Pages

Saturday, April 27

Medical Laboratory Technician Student

I am happily entering my 4th week of my MLT classes. I wasn't sure what the workload or schedule would require exactly but prepared myself & the boys as best I could. The month before I adjusted the boys & myself with the time changes we needed to accommodate my new schedule. The boys began riding the bus as they would for before & after school care. I am thankful for the time I had with them going through the changes slowly. For the most part it was a rather easy & smooth transition. Only once did we encounter a bus issue which was easily cured with proper information related to the driver. This gave me the comfort & confidence I needed to make it through my first few days.

The concept of being out of the house all day every day was quite new for me. This wasn't me accommodating the boys schedule or running errands & that caught me off guard at first. I've grown to enjoy this change. I like having structure as well as routine which my program gives me. It is quite similar to a routine work day, something I look forward to although I'm still nervous & uncertain about. Given time I'm sure I will be ready.

The first few days of the program were a huge adjustment. I had the schedule set but had no idea how my classroom was running or how much time outside of class would be consumed. Currently the schedule is not over taxing. This is fabulous but could easily change. I've completed a presentation on lymphocyte maturation that included a PowerPoint, something I haven't made in years. I am proud to say it went very well. The hardest part was presenting it in front of the class. I'm not good at public speaking and I'm certain that was made very clear. By the end of week 3 we were already drawing on fellow students. We had spent a few days drawing on a fake arm so I felt capable of drawing just nervous about actually performing the procedure on an actual person. Someone who feels pain or has difficult to find veins. My first live draw ended up being a butterfly in the hand. My patient had very difficult veins. We were required to do 2 draws, both of my draws were successful. As for being drawn on...that was much easier than I had anticipated. As one of my arms seemed a bit difficult I became the challenge and ended up with 3 draws that day with 4 pokes. The following day I offered up my remaining hand to a struggling student. I've been told it takes over 200 draws to get a phlebotomy routine but I am determined to have one before that. Seeing as how phlebotomy will be part of my clinical rotations I would like to have some good procedure habits before then.

The neat thing about lab is that after offering up ones appendages for fellow students to draw, we are then able to test our own blood. That's really cool. I've done a hematocrit reading, sed rate & slides. This upcoming week will will do fresh draws for more testing.



1 comment:

  1. Hi Stephanie! I just found your blog. Do you remember me? Would be nice to hear from you... Megan from beautiful sunny Mons (not... lol) :o) PS. I hope you didn't receive this message 3 times - had a few technical problems!

    ReplyDelete