Road to RD – Faith, Hope & Quinoa

Well Hello and Happy Friday!

I just want to say a big thanks to Chris for the great post yesterday!

I loved the blog post from Chris, he sure has to put up with a lot from me and I’m so excited to marry him in just 4 short months. If you loved Chris’s guest blog post, you will probably love Sara’s (my sister) guest blog past that will be coming to you next week. They are awesome, I’m excited for you guys to read them. Forewarning, my sister is a fantastic and creative writer, so you will probably get hooked (that’s my sneaky plan).

Anyway today is my last day of Clinicals, and while I have learned more than I could ever dream of, I have to admit I’m excited to have some time off to dedicate to wedding planning! Here is a brief summary of my clinical experience.

Well about 9 weeks ago I stepped foot into St. Luke’s hospital to complete my clinical Dietetic rotation. It has been a crazy wild road, but I am just so shocked that I only have one week to go. For the last 2 weeks we do something called Staff Relief, which means we basically run the show and pretend to be a real life Dietitian. And let me tell you, it makes for some crazy days trying to figure out what the doctors want and what the tubefeedings are running at. But alas I shall start at the beginning.

So my first couple weeks were a blur. Hospitals are very intimidating and being an intern does not exactly put you at the top of the leaderboard for anything. We usually attend rounds each morning for the floor that we are covering that day. At St. Luke’s the Dietitians do not specialize in floors or units but choose to switch things up. Rounds consist of getting lost and then sitting in on meetings where everyone spoke medical jargin there was a lot of head nodding action.

However as the weeks progressed I started to become more proficient in the medical vocabularly and just general flow of the hospital. You learn which nurses to ask your one million questions to and how to enter a patients room in an inviting way.

I did fall in love with talking to Patients and on the off chance they actually wanted education, that is a good day. To get the opportunity to truly help someone when they are at their sickest is a great feeling. Being a dietitian is so much more than helping people to lose weight. Dietitians are a vital part of the healthcare team. They write tube feeing orders and educate patients on all sorts of diets ranging from chronic kidney disease, diabetes mellitus, fractured jaw, pancreatitis, etc. All in all, it was a great experience filled with a lot of hard work and long hours.