Week Two

I had two days of orientation in the ICU. It was the first time I saw the hospital, the unit, etc. It was not a great two days. It was rather hard. But I know it will get better. There is just a huge learning curve with different charting system (paper chart for all orders. Seriously horrible. I cannot explain how much I hate paper charts), different protocols, completely different diagnoses, different everything. It may possibly be a little harder than I thought. BUT, I know it will get better. And I am thankful that the other nurses I work with are nice. Two of my first days after I had a super-fast orientation, I was floated to a Med-Surg floor & had 5-6 patients, with multiple discharges & admits. Kind of hard to do when I had never been taught how to admit and discharge a patient. Somehow I got through the day. Although, I was calling the nurse back at 11pm with a list of things I forgot to tell her. Even though those were two horrible days, once I leave work it doesn't really matter, because I know that I am in a sunny state with beautiful weather & some amazing places to go explore!

Wednesday of week two, I went camping with a couple from Maine. They are so fascinating.(one interesting fact about them is they sailed from Maine to the west coast of Florida last year! I absolutely loved hanging out with them!!) We drove to Roosevelt Lake, which is north east of Phoenix. It was a beautiful drive, we saw some great scenery, ate some delicious food, and met our camp-site neighbor, Dan. Dan showed us how to pan-handle, told us a million stories, including how he had drowned in the ocean, started traveling to heaven, and was miraculously washed back up on shore(this might explain some of his other stories...), how he made bookshelves & plant stands out of dead saguaro cactus, how he killed rattlesnakes & then took them apart to get their vertebrae for jewelry (he gave me some rattlesnake vertebrae to make in to earrings!! so cool!), and about his life as a massage-therapist/hypnotist/pan-handler/explorer. So interesting. Slightly crazy. My favorite snapshot of him was the next morning when he walked over to our campsite... he has a huge, white beard, no shirt (remember, its 50 degrees in the morning), shorts, and ugg boots on. I wanted to take a picture of him, because it seemed to fit all of his stories perfectly. I decided that I didn't want the Maine-couple to feel uncomfortable, or to offend Dan, so I didn't. During the day, we drove through the Apache trail a little bit, and did some hiking. We some some ruins, explored the Roosevelt Dam, and then drove back to Phoenix.

 Roosevelt Lake

The Cliff Dwellings on the side of the mountain.

We learned a lot about the different cactus & flowers in Arizona. Most notably was that we learned Cholla is pronounced Choya, like Goya. We had made up most of our own pronunciations because we had no idea how to say it!