A bit of April and march.

it's been a load of ups and downs.

because of the rain and snow when i drove in, i couldn't get my tattoo. i need to rebook that completely. i'm saddened that i couldn't get my keys done and the outline of ganesh done. but what am i to do? the roads were utterly crappy and jodie had told me that she came into the city and had to borrow her in-laws 4x4.

i pretty much relaxed til class started.

class was okay for the first couple days. i felt a little off my game, but that was just because the winnipeg site throws me off. it's just not my home base and i'm off a bit. out of my comfort zone and all that.

friday, i got one huge ass compliment. it was awesome and i felt so.... amazing.
we were in groups - as normal and i just ended up taking over and directing how things should go. cam, my instructor pulled me aside and told me, "you have just impressed the shit out of me. you took over the scene and you did everything perfectly. you showed care for the patient and didn't make anyone feel stupid. you are awesome." and he gave me a high five...while wearing my mittens. ^_^

i was seriously floating and just feeling so sure of myself in my skills for the rest of the day.

allen, another instructor did a one on one scene with me. this one was nerve wracking. but he said that my flow was pretty good and that i should have done my vitals and gotten O2 on sooner. other than that, i was good. i think i might ask him for another go round, but I didn't.

There were a total of two days where i missed. The first day, I was in pain and had a migraine of uber-intensity. This was not fun. The second day, I was waiting for my doctor's office to call me back with an appointment.
I got chastised for missing both days. Then got threatened with not graduating by the same instructor who gave me a compliment days ago.

Even to this day, i'm still recoiling from the actions of the instructors. We were given a case study to somehow form into a research paper. Not given much information on what we should be doing exactly, but I figured us students - who were almost all in the same boat of confusion would sort of band together and overcome.

Well, the students were still up in the air and when I contacted one, she told me that if i didn't hand it in already that I should just not bother and that i probably already gotten a 0%.
I asked my instructor and other instructors and they gave me no help, stating that i was given all the information in the city. well, if that was the "you have all the information already" comment, then no, that wasn't helpful. it also didn't help that i felt once more like i was being chastised like a child for asking for help. needless to say, i didn't want to speak to that instructor again.

two weeks later, i finally handed in my report and got an email back stating that the instructor was under the impression that i wasn't handing it in as there was no futher contact between us. this is when i told him that i felt like i was being chastised for asking for assistance and that i didn't need a rerun of that. also, in short, i basically told him that he needn't bother reading my report as it would probably be a waste of his time.

this was also around the time of when we were suppose to be doing our clinical rotation for ER, EKG and Psych.

Rolling from 2 weeks in winnipeg to doing exams with no study time... even though the coordinator stated there was. i believe it was something akin to "that week was there for you" when i asked what week and if this was some week that magically appeared, he told me that we got back from winnipeg, had the class on monday and then exam on tuesday. ...that is not a week. he also stated that the afternoons after our exams were meant for study time.
studying for exams that were being labelled as "the hardest ones yet", a weekend and a couple half days are not nearly enough to get decent marks.

my mistake for actually stating that i was "burnt out" from the whole ordeal. the coordinator of the course felt that i might benefit from some councilling through the school.
apparently i should have used the term exhausted. *eye roll*

i really don't like the way that they, the instructors and coordinator, treat us like children. I'm 30, an adult and I expect to be treated like one. I don't want my hand held and to be coddled, if I wanted that, I'd go for daycare or something.

I realize that we're the forerunners of this course, but we're finding more and more bad things out than good.

As it stands right now, I don't feel very sure of myself in my skills and we go back to car in May.
When we were doing our clinical rotations here, the staff at the hospital didn't know what to do with us. The didn't know what our skills were and what medications we could give. In the end, I ended up doing a fuckload of vitals and general care.

Our, as in the Paramedics, care is different than the care the nurses do. We stabilize the patient as best as possible and stop them from bleeding. We keep them alive, or as Doc says in RedVsBlue "make them comfortable while they die."

I guess I'll leave this entry with something from school Shaw came by to do a segment as well.