Playing Nurse

(Artist Unknown)

Wow... got to love her uniform!

As of this afternoon I've survived the second day of my Women's Health Gynaecology placement. Helen (fellow midwifery student) and I have concluded a number of things in the short amount of time we've spent carpooling these last few days and I'm sure we'll conclude a lot more than just the following by the end of four weeks:

1. We feel as if we are in first year again.

2. Nursing and Midwifery are NOT the same (we knew this already but there's nothing like a nursing placement to realize it even more). It makes us happy to be midwives and helps us understand why we feel like first years.

3. Our midwifery degree should have more than the one pharmacology subject we took in first year. Giving out drugs freaks the hell out of us!

4. Getting up early makes you yawn all day.

5. Working in a mixed gynae/med ward means we will be caring for men. Helen has, I have yet to experience it.

6. Hospitals are great places to get lost in, especially when they are being renovated!

7. Caring for six women in a surgical ward is very very different from postnatal ward looking after six postnatal mums and six babies, or labour ward with one or two birthing women.

8. Nurses are much more happy to have students buddied up to them than are midwives.

9. Nurses need to have fantastic time management skills. The ward routine has Helen and I fascinated.

10. Feeding, washing, moving and providing complete care for elderly women is very confronting.

11. Cups of tea are very very welcome.

12. Taking down and putting on new dressings over wound and surgery incisions is really fun.... but even so, four weeks of nursing skills in our final year of midwifery seems just a little excessive.

13. I miss midwifery.... in light of the PMS post a few posts below, it's nice to know!

Oh... and thanks so much for the comments in the last few posts, it's meant so much!

3 weeks 3 days left.

Let them go quickly!