I need a Grey's Anatomy pun to title this post

Hey Readers! Ive done absolutely nothing of late in keeping with my promise of blogging more consistently, but on this eve of exhaustion, where I find myself spent and lifeless after an 8 hour day of studying drug pharmacology, I was inexplicably refreshed anew and decided to scrape together some coherency in order to update you on how I've been doing, and offer you some highlights of hilarity of my hospital adventures. Its been a rough fall semester, which found me at Mass General Hospital every Wednesday morning from 6am-2pm, groggily chipping away at this RN dream. What follows is a very truncated list of some of my finer moments in student nurse history (You are warned that these are not safe for the queasy):

- My very first day, as I reached for the thermometer attached to the wall behind my patients bed, my left boob rested on, and subsequently dislodged, a very important tube that was attached to a ventilator from which my elderly patient was relying on for breath. I didnt notice this until he started gagging and choking, when in a panic, I quickly bent down to pick up the tube off the floor, then smacked my forehead on the very sharp corner of the machine, nearly knocking myself unconscious. The patient survived, my pride did not.

- There was that time that my 98 year old patient, decided to have her first bowel movement in four days the minute I walked in to her room, except that she was not sitting on a bed pan, did not warn me in time, and possibly actually hadnt gone in closer to four months judging by the amount of material that flowed out of Suzie. It took two nurses and myself to try and manage the breaking of that dam, and I very nearly passed out from the seemingly unstoppable force of the never-ending perfect storm of incontinence and laxatives. Ho.Rrific.

- Day three, attempting to make a connection with my mostly spanish speaking patient, whose only words to me that day had been "jes" and "eetz ok", I scoured his medical chart for something to inspire a conversation between the two of us. Telling him I was from California only frustrated him because my high school Spanish was terrible, and thus he pretended to be asleep in protest. Finally I saw something that I thought might make him smile and possibly feel better about being held up in a linguistically-challenged environment. I arrived in his room with a huge grin on my face, and with a definite air of satisfaction, announced "Feliz Cumpleanos!" Mr. Espanol barely twitched a muscle. He just stared at me through his very dark aviator shades he was allowed to wear due to the glaucoma, and general bad-assery. "Its your BIRTHDAY, right?!" I asked again, hoping he would understand me and be impressed that I figured it out all on my own. He very slowly lifted his glasses above his eyes, looked me dead in the face, and said with zero inflection "Aye yam Yahova Weetness." With that, he lowered his eyewear and went back to fake sleep. As always, and yet again: Mexicans: 1 Ashlee: 0

- This next one is actually mildly embarrassing, and slightly technical, but bear with me here, and believe me when I tell you, I WISH I had had a camera on me to document this moment, cuz it smacks of reality show material. I went down into the bowels of MGH with my patient to get a dialysis catheter put into his heart (a simple, but invasive, procedure that uses local anesthetic, but includes placing a plastic tube into the heart and attaching it to the outside chest wall with stitches. Essentially a snorkel from his heart to his clavicle)and I had never really traveled off our floor before. We ended up in a very official operating room, and the staff there was super friendly and were showering me with compliments about how Im going to be a great nurse because I have a great attitude, seem like I care, want to be involved, blah, blah. (Side note: As older students we hear this a lot from the staff at the hospital, how we bring a different energy to the table in terms of enthusiasm and general fearlessness. My answer to this would be, Im terrified every single time I walk in to that hospital, only difference is Ive got a decade or so of embarrassing myself on those baby 20 year old nursing students. At this age, Ive accepted that I will fall, HARD, but am committed to JUST KEEP GOING. 10 years ago, I might have thrown in the towel after living some of these excruciating moments. Please raise a glass of Andre to determination!)
As is no secret, I am a sucker for compliments, and did allow myself to revel for a few minutes in the welcomed banter as I was making snarky conversation with the O.R. tech about nursing school, and California, freezing Boston, and yes, everyone is better looking on the west coast (I couldn't HELP myself! Dont blind me with smooth words and expect me, on little sleep, to represent for Beantown. Me and it are having words right now anyway). So the Top Nurse (also my new show coming soon to Bravo) asks if I want to "help" with the operation. I look at her skeptically while visions of me yelping "scalpel!" suddenly are dancing through my head like Christmas morning. (Before you start giving me the side eye of "Ashlee, really? Did you really think they were going to let you CUT INTO A MAN?!" Listen, EVERY DAY I do something I seriously feel no one should be letting me do. Any concept of reality I had in this environment is totally skewed now that I have put in, and subsequently pulled out, a tube from EVERY SINGLE orifice in the human body. Yes, I said it. Take that one to the bank and cash it on your DISBELIEF.) In the haze of my new trumped up belief in myself, thanks to my new fan base in operating room #7, I quickly agreed to do whatever they needed me to do, which turned out to be holding several bottles of pain killers near the operating table, and when the doctor yelled out "Sodium Benzoate!" I was to show her the correct bottle, then turn it towards her so she could stab it with her medieval sized-syringe, draw out the medication while I provided the appropriate amount of force, and then step back in to the shadows until I was called again.

Things Ashlee Had Never Done Up To This Point, Nor Even Considered:
1) Never even SEEN an operating room, let alone been in one
2) Never "scrubbed in " to a procedure, which is as serious as it sounds
3) Never had a half-dozen serious medical professionals all staring at me at once
4) NEVER, EVER, EVER been in an operating room!

So Im standing there holding three large glass bottles of pain medication, and one tiny alcohol swab, waiting for my big moment. Operating rooms are STERILE. You DO NOT TOUCH anything. You do not lean, you barely sigh. In my defense, Top Nurse did not explain to me how to accurately go about my duty, and when the Doctor yelled for her med, I panicked when I could not figure out how to hold just one of the bottles, instead of all three, and suddenly felt the weight of six doctors staring at me. I blanked and slowly went to place two of the bottles down on the table. On the operating table. That was surgically sterile. That no one touches. That took an hour to set up properly. That if anything touches, has to be immediately discarded and thrown away. That table.

Has anyone ever really heard a tiny indian surgeon actually shriek? I have. She sprung at me in slow motion, like Tommy Girl in Mission Impossible, catching a tiny droplet of sweat in her latex-covered hand. And by sweat, I mean my dignity. Her scream echoed off the bleached walls, and we just stood there hunched over the blue table, breathing rhythmically like we just clipped the green wire on 24, both of us not sure if the coast was really clear, if the bottle had made contact. I have NEVER felt more ridiculous and simultaneously at a total loss for a witty comment to diffuse the tension. I had nothing. And really, although tiny indian surgeon saved the day with her cat-like reflexes, as she had in fact managed to wedge her infant fingers between safety and my train wreck, I was shaken up by the enormity of it all. I really could have made a colossal mistake right then, and was irritated with myself, especially when I knew full well the ramifications of a sterile field. And it was especially humiliating after being built up like I was for being an anomaly: a competent nursing student, one who nearly shut down the entire surgery, with a man's newly shaved chest hanging in the balance. Even though my fan club tried hard to get me to shake it off, with lilliputian doctor apologizing profusely for screaming at me (for which she had every right), it took me awhile to snap out of it, only finally consoling myself with the realization that the screech heard 'round the world almost made me toss all three bottles up into the air, which would have made for an even more elaborate clean-up, and probable "just took off running and never returned" ending to this story.

Sigh.

As I said before, nothing in my whole life has ever instilled in me this ethic with more passion or vengeance: JUST KEEP GOING.

Thanks nursing school. For forcing me to repeat cheesy life motto's and cling to them like a ... Im out of metaphors.

Well thats all Ive got for now. Stay tuned because Ive got several semesters left in which to thoroughly embarrass myself on even more epic levels than previously thought possible.