Working at the hospice today allowed me to incorporate many new nursing skills! One patient, David, is 96 years old and is not doing to well. He can not eat and he receives his meals and pain medications through a nasogastric tube. The tube is replaced about every 10-14 days. Today was the day to change the NG tube so I got to place my first NG tube!! Everything that I learned in lab paid off and I successful got the tube into the nose and down to the stomach. This is David in the picture to the right.
Another exciting first was that I got to change a patient's supra-pubic catheter. Which was a completely new experience for me as well! Actually, this might of been the first time that I have even a supra-pubic catheter, so to actually have the opportunity to change it was great! Then we continued the morning by doing dressing changes which is never to exciting, its actually pretty gross. The picture below is with several of the other Hospice patients after we did a group activity. They are all such sweet people, but require lots of nursing care and love.
We have our project due this next week so we have been spending much of our free time working on it. However, tomorrow we will actually to get have a break from school. Sunday afternoon we normally have off, but tomorrow is an extra special day because we get almost the whole day off and we are going to the beach!! Maybe we will actually get a little tan on this trip after all!! Sad that I won't be getting to spend Father's Day with my Daddy though. I miss him very much!
Hi Leah. What a great blog! Your time in Peru has been a life-changer, for sure. May I please use the photo of hospice patients in an online course on report writing? My email address is here: http://contented.com/contact/
ReplyDeleteMany thanks
Rachel McAlpine