Internship Updates

I know this isnt apart of the internship updates, but I stole this picture from Tabathas blog because its adorable! If you didnt already notice-Ann, Isabella, and Nellie are getting bigger! I havent seen Isabella since Christmas and Ann/Nellie since our trip to Phoenix so I was excited to see a picture. As of now they are all rolling all over the place and soon to be crawling. I wish they were all more annoying and bad babies because then I might not want one of my own-Thanks to you guys, Rach and Tab, I'm wanting one and going through niece withdrawals! To try to tame these withdrawals I've been visiting the nursery at work every time I hear the lullaby. There have been 4 sets of twins born since I started, but the last baby I saw was born 6 weeks early and he was a whopping 21" long and 10 lbs 6 oz. I felt bad for that mother!

As for the internship, I started at St. Vincent in Caramel on Monday. I met my preceptor-who is the only Dietitian that works in ICU, peds, OB, and Med/Surge. However, St. Vincent has a bariatric unit, which is doing 192 Roux-en-y surgeries this month!!!-more than most places do in a year) and they have 5 full time Dietitians and 2 part timers. Let me just start out by saying a hospital chart isnt anything what I thought it would look like-its not a chart, its a binder with inserts and more inserts. As for docs having horrible handwriting-true, true, true, but what I dont understand is why they would want to write sloppy because their orders are soo important-needless to say I'm excited St. Vincent is going to computerized charts. So far its going great-I've been in information overload since I started, but I have to admitt I think it gives me some sort of weird high! I havent had MNT since last spring, but its all coming back to me daily eventhough my list of "to look up" words, meds, procedures, diagnosis is at least a page each day I find this rotation much more enjoyable than the last one.

I will be doing part of my rotation at St. Vincent in Caramel and part of it at Seton Specialty Hospital which is a Long Term Acute Care Facility (which I quickly learned was abbreviated "L-TAC") Props to Rach and Ellen for being Nurses/nursing students the abbreviations are killing me.

Since Monday we have had some pretty unique patients mostly in ICU, but also at the LTAC(P.S. Jake is learning too-all the things I learn and am excited about he gets to hear). A patient was suspected to have a mitochondrial disease Mitochondrial Encephalopathy, Lactic Acidosis, and Stroke-like episodes or MELAS. Another case study has Pickwickian Syndrome...both of which I had no idea existed. I was able to see 2 swallow studies on Wednesday and I'm excited to see a wound (necrotizing fasciitis to be specific) be re-dressed on Monday...its a tendon showing, gross you out type of wound, but its cool-believe me.

I thought the drive would bother me more, but Ginny works at Westfield and our hours are very similar so we've been able to work out a carpooling system. Carpooling with a friend is fun and the conversation never runs dry. We are hoping to get to go on vacation with them sometime in the next 6 months-we are currently trying to work something out, but schedules are hard to mesh.