So, after the fairly intense first week of third year, we were all bracing ourselves for another busy one – and it definitely delivered!
We started the week with a day of updates. Every year we have to be updated on our Basic Life Support and Moving & Handling so we spent a day in the skills lab, starting with Life Support, doing CPR, placing airways and using defibrillators and then the afternoon was spent practising moving patients safely from theatre bed to ward bed, helping them stand for the first time after surgery, moving boxes of fluids etc without hurting ourselves and following all the moving and handling guidelines. It’s stuff we know already but its a necessary annual update so that’s done now.
The Tuesday was our introduction to our dissertation and frankly it was one of the most overwhelming days of the course so far. We started by noting down deadlines etc and then went into the full details of what we have to do and the type things we should be writing about.
Hearing about the proper details, search strategy, abstract, references, main referenced articles, other supporting articles and all the other bits involved in the whole process was more than a little bit daunting…I know I’ll get there and even a few weeks down the line, I will feel more settled about it all, but right now, I’m just trying not to think about it! I’ve been assigned my supervisor so I think I’m going to try to meet up with her in the next week or two and talk through it all a bit more then….all a bit scary right now.
The rest of the week was more NIPE lectures – we covered Developmental Dyspasia of the Hips (including the specific checks we have to do and manoeuvres to check the stability of the hip joint), Cleft Lip and Palate, Neonatal Eye (and how to spot abnormalities such as cataracts) and how to examine the abdomen and feel for the different abdominal organs (to check that they aren’t enlarged) as well as learning some of the abnormalities such as when the baby is born with its abdominal organs on the outside of it’s body, either in a sac made of the umbilical cord (this is called Exompahlos) or just free (called Gastroschisis) – so interesting! There is a lot to learn when it comes to our NIPE module but it does feel like it all fits together quite nicely, so I feel alright about that at the mo…famous last words eh?!
The weekend was another gentle one, M was home and we basically spent the whole weekend drinking tea and curling up on the sofa (it was the Ryder Cup, so he was firmly hooked on that!)
Image by Lukas Blazek
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