Journal #8

One of the issues that we had been prepared for coming over to England that was going to be different was the drinking. We knew that obesity was less than in the US but alcoholism was seen significantly more often in the UK. Until this evening, minus during the world cup, I had not really seen a lot of this. I had just assumed that there were a lot of people that had admitted that they had alcoholism but did not really have what we would qualify as outwardly noticeable alcoholism.

This evening, on the tube home from seeing Wicked, we noticed a gentleman who could hardly hold himself up. He was mumbling to himself words that no one could really understand, and holding onto the bar with two hands to keep himself standing up. While it is hard to say what this man’s background was just from seeing him this one evening for only ten to fifteen minutes you could tell a lot about him by the way he acted how he talked, how he smelt and what he looked like. He smelt like he had bathed in liquor, not showered in days, and he had stubble all over his face. I know these seem like simple things and very judgmental things, but you also have to take into consideration what time we were coming home, 10:30. Who is fall down drunk at 10:30? Once again this is all based on assumptions, and I know what happens when you assume so the rest of this will be based on how it made me feel.

I was very sad at first because I knew that one whether or not he was a chronic alcoholic tonight he was. It was very apparent that he was very drunk and behind those sad eyes there was a reason why and he is probably the only person that knows why. But I wonder if he knows or even cares about all of the things that he is doing to his body by drinking himself into oblivion like that. When you are to the point where you cannot stand or speak not only are you doing things that are completely unsafe you are hurting your body in so many ways. Your liver for one is being destroyed. If you were to drink like that for days into months and years you could end up with cirrhosis and possibly need a liver transplant, which can be a life threatening condition! If you are not careful and all you do is drink and you forget about the need to eat you can end up with an array of disorders in which you can have problems such as thiamine deficiencies and other vitamin deficiencies. If you are not careful your kidneys could have problems filtering all of the alcohol that you are drinking and you could go into acute or worse, chronic, renal failure which can also be life threatening.

I don’t want this journal to come off as judgmental and rude because that is not how it is meant to be. These are just meant to be observations and feelings. It is hard to see someone do these things to their body when you are not sure if they do or do not know what they are doing to them. It’s even harder when you know the person and you know that they know what they are doing and yet they do it anyway. I hope that everyone will take this with a grain of sand and realize that your body is a onetime thing, you cannot replace it. So be careful what you put into it and what you do to it because you cannot take it back.

Journal # 7

When you think of undergraduate nursing school there is one word that I can say for sure does not usually come to mind, dissertation. At the City University of London their nursing students before they graduate have to write a 10,000 word dissertation on a problem that they have found in the field. It really surprised me because in the US you usually do not have to write dissertations until you are at a masters or doctorate level. I know that they want their nurses and their nurses’ degrees to be well respected but I never thought that the program would be so rigorous. On the flip side, when we were in the skills lab we talked about IV starts and found out that their student nurses do not start IV’s until they have their RN degree and start taking other classes, that is not considered a normal nursing duty in the UK.


Learning about how the school divides up the time evenly between class and clinical experience and how much time is spent in each area was very interesting. The fact that the student nurses had to choose what they wanted to specialize in before they even made it past their first year, i.e. adult, child , or mental health, to me is such a hard concept because a lot of us are in our final year and don’t even know what we want to do. Another thing that struck me as very different is that the average age of students at their school was mid 30’s whereas at TCU most of us came straight from high school into college to start our degrees. There are a lot of things that are different about nursing school in London as opposed to the United States. One that I think my dad would have liked to have known about before I went into school was that in London they PAY for you to go to school and they PAY you a stipend while you are in school… yes you read that correctly… I would not have had to pay to learn to be a nurse; they would have paid me to learn and paid me for working in the hospitals. Would have been nice right dad?


I have a ton of respect for the nurses in London knowing not only what they have to go through to become nurses, but what they have to deal with once they are. Once they are RN’s they can have anywhere from 7-15 patients that are their patients on a ward on one shift and while their shifts are usually 8 hrs instead of the 12 that ours are that is still a TON of patients! Being a nurse in general is never easy but there are always differences wherever you are that will make it more difficult for you to do your job safely and effectively.


I have a very hard time thinking that it is a safe practice to assign that many patients to one nurse when I know that nurses in the US have less patients than that and there are still medication errors and other errors that occur on shifts. I think that there should be a regulation for how many patients a nurse can have at one given time based on the acuity of the patients. If you stretch a nurse to thin, no matter how well trained they are, mistakes will be made. While I think it is good that they have shorter shifts I think that they need to look at how they are dividing up the work and manage to put more nurses on the floors so that they can keep the patients safe. I know the NHS is tight on money but patient safety should be number one on the list and I feel very strongly that having about 10 patients is not the safest practice.

Journal # 6

Here is another journal for class for Diane and Susan. It is an observation from Dublin and how it relates to health and healthcare.


Who would have thought that Dublin would have been a place that you would have run into more smokers than London? After spending 2 weeks in London I thought it was the 2nd smokiest city that I had been to, only to Paris. That was until I went to Dublin.

When we arrived in Dublin it seemed as though everyone from the twelve year old to the 98 year old on every street corner was lighting up. I am pretty sure that I managed to inhale enough second hand smoke in Dublin to last me a lifetime.

From a healthcare perspective I have to wonder if cancer rates, especially lung cancer are higher in the UK and Ireland than USA. I also think that this would be a hard thing to prove since the detection methods are different than those in the US. As far as I can tell from my observations I don’t see a lot of prevention being put into for smoking prevention or smoking cessation programs where in the US they are becoming more prevalent because we have begun to see more and more of what smoking does to the body and how hard it can be to stop lung cancer and even sometimes how hard it can be for the body to withstand the treatments that are needed for lung cancer if they will be successful.

With Oncology being my field of interest I have very strong feelings about this topic in particular because of what I have seen in the field. I have seen many people suffer because of what they have done to themselves in the years of smoking, and I have seen people suffer who have never smoked a day in their life. Treatment for cancer, while usually effective, is very harsh on the body and can be hard to see as a nurse. When you are giving someone a drug that you know they are probably going to have problems with you have to keep telling yourselves and them that there is a reason you are giving it to them and that there are proven results for the drug. When I see patients that have lung cancer, while I am still compassionate just as much as I am for all my patients it in some ways is harder on me because I know that some cancers, not all, can be avoided and its sad when you see those because it breaks your heart knowing that there is something that could have been done somewhere down the road to keep it from happening.


To make a long story short I feel as though smoking is way more prevalent in Europe than it is in the US for whatever reason and I would like to see if in correlation to that the cancer rates are higher. It hurts me to know that there is something that can be done that isn’t and that people are starting to smoke so young and continuing to smoke till so late in life. But in the end there are some habits you just can’t change.

" Big Girls Don't Cry" - except when in Dublin...

O where to begin, should I start with the almost missed flight, the late bus, the screaming children or the awful waiters? I guess I will just start at the beginning.

After getting an early start Friday morning to catch the tube to the Gatwick express to the airport we managed somewhere to get behind. The Gatwick express stopped somewhere in the middle of the route for no apparent reason, we had to stand in line to get our passports checked even though we were not checking baggage BEFORE going through security and then AGAIN when we went through security and then had to practically RUN to the gate before they closed it.

We took the flight on Ryan Air because it was cheaper and for the most part it was fine, minus all the advertising and selling, they would sell you their own hand if you paid enough I think. We had a good pilot and got off and on the ground safely and that’s all I can ask for. When we got to the airport we had no trouble going through customs or anything but managed somehow to wait for 20 minutes for a bus before deciding to take a Taxi to our hotel in Blacherdstown outside of Dublin. We got in a bus taxi so it ended up being cheaper that way, it was great. We checked into the hotel and were on our way to a great weekend.

Once we finally figure out which bus we have to take to get to the city center of Dublin and find where it leaves by our hotel we are set to go, it’s only 7 miles away! 45 minutes later we make it to Dublin. Who would have thought 7 miles would take 45 minutes to drive! Apparently in Dublin it does. We found the green tour buses for the hop on hop off tour and hopped on and headed to Trinity College. We walked around Trinity for a little while and found the area that held the book of kells. We were really excited about seeing the book of kells until we realized we weren’t going to be able to see it unless we wanted to pay 8 euros, which is about 10 dollars. So we went into the store looked through the books of the book of kells and I bought some postcards. We hopped back on the green bus and headed to the main attraction of our trip, what we had been waiting for and had heard so much about, the Guinness factory!

As we got off the bus the smell of beer was in the air, and while I’m not much of a beer drinker I was still pretty excited as I had never been to a brewery before. As we were purchasing our tickets something happened, it was almost as though they knew we were in the building and were having a rough day, the power went out, complete power loss, apparently first one in Guinness history while they were open because the workers didn’t have a clue what to do at first. We all stood outside for around 45 minutes before the power came back on and they let us come back into the building. We toured around for a while, took lots of pictures, bought souvenirs and then moved on to trying to find our way home for the night and find something to eat!

After we hopped off the green bus we searched for the 39 bus back to Blanchardstown. And kept searching… for about an hour or so. Finally we found the 39 and jumped on, so excited to finally be headed back home. 10 minutes later he stopped the bus and said, “end of the line”. So there we are searching for the 39 again, but this time we ask before we get on to make sure we are FOR SURE going to Blanchardstown. We made it back to next to the hotel and are starving and decide to go to the Captain America, just kidding it’s a 90 min wait, even for 2 four person tables. So we head over to wagamamas and ended up paying like 15 euro for dinner but at least our waitress was helpful! Then on to bed for a good night’s rest on a bed that you couldn’t feel the coils in!

Day two started with a trip to starbucks on the way to the bus stop as we headed into Dublin on the 39 to catch the 7 into Dun Laoghaire. As we climbed on the bus, happy with our coffee and pastries we were greeted with a screaming child. The child wasn’t screaming because he was in pain or because he was unhappy, he was doing it just to hear his voice, he had to be 16-18 mos he could say some words like mommy and things like that so he knew better. His mom didn’t stop him at all, in fact it seemed like she encouraged him! Not the best way to start out the morning.

After the 45 minute ride into Dublin we managed to find the number 7 bus to Dun Laoghaire and rode 45 min into the port city. We walked around for a while until we found this quaint little jewelry shop with some great jewelers. A few of the girls we were with wanted to buy the traditional Irish rings and we found some beautiful ones there. While we were there Katrina and I were able to talk to one of the men about why we were in the area and in the UK and got to have an interactive discussion about healthcare with him, it was really awesome. Then he saw my ring and told me it was beautiful and that it looked like I had gotten a really great diamond. Good job baby!! We got an OK from another jeweler! Then he told us about a festival that the town was having and told us where to go to see it. It was such a blessing to find this jewelry store because otherwise we would have been at a loss.
We headed down to the pier and looked at the water and took pictures and realized how to use the timers on our cameras so that we could get a picture of the 8 of us. We walked around the festival and took in the fun and found some fun foods to eat like crepes. I have found my new favorite chocolate, buttons, it’s the chocolate from Cadbury eggs just in like little buttons. They are wonderful. So I had them in a crepe. HIGHLIGHT!!!!

So after that we rode back to Dublin and sat next to a chick whose music was playing so loud we could actually hear the lyrics also, it was annoying. So after we had all been beaten down for 45 min with awful music from loud music chick next to us we went shopping for souvenirs and headed to Dublin castle, which by the way is not really a castle. Then we headed on to St Patrick’s Cathedral to take pictures… in the rain… go figure.

After the rain we decided to go to a pub in Temple Bar to eat dinner and have a drink so we go into Quay Restaurant. We proceeded then to have wonderful food and AWFUL service. Our server came to the table all of twice, we had another server that filled our glasses and brought our food to us. Not only that but our server also wouldn’t split our check, even though at the beginning we told her we needed to because 3 of us needed to pay with a card because we wouldn’t have enough money to pay for the taxi to the airport which tends to be kinda expensive… We had a girl go to the bar to break a 20 euro note and she said something to the bartender about our server and asked for a manager so he pointed her out to our friend, and guess who the manager was… you guessed it… our server. So two hours and a service charge later we walk out and find our 39 bus home. The bus ride home wouldn’t have been so bad if it wasn’t for the people pressing the stop button every 2 minutes and every 30 seconds after each actual bus stop. 45 minutes later we were back at the hotel, our wonderful 4 star hotel, and we decided to go down to the bar and have a drink and dessert. It was crazy expensive and it was like she got the notice that it was bad service day and took 30 minutes to get our drinks to us, well to me. Apparently they didn’t have mint and Melissa couldn’t have her mojito but they decided not to tell her that for 20 minutes so she had to change her drink order and wait another 10-15 minutes.

Welp after all of that we crashed into our wonderful hotel room early , showered, and got up at 530am for our taxi ride to the airport this morning thinking that it would take 30 minutes to get to the airport, 7 minutes later we arrived and were headed on through security. After that we headed to find something to eat, all we could find was a burger king, thinking that we could get a soda in the morning so that we could wake up only to find that the soda we bought was FLAT and disgusting. Then as we were boarding the plane we were gagged by an awful smell , we all look at each other and realize that the man in front of us had just ripped a big one, in fact it smelt like diarrhea for about 5 minutes just trailing behind him.. it’s not like he was an old man and he might have actually had some, he had to have been like 23. AUGH!!

So by the time we got onto our 745am flight today Katrina , Melissa and I were all delirious and irritated, as we loaded onto the plane I noticed that the advertisements on the overhead bins were all the same but at that time I didn’t really pay that much attention to them, that is until Melissa said something about the advertisements, it said “ summer love, the way it’s meant to be felt”… I’ll let you think about that for a second…. Are you there yet…. Do you need another second….. yes it was advertisements for prophylactics called skyn and I don’t mean antibiotics.. ALL OVER THE PLANE. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was just the words, but no it had a picture of the box AND a picture of the item in question. We tried really hard to be mature about it but after 4 hours of sleep and no caffeine we could hardly contain the laughter. So once we got to cruising altitude and turned on our Ipods I put down the tray table so that I could lay down my head and take a nap for the hour flight, o wait what is on the tray table, an advertisement, what for? Skyn, again…. Not only do we have to look at it all over the plane we have to SLEEP on it!

Once we landed in Gatwick, and got on the express we could not have been happier. We got on the tube at Victoria and headed back to 17 Bedford place. When we got to the door we almost ran in we were so excited to be back to London. As much as I have enjoyed my trip abroad, mostly London, I think I am about ready to go home. I miss my family, my bed, my snickers, and of course my sweet fiancé.

Journal # 5- Nothing exciting...

When you are thinking about having surgery what is something that you as a patient look for: Credentials for your surgeon? Location? Where the surgery will take place? How about a small building connected to houses, how does that sound to you?

When we were in Ireland this last weekend we noticed something rather strange. On the outskirts of Dublin in a town called Blanchardstown we started to see on strands of houses that were connected random houses that had signs that said SURGERY. That’s it, just SURGERY. And we began to notice some of them would be lit up, like vacancy signs. This concerned me very much because in reality why would you go to a small office in a residential area surrounded by houses? Are these surgery offices licensed? As a nursing student, soon to be nurse, the sanitary conditions are also something that concerns me. Being in an area like that there is only so much that you can control because if you are needing a sterile environment and you are surrounded by houses and someone happens to walk into the wrong house, oops there goes your sterile room!

All of us on the trip talked about them every time we passed by because we found it very odd because we don’t have things like that in the states. We have small surgery centers but they are like little hospitals and they are not placed in the middle of residential areas in between two houses! The fact that they are in those places while yes they are accessible to the general public makes me question how good they are and how clean they are. “They just seem like back alley places where people would go to get cheap surgeries the government won’t pay for with a coat hanger”- Melissa Gase

I wonder if when the light was on the SURGERY signs that meant you could walk in and get surgery and if it was off that meant there was someone on the table at the moment so you had to wait till they mopped up the blood….Hey mom and dad why don’t I just go back and get my surgery done there! Good idea right!? Not!

There were plenty of things that went wrong while we were in Ireland but at least none of us got injured and had to actually find out what those surgery centers were all about. I tried really hard to get a good picture of one but every time we were coming home on the bus there was either a child screaming or we were sleeping on our 45 min bus ride so I missed the good ones all 4 times, sorry I know everyone would love to have a good picture of this great mental image I drew in your head, maybe next time.

Florence Nightingale Museum, Old Operating Theatre, Journal #4

Well there have been TONS of things going on the last few days, we went to the Florence Nightingale Museum and got to see a lot of artifacts and really cool things about Flo. We also got to Tour a NHS hospital which was a very intriguing experience to say the least. Things are different over here, they still have bays instead of just single rooms and nurses have on avg 7 patients as opposed to 4-5 eek!
Today we went to the old operating theatre which is part of the old St Thomas hospital and it was a teaching operating room it was really amazing and outside of it in an attic area they had set up a museum which had really interesting medical instruments and things which I also found very interesting though not everyone might. We then went on the King Cholera walk which was pretty much just a tour talking about how cholera was spread and about the really bad living quarters and things like waste water being put into the Thames back in the day which makes all of us nursing majors cringe at the thought. And after that we went to a noodle bar called waggamammas for noodles! It is kinda like a mix of pei wei and Indian food I would think because they had a lot of dishes that had curry in them. But it was very good.

Story of the day: So after years of anticipation for some, the time has come, one week and one day from TODAY Maggie and her flatmates will be seeing…. Wait for it…. WICKED!!!... granted we had to go all over town, wait in long lines and pay more than we wanted to for the tickets but we have waited long enough. I have wanted to see this show FOREVER and it is time. Our student ID’s got shot down because they did not have an expiration date on them, thanks TCU, there go the 25 lb tickets, they don’t sell any half price face value because they are in such high demand, thanks for being so popular wicked. BUT we did not pay 60lbs for our tickets so YAY US!! So I shall be posting next Wednesday night about the greatness that is wicked, and tonight we will all be listening to the sound track to celebrate getting 6 tickets together for a show while we were here…. YAY!


Below are some pictures and then my last journal for Diane and Susan before my midterm tomorrow. I will post the rest of the pictures on facebook.













Yesterday we went to the Florence Nightingale museum. I was very excited about the prospect of learning more about the origin of nursing and how it came about but I did not realize that in doing so I would in fact learn more about myself.
The day started as any other, far too early with loud people above us, loud cars outside and bright lights streaming in at what seems like 5am. Me and my flatmates hopped on the tube (which we have become quite familiar with by now) to St. Thomas’ hospital and then walked the rest of the way there. When we had all gathered in front of the museum we entered together and were given audio guides that were stethoscopes which you placed the diaphragm on the lighted places throughout the museum so that you could listen to pieces of history as you walked around reading and looking at artifacts.

The exhibit that stuck out most to me was the one that said “the call to nurse” I read the tablet that was next to the exhibit but the audio guide for it was out of order. There was a bench next to it and I sat down for a moment to let it all sink in. The exhibit said “Florence felt from a young age that God was ‘calling’ her. But she did not know for years what her vocation should be. Her Christian faith was the driving force throughout her life. She believed in helping others less fortunate than herself by understanding God’s laws and His will through statistics. Just before her 17th birthday, Florence felt she heard God’s ‘voice’ speaking to her. This happened soon after she had discovered a talent for nursing while caring for her family and their servants during a flu epidemic. She gradually felt that God was calling her to be a nurse- a shocking idea then. Nursing was not a job for an intelligent, good-looking young woman like Florence. Only working class women nursed for a living. Her parents were horrified and anxious.”

Out of all the things I had learned about “Flo” through nursing school, I guess this had just passed me by somehow and yesterday it just hit me in the chest. How many of us are becoming nurses because of the shortage? How many because it’s “the right thing to do”? How many because of the money, our parents? But even more interesting, how many of us truly feel called by God to be nurses? One question that has been asked of us by our instructors since we arrived is what brought us to TCU, what brought us to TCU’s nursing school? How many of us answered “God called me to be a nurse so here I am.”

In high school I worked as an Athletic Trainer for the Football team and I loved it, and I loved my A&P class , partly because I had a WONDERFUL teacher , who BTW was taught by a WONDERFUL teacher DR.B. Because of working in the healthcare field then, I knew that I in some way wanted to be in the field helping people whether it was PT , AT or nursing. I always joke that the reason I didn’t go to Arkansas and become a Physical Therapist was because of all of the chemistry I would have had to have taken but to be quite honest the more and more I think about it the more I truly believe that TCU is where I was always supposed to be. Yes it was closer to home, yes it was more expensive but in the end everything happens for a reason and if everything had not happened just exactly how it did I would not be where I am today.

I think that being able to look at it from a religious perspective, being a religious person has made it a much richer experience for me. It has changed my outlook on things in nursing because as Diane said today “as nurses we don’t want to see someone hurting.” The best way I can say that I related this whole experience to my practice is that my life is my practice, I AM my practice. If I was not who I am and I did not have the heart for my patients the way that I do I would make a crummy nurse, and no one wants a crummy nurse. I think that being able to finally see that nursing really is “ a God thing” for me, the way everything worked out, me coming to TCU, meeting the people I did and making the choices I did all stemmed from the fact that it was where God wanted me to be doing what God wanted me to do. He made it all possible and without Him it would not have happened.

With all the health problems that I have experienced throughout nursing school, with the deaths in the family, with the stress, the graduating early, EVERYTHING, I can promise you I never would have been able to do it alone. And I didn’t. I will never take credit for that because it was not me that was able to accomplish those things. It was me and God taking on these things together. One day at a time. Even though I tried to take too much on at once, I know I know.

British Museum, Natural History Museum , Journal #3

We are almost officially a week into our trip and not only have we learned a whole lot we have SEEN a ton. ( as I'm sure you can tell by my pictures on my facebook :) )
Things have been busy and crazy. Today we went to the British Museum and the Natural history museum and then platform 9 3/4 and the to shakespeares head again which was fun.

We got to see dinosaurs, mammals and my favorite part the human biology! it went through pretty much tracing a cell through the body and going though the development of live and things like that and talking about memory and logic and illusions and it was really awesome. I think they should just take all the nursing students though there because it gives you a pretty good basis of everything you need to know and of course they are pretty straight forward about most things hah

Story of the day:
Coming home on the tube melissa was very sleepy and was leaning toward me kinda taking a nap on the way back to the flat . i noticed that the chap next to her had something on bis arm that looked to me a lot like psoriasis . i made a few comments to jackie across the row, mouthing of course , I would never say something rude about someone that would be awful. On the way out of the tube station jackie asks me out loud what she thinks it was since the chap did not get off at out stop. I told her it looked like psoriasis.but that i did not know. melissa freaked out because apparently she did not notice the rash all over the guys arm next to her and was only leaning next to me because she was tired... now she is freaking out and thinks she is going to get psoriasis












Today we went to the British museum. As we toured around through the mummies of ancient Egypt and the pottery of Greece we stumbled upon a room that was large and contained not only statues but books behind glass throughout a long straight room. We walked through and glanced at the statues till we came upon a woman holding a box of items which you were allowed to touch. One of these items was the Hindu god Krishna. Melissa went to hold it and the woman began to tell us about the small bronze statue. While I was interested in the statue I had a very difficult time concentrating on it because of the fact that she had very crooked, almost rotten looking teeth. We politely listened, nodded and moved on and as soon as we were out of ear shot had a conversation about whether or not it was a regular thing here in London to have teeth like that.


Later we went to the Natural History Museum. While we were there we toured through the exhibit where they talked through the development of human cells and how humans were formed and how babies needed to be taken care of and so on and so forth. The exhibit also went on to talk about nerves and muscles and the joints in the body and how the body worked together to make everything work in unison. It discussed things from puberty to memory, homeostasis to fetal development. In the exhibit about memory there was a station you could play a game about how much you could remember when put under stress in a crime scene situation. In the end the chap with the knife has awful teeth some of which are missing, another sign that its more normal than not that people don’t have just the best teeth here in London


The entire exhibit was hands on and very interactive. There were levers to pull, buttons to push, and movies to watch to help you to learn about the human body. They taught you how it worked and how to take care of it. The explained how your memory worked and how it could be affected in times of stress. Every aspect of the body seemed to be covered except for teeth.


I was very interested when I realized the connection here. I had been so amazed by the amount of hands on experience at this museum and how wonderful it was at teaching these people about the cells and the nervous system and how their body worked and yet in the end it never discussed their teeth, oral hygiene, or really any hygiene for that matter. As a small group we discussed it later on and talked about how for a country that is so focused on fashion and how they look , you would think that they would be more concerned about their teeth and how straight they were and how taken care of they were but surprisingly enough they aren’t. I don’t know if it is because of a lack of information or a lack of motivation but there is some reason why Americans are so intent on having wonderful straight smiles and British people don’t care


As nurses we need to take into these considerations and learn how our patients are feeling and relate to them. We need to be there for our patients and care for them to the best of our abilities because that is what we are there for as nurses. I personally did not become a nurse to empty bedpans. I did it for the relationships that I plan on building with my patients. Without knowing the cultural differences and religious differences between our patients we will never be able to give our patients the best possible care, so with that said we as nurses need to look into the things that are affecting our patients and see what it is that we can do as their caregiver to help them in the way that is most beneficial to them.

Museum of London

Yesterday we went to the Museum of London and were able to walk through and see the evolution of London from the beginning!! It was really wonderful to see all of the artifacts and pieces of history from England. Afterward we went for High tea at the Georgian restaurant in Harrods. Which BTW dad is NOT like having tea at Macy's. Its like RCC. I have pictures!

Well sorry this one is short but I promise I will write again tomorrow!

Story of the day:

While we were heading home from high tea at Harrods, all dressed up in our heels and dresses Melissa managed to get the heel of her shoe stuck in a grate and pull it up out of the ground. Did I mention we were in rush hour at the tube station?!... she scratched her ankle with the side of the grate and we had to put it back in the ground because it left a big gaping hole and we were afraid someone would fall in. That would have been a mess.












Yesterday we went to the museum of London and got to see TONS of artifacts from the beginning of London up until present day London. Amongst all of the wonderful things that we saw we actually got to see some medical instruments dating back to the beginning of time. We saw things like tweezers and these contraptions that they used to scrape dirt off their skin, to bedpans and syringes. One of the things that stood out most to me was a surgeon’s kit that was fully equipped with scalpels and a saw. Above the kit was a plaque that said that in that time people preferred their surgeons to have blood on their aprons because that showed that they had more experience.

When I first read that I laughed but then I was appalled. For me it is hard to believe that we as humans ever chose people that cut into us by which one had the most blood on them. To be quite honest I would think I would not want a lot of blood because I would not want to lose a lot of blood, but then again it was a different time and maybe they had not yet understood that losing all of your blood meant losing your life also. When I think about all of the things that were done in the medieval times, medicinal-wise, it tends to make me cringe knowing what we know now about medicine. All of the things that could have gone wrong: the infections, the blood loss, and just in general the improper hygiene of it all.

For those of you that know me I tend to like hand sanitizer and things like that even though I’m not the cleanest person when it comes to my bedroom and things like that. When it comes to my patients and me in the hospital I am obsessive compulsive about things like washing my hands and using clean linens and instruments so I cannot even imagine living back before the knowledge of how to sterilize instruments or the knowledge of the need.

For me, having recently had to choose a surgeon for myself, I can say that I did a lot of research seeing who was best in the field that I needed, who had the best record in the area, the best hospitals and so on. I can also guarantee that when I met him for the first time he did not have any blood on him!! I think that throughout time our ideas about medicine have changed and we with them. We have learned about sterile technique and have learned how to keep people from getting infections as easily. We also have come leaps and bounds in the field of surgery. While we still use saws in some ways, now we have lasers and nano-technology that has enabled us to do things that we could have never thought we would be able to do back in medieval times. I have never been surprised by what we are able to with medicine not only in technique but in actual medication that we never would have thought we would have been able to do.

First 24 hours in London!!

I could do something like hour by hour but that would get boring for everyone pretty quick I think, so I'll just sum up :)

WE ARE HERE!!! SAFE!!!

We landed yesterday and were able to go get our tube passes, pick up some groceries and get settled in our flats in Bloomsbury , which is in London :) For dinner we decided to eat out at Shakespeares Head Pub. It was actually pretty good.

Today we got up and out around 9 and went to ride the tube around, we were able to master 2 different tube lines, walk around Piccadilly circus, Trafalgar square, the national gallery, and the Victoria and Albert museum. Along with other various shops and errands.

The story for today is the hunt for the fan.

Melissa and I were on the hunt for an oscillating fan for our flat. Not only did we have no idea where to look we just didn't know where we were going. We asked someone at a phone store we were at and they sent us to a nearby store, Argos. After trying to master how the store actually worked ( you had to look through a catalog, type in the number , see if it was in stock, write it down and buy it at the front desk) They had NO fans in stock at the store close to us so we had to get the address for the store in Kinsington, which was a ways away from our flat. So we had to plan how to take 3 different tube lines to get to the other store in a fancy part of town so we could buy our fan. The ride home with the fan, switching lines twice was also quite interesting but always an adventure.



Trafalager square



Argos store sign – our life saver




Me with the new part of Melissa and I’s family



Kensington where we got our fan, Peter.



A stop on the tube on the way to get the fan




Florence Nightingale- the reason I will have a good job when I graduate…



The red telephone booth, I had to



Our flat entrance



Katrina and I before dinner our first night!



The Pub we had dinner at our first night in town



This is for Dr.Weeks and Dr. Hawley, everyone else is more than welcome to read it but it might be less interesting to you 

Today we had the opportunity to get out and explore on our own. A group of us decided to go and explore the Victoria and Albert museum. After a while of map searching and riding the tube we were able to find the “subway” or underground road that lead us to many different museums, quite a few of which we would like to go back to this weekend . We spent a few hours in the museum but one of the first exhibits that we looked at was the Fashion exhibit. This exhibit traced fashion back from the 1700’s to the fashions’ of today. One of the things that stuck out most to me ironically was the corsets. I know it seems like a long shot but the first thing I said to the girls I was with when one of them said it would be cool if we still wore them was how bad they were for you, how they weakened your back muscles and abdominal muscles and squished your insides to the point that nothing was in the right place! Maybe that comes from having spent too much time studying nursing and reading books set in that era, probably a bad combination.
This experience at the museum made me think about how small things like corsets somewhere back in histories of countries like England for example can have such huge effects on things such as Life expectancy and Infant mortality. Things like these that somewhere down the road we as countries have changed; we have been able in change, to affect the lives of our citizens. This in and of itself is a historical development in the life of England. Whether the corsets were done away with because of fashion reasons or for health reasons, in the end it benefited the health of the women and the babies that they subsequently carried. I know at the time it was the most fashionable thing to do and truly you kind of had to wear them. But it seemed to me that someone could have stood up and said “ No this is terribly uncomfortable and I don’t want to wear it”, but then again women weren’t really that well respected were they.
It was very weird to me at first that my response to this fashion statement was one of concern for the women that had worn these garments. But in the end I know that I was really just acting with what I knew. My emotions were well in check and not uncalled for because for all we know corsets could have caused early deaths for many women back in the 1700’s. While this particular piece of information won’t really affect my practice as a nurse, the fact that women want to look like that again will. The desire to have the thin waist is one that most women have in common, though some will do more to get it. As a nurse we will all come in contact with women who struggle with their body types, some of whom will go to drastic measures to achieve what they desire. These actions are things that I will have to understand and realize that they are not just cries for help, that they are real conditions and that these people need real help and support.
As nurses I know that we tend to label people, “drug seekers”, “hypochondriacs”, and “attention seekers”, and I feel that we have gotten away from the deep caring that Florence Nightingale changed the profession with. We have begun to stray from the things that make us who we have been called to be as nurses. We are supposed to be caring people who want to do things for our patients and love on our patients and yet some nurses leave the room and immediately talk bad about them behind their backs. What kind of caring is that?

I guess the main thing that I brought out of the museum and the corset is that 1) fashion can physically hurt you, 2) our thoughts about fashion can make us hurt ourselves, and 3) something as small as truly caring for your patient can make all the difference in the world when it comes to your job as a nurse.