Succinylcholine Chloride

jillweeann:

Life of a student in the medical field, doing clinicals. 8-4 Monday-Friday for the next 3 weeks. fml.

8-4 isn’t too bad. My first 2 months of clinical were 7a-11p clinical rotation for 3 days straight, 24 hour shift at work, straight from work (1.5 hour drive) to school for 8 hours and repeat for about 30 days straight. I think between Jan and Feb I got 2 days off before everything started up again. As bad as my rotations were there were people in my class who had much harsher schedules. 

My car looked like a trash bin for a long time. Receipts, empty fast food cups, books, old tests, study cards, 12 lead strips, you name it and it sat in my car for months cause I never got a chance to clean it out.

There’s this joke that gets told a lot in paramedic classes. You don’t graduate until someone gets divorced. (650 hours of clinical, away from home, never seeing your family.) I can honestly tell you there is nothing worse that working a 24 then driving straight to class to take a major test when you’ve been up all night running granny totes.

The funny thing is I kinda miss it. I must be a masochist but I honestly do. I got to work with some incredible people, medics, basics, doctors, fire fighters. I got the chance to run from emergency surgery to the delivery ward (all the way across the hospital) in scrubs because the doppler was missing during an emergency c-section. I got to grill steaks and tell horrible jokes with medics on slow nights. I sweet talked an ER doctor into letting me intubate an overdose patient. After a successful intubation that doc let me do pretty much whatever I wanted in the ER while he was there. I stood in on a cardiocentesis, decompressed a tension pnumothorax, watched a surgical crike. 

I was beat up, sick for weeks at a time, tired, wired, and overworked but I wouldn’t trade a single second of it. It sucks. God, it sucks but it is totally worth it. 

Keep your chin up. I promise you clinicals will be over before you know it. Good luck with everything and invest in energy drinks and OTC pain killers.