July 18-24

The Hospital

This week we continued our experience in the chemotherapy department. We were able to start more patients on their treatment with IV insertions, fluid administration, medication administration, and chemo drug preparation, rate setting, and more. We got lots of practice in this unit and were able to grow in comfortability and confidence with IV starts and IV administration. It was particularly interesting to experience the differences. For example, Cabrini is still waiting on a full safety cabinet because right now they use a single hood (that isn’t always implemented from my experience this week).

This week we also spent a day at station 1 to finalize our case presentation. Last week we picked a patient with CKD, interviewed her, did a head to toe assessment, and gathered information for her chart all to be combined into our presentation. We worked on this assignment in and out of the hospital and learned how to incorporate our Daily Sheet formats with their “case pre” format.

The weekend!

This weekend was out last full weekend in The Philippines! How crazy is that? We spent it with all of the people that we have grown closer to over these last two months. On Friday we took the day off of work, cleaned and decorated our house, and bought all sorts of goodies in preparation for a party for all of our new friends! We invited all of the nurses that we’ve met over the course of our internship. To recap-this has included nurses from Station 1 (med-surge/general ward), OR, Hemodialysis, ER, ICU, and Chemo). We taught our guests lots of games that we would play with our friends and enjoyed one of our last nights with the people that have helped us the most with this cultural transition and experience. Most notably, this night also included by first Balut experience since one of the nurses brought some for us to try. Balut, the delicacy that would make a trip to The Philippines complete, is a fertilized and partially developed duck egg that is cooked and prepared for consumption. It tasted better than I expected but the texture, or the multiple textures, are something to get used to. I am glad that I got to eat it before we left! The rest of the night we had lots of fun, danced, played card games, and socialized. It was a pretty good time – hopefully we didn’t keep our neighbors up!

On Sunday Sir Jeff brought us to SM Lipa to watch Jurassic World and play some games at the arcade. No matter how many malls I’ve seen here I am always surprised by the amount of people and activity going on – especially considering how dead malls are at home. We enjoyed sour cream flavored popcorn during the movie and went straight to the arcade where we played multiple rounds of the basketball game and then watched Sir Jeff win a stuffed animal from the claw machine. It was a good day and a great way to finish off our last weekend of our internship.

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