working in the hospital
This week we rotated back to our first placement, station one, which is a general ward. Our goal for the week was to pick a patient to complete a nursing care study on. We will present this case on July 26th to a panel from the hospital on the same day that another group of nurses from Cabrini. So, we spent most of our time taking care (passing meds, interviewing, and doing assessments) on our patient and reviewing her chart. It is important to note that at SFCMC the charting is done all on paper – requiring the nurses to be masters at deciphering the code that doctors call handwriting. Learning the new formatting of charting and figuring out what the handwriting said made it much more difficult to get all of the information we needed than it does to get information for our clinical assignments at home. Never again will I complain about having too many buttons to press or information to sort through! Once our patient was discharged we left station one and started our rotation on our very last unit, chemotherapy. We spent the morning taking VS of all the patients that came in. Then, we each started a patient’s IV and once the nurses received the orders we administered all of the meds needed for their pretreatments like hydration (ex: NS, D5W, LRs), diphenhydramine, and ondansetron. Then we used a closed system to draw up the chemotherapy drugs and hooked them up to the patients. We will also be on this unit next week and I am excited to get even more practice and experience with IV insertions, chemotherapy drugs, rip rates, pumps, patient communication, etc!
the weekend
This weekend we Jake, Aileen, and I were accompanied to Batangas, a local beach spot, by a classmate’s family. Ate Melissa, our classmate’s aunt, along with her husband, brother, daughter, and caretaker have treated us to many fun weekends before this. They showed us around Tagaytay, Manila, and now Batangas. We are very lucky to have met and connected with them. On Saturday they drove us about two hours to the beach resort we were staying at. We spent the afternoon swimming in the ocean and the pool. We also took a boat ride with the family. We were able to take in the beautiful view and even swim around and snorkel a little bit! It was so fun! Then, we had a delicious unlimited bbq dinner. On Sunday we had breakfast at the hotel – another buffet. After that, Aileen and I decided to ride a jet ski which was super exciting and fun. We had lunch on our way back to Sto. Tomas at a 60s-themed diner. This weekend was the perfect combination of relaxation and excitement.
after we STUFFED ourselves full of Filipino BBQ 
JAM on the boat 
Taking a boat ride out to swim/snorkel 
coming in from our jet ski ride
Looking forward
As I am posting this I only have 13 more days here in The Philippines. The light at the end of the tunnel is illuminating the many things I’ve learned here and I have started to reflect on this experience’s impact. Over the 40+ days, I’ve had moments of doubt, fear, anxiety, sadness, homesickness, frustration, annoyance, and so much more. Despite this, I’ve also found time to laugh, express gratitude, learn, and overcome adversities. There are many things to take away from this experience and to learn from the Filipino culture and people. I want to spend the last two weeks of this experience soaking it in while also being thankful to have loving people and comfortable home to return to. I think that this experience has made me stronger, and more confident in myself and my skills.