"You did some things that were good. . .

I will talk about the things that were not good."

Our professor today? Not the most supportive and loving.

After three days of classroom preparation, and vague attempts at studying, today was megacode drill day.

And wow- it was intensely. . . disturbing. First of all, our "patient" was the oldest CPR dummy I have ever seen. His mouth was cracked at one side so all rescue breaths sort of slipped out his cheek. His legs and arms refused to stay attached to his body.

Then somehow, throughout the day, he became oddly life like. He's the kind of dummy you can shock, and intubate, and pretend to put drugs into, and he reacts accordingly. He "breathes" and "throws up" and he has a heart rhythm that you can pick up with a monitor. So there was a little tension in the room every time we finished a set of CPR or injected a new drug and were waiting to see if it had worked. It started to feel almost real.

And we killed him over and over and over.

I had the honor of killing him by failing to diagnose his hyperkalemia. I was however, the first team leader to get through the entire protocol without having the professor stop us in disgust.

I also managed to intubate properly on my first try. You only have 30 seconds per attempt to squeeze the little plastic tube down the patient's throat, making sure to push it up through the vocal cords into the trachea instead of down into the esophagus. And it's hard. And the dummy makes this terrible cracking sound if you push to hard with the flashlight that means that you've broken his teeth. I did not break any teeth and I just managed to find the vocal cords and get the tube into place on second 29. Talk about tension! And I have a nagging suspicion that actual patients are going to be just a tad more difficult that a CPR dummy.

Tomorrow, we have another 4 hours of Megacode drills and then a whole afternoon of skill stations: chest tube insertion, IV practice (on each other), drawing blood, nasogastric tube placement etc. Last time we practiced IVs, my very nervous partner punched all the way through my vein not once, but several times, and I ended up with a six inch bruise from my bicep to halfway down my forearm.

I should be excited that we're finally finally learning actual skills that we're going to use in the hospital, but it's less exciting, and more overwhelming. Running codes this morning made me all too aware, that within a few years, I will be running actual codes, and that peoples' lives will depend on the decisions I make based on the training I'm getting right now. That's a lot of pressure. And a whole lot of protocols to memorize.

I'm completely exhausted already (it's only been three days!)- but I guess that's a pretty good approximation of how I will feel for the next, oh, rest of my life.

On a creepy side note- here's what we get to play with tomorrow: