Timetable

My Timetable was available on the Student Portal yesterday. A few things about my timetable:

• 9 hours of Anatomy and Physiology every week! I have 3 A&P courses in first semester (regular A&P, cardiovascular A&P and pulmonary A&P). Is the human body really that complicated? (Air goes in. Air goes out. Blood goes round and round. What else does an RT need to know?)
• My earliest classes are at 8AM. I was kind of hoping 9AM. Waking up at 7AM, like a civilized human being!
• My elective is an ethics course. Do not lie, cheat or steal. If you lie cheat or steal, you will be punished.
• If I get an exemption for my ethics elective, my first class on Tuesday will be at 10AM. I don't lie cheat or steal, so I don't need to be taught about that! Sleeping in, until 9AM on Tuesdays!
• My first class on Friday is at 10AM. Sleeping in, until 9AM on Fridays!
• I finish classes on Monday at 11AM. Very Happy to see that. I have some stuff I want to do, in another city, late Monday afternoon.
• My General Therapeutics course has a theory and a lab component.
• The General Therapeutics lab is for 2 hours on Friday. I'm pretty sure that I only have to wear scrubs in the lab, which would mean that I only have to wear scrubs once a week on Friday.
• There seems to be a job shadowing component in the first semester. That appears on my timetable for 4 hours on Thursday. I don't think that it's for 4 hours every Thursday, because I only get 24 credit hours for it. I'm guessing that it will be for 4 hours for 6 weeks.
• Without the job shadowing stuff, I have 22 hours of class and lab.
• My latest classes are finished at 3PM.

Not what I wanted

My new most favorite TV show is on a Canadian TV channel called CLT (Canadian Learning Television). The TV show is called Situation Critical and it's about the trauma center at Sunybrook Hospital in Toronto. It follows patients and medical professionals as they are dealing with various sorts of traumatic injuries. I've seen about 3 or 4 eisodes so far and I'm quite impressed with how the show has been done. At first I was kind of shocked to see how graphic the program was. I'm actually quite interested in seeing all of the blood and gore, but I'm kind of surprised that it's being shown on a mass market education channel at 9PM on a Sunday night.

Most of the show focuses on the Trauma Doctors when they're treating patients but they do frequently acknowledge the other people who are a part of the trauma team. They did a good segment on the RNs who are a part of the Trauma Team, in a recent episode. As I've been watching the show, I've been trying to identify the RTs that are working in the trauma room and was hoping that they would mention RTs in one of the episodes.

They mentioned an RT in last nights episode, but not in the way that I was hoping for. A 50 year old women was brought in after being ejected from a car during a car accident. She was conscious and was bleeding a lot from a nasty head laceration. She was in a lot of pain and heard one of the Doctors give an order to draw up some Fentanyl. As soon as the Fentanyl was mentioned the patient said something like, "Yes, please, Fentanyl...". The person closest to the patients head found the patients reaction kind of funny and asked her how she knew that word and was told that, "I'm an RT". Everyone stops for a few seconds and the Trauma Surgeon asks her where she works. She works at Mt. Sinai. At that point the narrator dramatically states that, "The patient has just identified herself as a Respiratory Therapist from...Mt. Sinai" and then goes on to refer to her as one of the trauma teams colleagues.

The RT was actually pretty lucky. Other than the head laceration, she had a concussion which seems to have resulted in some minor problems with her memory. A few weeks after the accident, she was talking about how she could find herself sitting at a traffic light and not knowing where she was going.

Crap. That's not what I wanted, when I wanted RTs to be mentioned on that TV show.