Still in the course!

I totally passed that retest, so I am now in class learning about respiratory emergencies. Just thought posting now would be a good plan.

Electrocardioagraphs, the bane of my existence

So we had two tests this week. On Tuesday we had our electrocardioagraph test, and on Wednesday and Thursday we did International Trauma Life Support and had a written and practical test on that on Thursday. I passed the one on Thursday. I did not pass the ECG one.

We have a re-write on Tuesday, and one other student and I will be there. I need to pass it to stay in the course, so I'm spending today and Monday buried in stuff I find hard to understand but have to know.

It's really interesting though. Just complicated to no end. Travis is encouraging me to spend lots of time on it, so that's good.

Have a good weekend!

2 months down, 2 left to go (in class, that is)

The front entrance to our dorms. I love this paint colour!


My first experience with the laundry room, 48 steps down from my room. I usually wash my laundry on weekends at Travis' house. I totally freaked out when I put in my dark clothes, including my uniform, and put the machine on colour wash. It then proceeded to lock the door and flash a light that said 'Warm Wash'. I was horrified, since my uniform NEVER gets washed on warm, and raced up the 48 steps to ask Joanna if she knew what to do. She reassured me that it would be fine, and then I went back down the 48 steps to finish the laundry.....

I look ridiculously young on this picture, which is why I am including it. Packing up the bilateral Sager splint.....

For our 6-month-going-out anniversary, we went out for Chinese food at a little place in Langdon, just south of Travis' house. I think we both looked pretty nice. The red eye is a little alarming, though ;-P

our almost-daily blood pressure monitoring sessions. Practice makes perfect!

EMT snowball fight on Tuesday. We came out of class and just HAD to play in the snow. First good packing snow of the year!

Travis in his 'native habitat'.... or something.... driving the 'kitty' last Saturday. He worked for 2 hours. I enjoyed watching him work for 2 hours :)

He showed me how to use these!!! It was really exciting to see everything. I've never been inside a machine that big before.

You can see the truck the tractor went home on just beside us there.

So yeah. I think the last day of class is May 5. Graduation is (I think) April 29, so we'll be graduating long before we're done our course. But that's how it works, I guess. It would be kind of odd to have a separate grad for only 5 students.
Classes are still going well. We've just completed 2 weeks of some of the harder stuff in the course, cardiology and electrocardiograph interpretation. We have a test on that next week.
Here are some new pictures. Hopefully they won't get messed up like the last batch. Btw, I realize that the last post has the date that I originally wrote it on, not the date that I posted it...

new pics (sorry, the formatting went nuts....)

This is Christine, my IMPACT group leader!

























scenarios!

fooling around with equipment practice













































doing IV clinics


Free slushies we got on a really nice day after class when we went to the gas station in our uniforms

sad, busy day today

Hi! I'm studying for dear life today, since I just got a real scare. We had 9 people in our class last week when we took Test #1. Today the 4 people who didn't pass the test got rewrites. They all failed. Our class now contains 5 people.
I am really sad for them, since some came from really far away to be here, and each one of them would make a great EMT. But the rest of know to be really careful and try harder than ever now.
We will miss all of them. All of us are so different, but we worked together really well.
So I am studying lots of stuff, since we have another test next Tuesday. I have to study several different topics this week: emergency pharmacology, venous access (IV's), medication administration and medication math, the nervous system, and some basic chemistry.
I can't open the extra materials and assignments on the NAIT website with my computer, so my teacher printed them out for me. I talked to NAIT techs 3 times this last week, and they have no good advice for me. My computer opened them fine until last Tuesday, and all of a sudden it didn't want to any more. The best advice I've got so far was to download Firefox and use it instead of IE, which I might do for just this one thing. The other advice was to delete my Google toolbar, to delete my cookies, to delete my temp internet files, to disable my popup blocker, to update my Java, and numerous other things that don't work. Silly computers.....
Anyway, I need to get back to studying. I am doing an assignment on Emergency Pharmacology next. :)
I love you guys!

Guzoo night!

We went to a place called the Guzoo close to here tonight. One of the guys in my EMT class works there, and he knows the animals. It was really fun. It was 4 of us from EMT who went.

Hey! I hope everything is going good for all of you.
Today we had our first test, on Modules 1 & 2, and I got a way higher score than I was expecting, so I'm really excited. I'm told this one was the hardest, so that's encouraging. I did study pretty hard, but felt quite out of my depth. And now I have time to actually read the material we're going over in class before class tomorrow. This is officially the first time I'm not playing catch-up.
After the test this morning, a bunch of us went to Wal-Mart in Olds, which is about 35 minutes away. It was quite fun.
I need to go and do some stuff, but will try to post some pics later today.