet totally transferrable body of functional knowledge and skills through all this--despite all our complaining. We can connect once for ten minutes to delgate tasks, then meet for 2 1/2 hours the night before a presentation to brainstorm, outline, put it all together and make it come off really slick. Are these not fabulous skills? I realize that the school work itself has taught more than I may realize.
So relating to that sort of work, i’ve been bouncing this little piece of fear off people this week--that it will feel like i’ve fallen off a cliff when all the schoolwork and deadlines go away. I get so driven, so filled with purpose in the swing of a semester, that often at breaks i have little breakdowns. It’s like I’m leaning against something or pushing on it so hard & then suddenly it’s gone and I fly across the room. So i had literally prayed that somehow i could be let down slowly, somehow tapered down from such an extreme pace.
An answer came today after class and our presentation, when I headed up to the University to attend the Nursing Council meeting to fulfill my professional project assignment. I called the nurse who is actually on the schedule to find out the meeting was in room 3515c in the HSEB, but she couldn’t attend--so I represented the Burn unit for the day. I loved it! I know most would say it’s just new-grad energy, that meetings are boring; but i just loved it because it was everything we have talked about in leadership in abstract terms, in real life.
A woman from Risk Management came and told us about the defense council and it’s role and attorneys, reviewing specific cases of legal action against the U and what happened, including the charting that saved our asses. A guy from administration came and updated us on the parking and child care situations, asking for feedback. It was the perfect opportunity to share a couple of my ideas with someone in a position of power! On the parking topic, I told him my idea for a user-friendly web-based carpooling program at the U; that maybe even an FTE could be created to facilitate it because it could save so much money in parking. We all work the same shifts, right?--1800 RN’s alone are trying to park in finite spaces, and pissed they have to pay for it.
I also shared my vision of the entrance to the new remodel of the Hospital landscaped with native plants, allowing one last sliver of green space (since he told us they’re ripping up the golf course soon to build more clinics.) The U wants to be considered green, and this would really help perpetuate that illusion! But really, in the artist’s rendering of the finished project we see every day after we park our individual vehicles illegally in the visitor’s lot, shows the grounds paved over to accomodate 12 new parking spaces and planted with a handful of deciduous trees that don’t belong at the foot of such majestic wild mountains. We need sagebrush.
It felt so good to have my ideas heard, and the administrator was incredibly open. He thanked me for saying something constructive instead of saying I hated him because of the parking fiasco, and made sure the lady typing put the ideas in the minutes. How satisfying. And I can speak their language.
I suppose the preceding fits in with LA5, because i want the company, and my fellow employees to change some things. They both hold different bases power to affect change. To increase drivers or motivating forces for my carpool network, I would have to ensure that people could comfortably meet their prospective carpoolers before any commitment was made, so they could decide if anybody was a creep or a wierdo before getting in their car. Next I would calculate how much gas and parking money everyone would save. Speaking in economic terms is always the most powerful motivator for companies (and probably the nurses too.) If the U couldn’t legally facilitate it, maybe I could come up with some underground alternative, like a simple web program or email tree. I know people love their cars, but the snowballing gas bills we pay might be just the timely motivator we need to get people to cozy up. They could...talk to each other on the drive, instead of staying isolated in our expensive rolling boxes, driving alone and tired to and from places like Heber and Magna and Layton.
I have to go back to the answered prayer and the sensation of falling. So after said meeting and actually using the word deciduous to the suit, I headed over to my unit to pick up my temp license paperwork from my boss. I saw my nurse educator, who is my direct supervisor, and told her about the meeting. Now she’s the type to get jazzed over a good meeting and we got talking about how I can no longer work as an intern after my final exam and what projects I can do for hours until my license comes through. She had just this morning had a meeting with all the residents from Rehab, assessing what went wrong when one of our long term burn patients had to come back to the ICU from rehab with a pneumonia. Suffice it to say there are lots of incongruent ideas and ways of doing things between the two units. So she came back and got with the Burn PT/OTs, social workers and other managers and they dreamed up an idea for a protocol that incorporates formal phases of burn care. (I’m not sure if I’m supposed to share that so put it in your vault.)
It would involve educating staff of both units. streamlining care, and educating patients and families about what to expect. Not only does Rehab need to be educated specifically about burns, but Burn needs to be educated about proper rehab. We have a tendency to over-care for people because we get used to vents and trauma, but as people get better, they need to be allowed to struggle to butter their own toast. And there needs to be continuity and accountability. There’s that word again. I wrote my whole big paper on it that you can read. It’s painfully formal & the assignment was way too long to fit in the pages they expected. Anyway, what we decided is that I will be on the task force for this project and do the graphic design for the pamphlets, posters etc and have input on feasibility as a bedside nurse. I will have my hands in an exciting project--using the skills and energy that have been totally focused on school the past 3 years and thus, answering my seemingly dumb or unimportant prayer.
Nothing like this has been done in any of the burn centers either, so she said I can put together an abstract and present it at the American Burn Association conference next year in San Antonio! Like i said; Wow.