End of a Long Week.

This week has been a different week for me. I found out my little passing out episode in class the other day may actually be something totally unrelated to the procedure that was taking place. Thursday night, at about 3:30 in the morning, I get up to go to the bathroom and end up fainting again and winding up in the bathroom floor. In the process, I manage to bang my knee up pretty good and knock a little table we have in there all over the place. I was pretty tempted to just lay there and go back to sleep considering how I really didn't feel like standing back up at that point, but then I remembered I sometimes don't have the best aim at 3:30 in the morning and didn't know what I could be laying in. I managed to make it back to the bed, and it was probably a good thing since Amiee got off work a few hours early and I'm sure it would have scared the shit out of her turning the hall light on and seeing me sprawled out in the bathroom floor.

I had a scheduled appointment with my cardiologist the next day, so I mentioned what had been going on to him and he said he was 99.9% sure it was a vagus vagal (or something like that) but drew some blood just to be sure. I'm still waiting for the results on that.

So what else happened this week? Oh, yea! I got my first patient assignment at the hospital. That was definately an experience I don't think I will ever forget. My first patient was on an every 15 minute suicide watch. The instructions I recieved from the unit tech was to just keep them talking and and write down where they were at and what they were doing every 15 minutes. If anybody knows me, I'm usually pretty shy around people I don't know and I'm not the greatest conversationalist. Now, I'm expected to keep a conversation going with this person for the next two or three hours, and I'm totally terrified I'm going to say something that could send the person over the edge! Turns out, once I got them talking they kept going pretty well on their own. I've known people in my life who have killed themselves, but have never been around any one while they were in the stages of actually wanting to go through with it. Listening to this person talk, it was kinda surreal how matter of fact they were with everything. From the way they had tried to do it in the past, to how they would probably try and do it again when they were released from the hospital. It was definately an eye opening experience.

Well, it's now 1:00 am and I really need to be getting in bed. Have to be up in another five hours and I'm going to need the energy to study for my clinical check off which I quess is now technically tomorrow morning. There's going to be a lot of sore hot dogs and oranges tomorrow! Wait, I quess that would actually be tonight? I don't know, I'm tired dammit.