Halfway Through Class #3!

(Warning to the squeamish – includes my account of placing a catheter in a mannequin for the first time).

            Friday was a very big day for the family. My brother and SIL moved into the new house. They hired movers, which took away one of the most difficult pieces of moving, remarking that this was an important new level of adulthood: hiring movers instead of asking friends to help in exchange for pizza.

            While Big Bro and SIL oversaw the moving process, I took my first closed-book exam at Villanova. It was going to happen soon enough, but it ended up being a lot less stressful than I thought it would be.

            Right now I’m taking Nursing Process, which covers a lot of basic nursing skills, like giving medications, bed baths, transfers, and urinary catheters. Yes, catheters.

 
The day before, I was doing a long series of medication calculation drills, since medications were supposed to take up a major portion of the midterm. There were two calculation questions. One involved a prescription for X mg, and the available tablets came in ½ X mg. But I am obviously glad I did the drills, since I think I’ll be calculating dosages a lot more than assessing whether someone is “distressed” or “despaired” on a spirituality scale (this scale from my nursing textbook’s spirituality chapter, which was my second least favorite chapter of the book*).

After the midterm and skills test, we learned how to insert and remove Foley catheters. Fun and slightly scary stuff, because on the one hand, our mannequins stayed very still, but on the other hand, their “parts” were completely inflexible. I had to use what felt like a lot of force to spread my mannequin’s parts to see its (her?) urethra. And when I finally saw it, it was a bit of a challenge to get that catheter in. Luckily, the mannequin had a window over the bladder, so I could see exactly far in I was before I inflated the catheter balloon. 

At the end of lab, each of us got a tightly wrapped Foley kit to take home. Not to practice on a person, obviously, but to get familiar with how the kit is laid out. I will take my to lab on Monday for the Foley test, pretending of course that it’s still sterile after being opened and played with, just like we pretend that the dyed water (practically neon yellow) in our mannequins’ bladders is urine.

* = My least favorite chapter was the sexuality chapter, which used the term “transsexual” to describe anyone trans, instead of the more inclusive (and more accepted) term transgender.