Cadaver Lab!!

Hey hey hey! I just got back from the cadaver lab!! It was amazing!! Absolutely amazing! How can you not believe there is a God when you see how amazing our human bodies are!?! I don’t know!

So I’ll start at the beginning!

We get to the NAU health sciences building and go up to the 2^nd floor where the cadaver lab is. It’s not marked or anything.. it’s pretty low key.. they don’t tell a lot of people about it. Anyway we get there and our instructor, Dr. Leahman, explains that there are 6 bodies for us to look at AND if we feel nauseous at any time to let him know!

After that little chat we’re all nervous but we get gloves and goggles on and in we go. At first I panicked! The room was just a normal old classroom but had tables with partially covered bodies. It was not what I expected and the smell was SO over powering. The freakiest part for me was that the bodies still had skin on their hands and feet. Some of the female bodies even had painted toenails and fingernails. It was real! Real loved people; grandmas, grandpas, sisters, and brothers! Once I got over the shock of seeing all the bodies and started actually pointing out the organs and finding arteries, veins, bones and muscles I had been learning about it started to be an awesome experience!

All the bodies had a sheet of paper stating what they died from and how old they were. Once person had died from lung cancer and we got to look and see the breakdown of tissue and how the alveoli would have been completely destroyed. A lot of the bodies had been smokers and all of their lungs had black lines all through them, so sad that a lot of people don’t even know the damage they are doing to their lungs.

There were so many different things to look at: A knee replacement, a pacemaker still in the heart that was attached to the SA node, the valves in the heart, the kidney’s the gallbladder, the BRAIN (I held a whole human brain in my hands!!!), everything!

The body is so amazing!

We had a little old lady that had died at the age of 91 years old. Her lungs and heart still looked perfect compared to the other overweight and smoking bodies. It just really taught me the importance of the things we put in our body and how much it affect us! Gaining weight has to be the worst thing you can possibly do! The fat gets intertwined in everything, and it’s gross! I have seen it! One of our bodies was obese and it was just massive amounts of yellow fat. And all of his inners were just being squished and ugg.. not a pretty sight! Anyway, very eye opening experience of how much more you’ll get our of your body when you’re healthy! =)

Anyway it was amazing! I’m so thankful I can have these opportunities to learn about the human body and do it by hands on stuff! Learning from our textbooks is important but I learn the most while doing hands on stuff! I will never forget what those bodies looked like or how the organs felt. Amazing! I really REALLY want to go to body worlds now! Where they have all those cadavers.. you know what I’m talking about? Well it’s in phoenix now and I really want to go!! We’ll see! Maybe this summer!!

MY Clinical =)

I had the best day today in the hospital! Oh MY GOODNESS!! I can’t explain how alive I feel in the hospital. Today I was in the spine and joint surgery center and the majority of the patients had ether lumbar, thoracic or cervical spin injuries or we had some with hip replacements. I had the best PCT that I followed around all day. His name was Carlos and he was amazing. All of us students and Brenda (my really sweet instructor) walked into 3 north and Carlos looks at me and says “I want her!” I was shocked! At first it was bad… I was blushing and embarrassed, but later on in the day he said he could tell the moment I walked in that I was going to be someone who wants to learn and digs in and helps. He was a really sweet guy! I got super lucky!

I took so many vitals. For me they’re as easy as changing a baby’s dipper! “Hello, My name is Patricia, I’m your CAN today, I’m going to take your BP, temp, pulse, and respirations” said over and over especially in this unit! I was taking postoperative vitals which are taken every 15min the first hour after surgery and then every 30 min the second hour and then every hour after that. So vitals take up a lot of time but are so important.

One lady named Holly (she was my favorite patient of the day) had an extremely low BP around 2:30pm; we’re talking around 76/45. bad bad bad. I immediately reported it to the nurse and they found out that they needed to change her BP medication.

Another man was sitting in his chair and only needed moderate assist with things through the whole day. I had just taken his vitals and his BP was also low so Carlos and I decided to get him in bed to see if that helped it go back up. His BP wasn’t as bad as Holly; his was around 109/70. Anyway, so we’re getting him his walker he starts walking to his bed while Carlos goes around the bed to unhook an IV or something and I was just standing there when I see him start to wobble, so I get my arm under his shoulder but he’s really falling by then and I yell out, “aw, he’s falling” Carlos turns around and see’s what’s happening and comes and helps but it was crazy! Neither of us were prepared for him to fall. He had been fine all morning walking with his walker but because his BP was low he got dizzy and just lost it. Carlos was so grateful I was, telling me how good I was. Plus Carlos would have never forgiven himself if he had a fall on his watch! Thanks to me he didn’t. =) Both our hearts were pounding by the time we got him back in bed and it was quite the experience, I must admit! It could have been a hard fall, and I don’t know if this eighty year old man could of handled more broken bones and surgery. It was just good for me to learn that you never leave a patient alone and things happen when you least expect it. So EXCPECT them! That was my lesson!

I also did a accu-check on several patients. Just checking their blood sugar level, nothing that exciting, but I did scan the bar-codes, used the lancet, got the blood on the little strip, used the machine, then reported it to the nurse! I did it all! I Loved today! It was just like when you have your hemoglobin tested before you can give blood only I was the one sticking the patient. It was sweet!

What else… we used a sliding board with a patient that had been in a motorcycle accident and had broken L2-L6 and we had to be all careful not to twist his spin when transferring him to his air bed. Ahhhh.. Those beds are nice! Laying on one is like floating on clouds!

I did a ton of linen changing. I got that skill down! We recorded input and output of our patients, (emptied follies and stuff). We recorded percents of our patient’s meals. We used a mobile bed scale to weigh a patient with a broken femur.

Oh I was in helping Carlos with something and guess who walks in! Jeremy! He worked today at FMC as well and had been paged to come do a chest x-ray on one of our patients that was 91 years old. I asked Carlos if I could assist Jeremy and so I did a chest x-ray with him. It was so fun to help Jeremy and to be able to see what he does for his job. It was sad though.. the x-ray showed that this 91 year old man had lung cancer… and the nurse said later that he was going on hospice. There were no more surgeries or medication they could give to help except to keep him comfortable the last few weeks of life. Sad huh?

I also did an EKG on a patient. We viewed the heart from 12 different angles and it was awesome that I knew more about the printout then Carlos did. (heehee) Just because in bio we just learned all about the QRS-complex, the p-wave, the t-wave, and what happens during diastolic and systolic periods. It was sweet!

Lets see, lets see. SO many things! I’m probably forgetting half the stuff I did, but I don’t want to drag on..

It was just a great day because Carlos was complimenting me all day, I was helping SO many people and I was learning SO much! Carlos said I was the best student he’s ever had the privilege to teach, that I was excellent with the patients, that I knew and understood a lot of the bio behind everything. All day he was quizzing me on things PCT’s have to do and he asked me this one question about what we use a incentive spirometer for. The first thing that came to mind was your alveoli, and how high the risk of getting pneumonia is in the hospital. So I started saying all this stuff about how your alveoli and bronchi tree and he was just amazed! He also said I had a good aroma about me and that I was sharp! It just all made me feel so special, and wonderful! When I was leaving he gave me his number and full name so I can use him as a reference on my next application to FMC in the fall. Wow wow wow!

What a GOOD day!