I think they're trying to get us used to touching people...it worked!

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I'd read some posts earlier about people freaking out because they had to bathe their classmates...and now I have a story to share!

I just finished the first week of my accelerated program. I loved it!!! There are 6 guys and 19 girls in my class. Today we had already practiced finding pulses and doing cardiac and pulmonary auscultation on our lab partners. The instructors made us rotate around the lab, and everyone had to find the apex beat and the femoral pulse on everyone else. Talk about getting used to touching people. At first everyone was a little hesitant, but by the end of it, we were so used to it that we could usually find the pulses on the very first try. All the guys had their shirts off, we were in sports bras and bathing suit tops...and nobody cared!! (Well, I guess I speak for myself...anyway, it didn't seem like anyone cared.)

The point that my professor kept trying to make was that we need to separate bodies in the clinical sense from bodies in the sexual sense. Breasts are just tissue. If you need to move that tissue to feel the apex beat, then you move the tissue. Everyone has a body, everyone is different, and we need to get used to it. I wasn't sure how I'd feel about practicing on each other, after reading previous posts, but it really wasn't that bad. It makes sense to practice on each other, so that we actually know what we're looking for on a real person. We're going to have to deal with some pretty nasty stuff as nurses, and I think that stepping out of our comfort zones as we learn is a good thing.

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I start an accelerated program (B.S to BSN) in 2 weeks and I was wondering how we were going to practice for the real thing. As a male student it might be a little more difficult touching classmate's breasts and all that stuff , but I guess we gotta start somewhere. Makes me kind of nervous though...

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You'll be fine...I was nervous finding the femoral pulse on a guy for the first time...but you get used to it!

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