Three Down, One to Go

That's what my status for school is! Yay! I just finished up Level III of nursing school and am on a one week break before my final semester, level IV(hence the reason all the updated blog posts--I'm trying to get caught up, so make sure you read the posts below!). It was a crazy, busy summer, but I had a fantastic clinical group, clinical site, and instructor. I couldn't have asked for more, really. Our home base was an apartment facility for residents over 65. We each were partnered and had a patient that we visited in their home weekly. My clinical partner was Darren and we made a great team and worked well together, which was so nice. We had the most amazing patient ever, who will always have a special place in my heart.

That was for one day each week and the the other day we were at two different sites. One site I was at was a home health hospice agency and another was a pediatric and adolescent mental health facility. Both offered amazing learning experiences.

For our community project, we did a weekly learning afternoon at a local Boys and Girls club. We all split into our partnerships and each focused on a different body system. We had a giant poster of a boy and added the body parts each week that we talked about. Darren and I had the skeletal system and talked a lot about safety and nutrition and did some fun games and such with the kids. It was a lot of fun. I have a ton of pictures, but I don't really feel comfortable posting pictures of the Boys and Girls club kids, even though we had permission, on my blog.

For our health promotion project, we did a fitness program for the residents at the apartment complex. We did chair yoga and a walking club. We had a map of the US and had the clients pick where they wanted to walk to. We logged all their miles and did weekly weights and blood pressures. It was a BLAST. I've always been hesitant about working with elderly patients, but these amazing people proved me wrong. They were so much fun and I learned so much from them! For our finale, since we ended up walking to HOLLYWOOD, we had a Hollywood themed ice cream social. It was soooo much fun. All the residents got dressed up to participate. We each got little awards and gave awards to our participants as well. I have a lot of pictures of this as well, but again, don't really want to post the residents' photos on the Internet. Anyway, here are a ton of random photos of our finale.

This is our amazing instructor, Kate. We learned so much from her. One of my classmates making her entrance!

Serving up the ice cream! (don't worry, we had healthy options too. ;))

Our amazing group!

This was the poster we left with the residents about our project. Darren, Bri, Maria and I designed the poster. We were pretty happy with the outcome.

We had a little photo booth to take pictures. Here are just some fun photos.

Onward to Level IV!