In 12 hours I will be my roommate's final demonstration patient for nursing assessment! In 13 hours, I will be going myself. We've been practicing a lot (probably why I have disappeared off the face of the earth?) so we are pretty comfortable with the assessment part of it. Reporting back to our examiner, though, might be tough. We are able to bring in "cheat sheets" listing whatever we want. As long as you don't read directly from it, you're golden. Mine has spaces for the symptoms of whatever problem she is given (we draw something like a headache out of a hat and we have to ask certain questions about it) and spaces for BP, HR and all of the vitals. I made mine more of an outline so when I look at it during the exam I'll know what comes next or what I've missed. Plus I added some jargon on there so I'll report back with the right terms. It's scary, but I think that we are both prepared. Everyone so far has done well - we think the only way you can really do poorly is by reading off the sheet word for word or just missing half of the systems we're supposed to assess. We will see!

We also had to take the CNET which makes sure we know enough about drugs to go into the clinical setting. It's a national test that nurses take when they go to work at certain hospitals, so if I apply to a place that requires it, I'm done! We went over all the answers in class since there was no way we would've known that stuff, but it was still kind of scary since we were hanging in the balance.

Speaking of clinicals, I will be in the med-surg unit for my acute care clinical for July/August! One of my roommates is in neurology and another in oncology. It seems like everyone is somewhere different for our acute care setting. I will be able to walk to that one, but my other one I think I will have to drive since it's about 2 miles away. We start our course that our clinicals fall under in 2 weeks! I'm really excited :)

Off I go to practice a little bit more. We tweaked our cheat sheets and now just want to see how they work!