Smells like poop spirit.

I've found another area of nursing that I can cross off my list- Acute Rehab.  While not as nosepicking boring as surgical nursing, it has its own pace and I think that pace is significantly slower than the pace I run at.  Which is shocking, I know.

Acute rehab is where people go that are no longer critically ill but are now faced with the task of re-entering "normal life" when their life as they've known it doesn't really exist anymore.  A lot of the patients are post-stroke and have some loss of function on one side and they need to learn new ways to carry out their daily routines with their new condition.  Sometimes you get people that had major orthopedic surgery, but it's generally a lot of stroke patients.  It takes a special kind of nurse to work with these patients- you have to be caring, nurturing, but at the same time firm and push them to stretch themselves.  And you gotta like to clean up poop.

I know, I'm a callous jerk.  And my first experience in ARU... totally different.  But this time, it was a lot of poop.  At one point, 20min  after a particularly poopy experience, I was sitting at a computer charting and my RN found me sniffing my shirt and grimacing.  The conversation went like this:

Nurse J: What on earth are you doing?  (while laughing)

Me: I smell like poop.

Nurse J: Yeaah, that happens here a lot.

(my fellow student on the floor with me walks past)

Me: Yeah, I smell like her patient's poop.  (my friend laughed at me)

And you know, it doesn't get any easier with the smells.  About two months ago, I had a patient with no less than 8 diabetic ulcers on her feet- they were open and huge and emitted an indescribable, unique smell.  And as part of my assessment, I had to get all up in those things and measure each one and describe their characteristics.  Do you know how horrible it is to be sitting, HOURS later, and still smell "wound"?  Get me some Vicks or something for my nose already.

But on the bright side, my instructor found out how much I liked the ER and switched the schedule around so that I can go back there for my last clinical day of the semester- which is next week.  NEXT WEEK!!!  I'm almost there...