bagged & intubated

Our Friday classes now consist of three hours of learning clinical procedures that we will hopefully perfect next year in rotations, but for now we just practice on one another and get our mistakes out of the way!
We started with venupuncture (or blood draws) as well as finger pricks, EKG placements, and arterial lines. Moving through a week of practicing injections of normal saline into muscle, subcutaneous tissue, and into other areas was a lot of fun! We will definitely perfect this skill in our pediatric rotation - kids need immunizations!

THIS WEEK THOUGH... we topped it all off learning how to put in an endotracheal tube for intubation! Unfortunately we didn't practice this on each other... but we did practice on models of infants, children, and adults. It takes a lot more force to move the tongue and position the tongue blade to visualize the vocal cords, but you could feel your adrenaline rush starting up the second you assembled the materials and placed the head in the right position. As awful as this sounds, I cannot wait to intubate my first patient!! With a small interest in trauma, I'm excited to just work off of adrenaline and not have to think twice about what I am doing.

One more step towards saving a life!!