My cohort! I’m not sure I can really say that because I’ve traveled through 5 different classes in the last four years, but this cohort is a fun one. We had one final poster presentation today (which went fine) and as we were all dressed up in professional attire, they took a class photo. I loved every minute of it, I never wanted it to end – I met so many great people, I learned so much. My first bachelor’s degree was all about pressing to the end, trying to ace everything, do everything perfectly, finishing things quickly to get to the next, supposedly better, thing. It was the right thing to do then, but this time, I really relished all the people & all my clinical experiences – this time I knew I wouldn’t have a chance like this again in this lifetime – how many more times will I be able to be invited to a bar with 40 college kids again? Never. (I was invited, but I didn’t go. Because I still don’t know how to have fun.)
You saw Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue about his about baby? Who noticed first that there was a problem? The nurse, of course, who was doing her regular hourly assessment on the baby. Go nurses!
Jeremy thought that in the last blog, I was insulting the nurse practitioner by not calling her an actual anesthesiologist. I had to explain to him (and now to you) that I didn’t mean to slight her. The nurse practitioner was the first person to walk into the room and introduced herself as part of the anesthesia team and that she would be doing the intake questionnaire on Edda. And my first thought was – YES! We are going to have a nurse anesthetist do our anesthesia. I loved her, I wanted her to administer all the methadone/morphine and monitor her breathing and take care of Edda during the 6-7 hour procedure. So at the end of the 20 minute discussion, I asked, so are you going to be Edda’s anesthesiologist? And she said, no, I’m not and actually I don’t administer any anesthesia ever, I’m in charge of all the clinic intake for all surgical patients for the anesthesia group. So the nurse practitioner is actually not an actual anesthesiologist. So then 15 minutes later, the actual anesthesiologist came in and continued the anesthesia conversation. When I said the word “actual” I was differentiating between a person who regularly puts people to sleep and wakes them up again vs a person who has never done that and not differentiating between an MD and an RN.