I don't know if I'm alone in this, but I seem to have a knack for remembering pointless things.
I remember the names of restaurants that I've eaten at on vacations, the servers' names, and other useless information that I will never need to recall in my life again.
This also applies to my time in nursing school, which admittedly wasn't that long ago, but long enough that a lot of the non-vital "nice to know but not need to know" information that we learned has become a little hazy.
The one random nugget of seemingly useless information that I remember from nursing school is what a scleral buckle is and what it is used to treat. It was briefly mentioned in my second semester of nursing school and for some reason it stuck with me. I've never encountered someone that has had this procedure in clinical OR in my personal life and I really have no justification for remembering it, but I do.
Does anyone else care to share a random nugget of information they learned in nursing school that they still remember, but never actually came in handy to know?
When we were taught how to make beds, it was drilled into our brains not to shake out the clean sheets. We had to lay the sheets on the bed & unfold them systematically.
Old habits do, indeed, die hard. To this day when I take clean sheets out of the dryer I fold them very precisely so that when I make the bed I just have to lay them on the mattress, unfold them, smooth them out, & tuck them in. My husband just stands there & shakes his head when he watches me!
Sometimes I purposely shake the clean sheets (over the mattress of course) and silently think "take that nursing teacher!!!!!"
A quote, "If it's warm, sticky, and not yours, don't touch it without asking." For some reason I remember who said this, where we were, and what we were doing. (before anyone asks, it was in class, and said by an instructor) It doesn't even always apply (blood, for instance), but still whenever I'm about to touch something it comes to mind.
I learned that in EMT-B class, still remember it :)
I tell my pregnant friends this all the time, though, just to watch them squirm.
I threw up when pushing with my first one, I threw up before pushing with my second one but did poop while pushing my second one. My poor L&D nurse was 20 weeks pregnant herself and had to clean that up. She had to excuse herself to get some juice right after!
If you feel faint, fall backward, not forward into the sterile field.
When I was in medsurge clinicals several of us students got to watch a pretty gnarly bedside necrotizing fasciitis debridement. Since I was assigned to the patient, I was holding his free hand out of the sterile field. He was pretty sedated, but it was still painful, and I was using both hands to try to help calm him and keep his hand away. The student next to me started swaying and pitched forward. I jutted my hip out, and watched helplessly as she slid down my leg and whacked her head on the floor, as the other students just stood there and gawked. I felt horrible for not being able to ease her down to the floor, but I was not going to let anything contaminate that sterile field lol. Every morning after that, before sending us out, my CI reminded us to faint backward.
FiresWifey
22 Posts
The vertebrae: Breakfast, lunch, and dinner
7:00am - breakfast (7 cervical)
12:00 noon - lunch (12 thoracic)
5:00pm - dinner (5 lumbar)
Not from nursing school, not there yet...but this has stuck with me HARD from anatomy. :)