So far this week, I've fallen off a horse named Thunderbolt, gone into respiratory distress from a mountain bike ride after catching a chest cold on a long plane flight, suffered from a kinked airway, and been found unconscious beneath a bench on campus. I've given CPR to a patient who was (unfortunately) recently deceased, helped an asthma patient, and assisted a wildland firefighter after heat exhaustion. I've learned how to backboard a patient, splint a limb, and clear a spine. I've assessed case studies of a climbing fall, a fall down a long snow slope, asthma while portaging, and burns from a cooking stove. And yesterday was only Day 3.
Today is our first quiz and our first major simulation. That's when the real makeup and fake blood come out, although they're not giving us any information about what the simulation will entail.
My classmates are a motley crew of folks- we have a 17 year old high school kid and a 55 year old gentleman. We have three women and fifteen men; a couple ex-military, several college students, and a Red Cross instructor. Since we're spending ten hours a day together, we're getting to know each other in that deep-but-still-superficial way; I don't know their favorite colors or the names of their family members, but I can tell you how most of my classmates respond to stressful situations. Who leads, who follows, and who doesn't know yet which they're better at. It's been really interesting watching everyone (even myself) change over the past two days. Most of us have gone from staring in wide-eyed wonder at the first fifteen acronyms they threw at us to using those acronyms with ease and staring in wide-eyed wonder at the next fifteen they threw at us. We're all becoming more comfortable with both the lingo and the concepts; I'll be interested to see us next Saturday afternoon. Will we be competent? Ready? We'll see.
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