overit013

I am in my final year of nursing school and am currently in my psych rotation. We just had our first week of clinicals + clinical orientation, and our clinical instructor seems to have some very strong opinions on things that have made clinicals very difficult for the students in my group. Here is a brief picture of what has occurred thus far. Keyword: brief. We were instructed that while yes, this is a clinical rotation, she does not allow us to wear scrubs and we must wear business casual to all of our clinical experiences. Once in our conference room to go over orientation, she started the day by having each student stand up and spin. While we spun, she critiqued our outfits in front of the other students. It felt like the first day of 7th grade all over again- super awesome. One female student was wearing small heart shaped silver studs in her ears and was told that she must remove them immediately, as the shape of a heart may "remind a patient of a sexually traumatic experience and send them into a new psychosis". Another student was told that the muted maroon shirt she was wearing was "way too alarmist and could possibly send a sick patient into an even more psychotic state". (It was after this that I decided I would wear black muumuus and black pants for the remainder of our clinicals.) The absurd dress code rules continued for the remainder of the students, but this can give you an idea. Now, the rule that has driven me to write this post. During orientation, after slightly overcoming my newfound crippling self-consciousness problem, I asked our professor if there was a microwave in the cafeteria for us to heat up our lunch, or if we should use the microwave located in the breakroom on our unit. She looked at me as if I had asked her if we were going to behead the babies before tea, or after tea. "We don't microwave things for lunch", she replied. Now, I am the type of person who can get behind most any rule you throw at me as long as you give me a solid, logical rationale for it. Wanting to be able to understand where she was coming from, I asked her in a very non-challenging, polite manner as to why we couldn't microwave lunch. She replied that if every person in our 8 person clinical group microwaved things for lunch, we would waste our entire time microwaving and not have any time to talk. While I can maybe see where she is coming from, only 2 people had even brought their lunch, and I suspected that this would be the normal trend. I then asked if we would be allowed to microwave our lunches when we no longer met for a group lunch and just stayed in our unit break room for lunch. She once again looked at me and said, "We do not microwave things for lunch". She would not offer any rationale for this, and called me and my fellow student petty for arguing the point. This might not seem like a huge deal to any of you, but I absolutely hate cold food. I would choose hot soup over a cold salad even when it is 115 degrees outside. I just can't do it, cold food makes me nauseous and sick for the rest of the day. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to handle this, and the professor in general? I'm feeling pretty desperate at this point.