Day 4 – Clinical rotation at Hospital Ramon Garibay.

Today I received a tremendous amount of help from the medical interns.  First, was help from one of the women intern’s treating a women in early labor. She took timeout to explain to us what she was doing during her assessment. She helped us understand the medical history portion of the assessment and allowed us to ask the patient some questions from the paperwork as well. It was pretty intense for me because I am so afraid of getting phrases wrong. I was extremely proud of myself because the pregnant women answered all of my questions, which means that she could understand me!! Second, I spoke with another women intern and she asked what we needed help with. We told her that we wanted to learn more phrases that we could use within the hospital setting. We talked to her about pain assessment and how important this question was to us. From the conversation we began developing sentences in Spanish related to both pain and medication implementation.  The last intern we spoke with also asked us what we needed help with. We told him sentence structure related to verbally conversing with patients. His approach was to give us random symptoms in English and then we would have to form a sentence in Spanish and relay information back to him about a patient. This was an exhausting task, but very rewarding to finally be able to form sentences and speak them out loud in the correct format. I am anxious to go back tomorrow and use what I have learned with more patients in the hospital setting.

One thing that I always have to remember with nursing is – Go with your gut instinct.

Favorite Spanish sentence of the day – Que medicamentos estan tomando actualmente? This is one of the sentences that I formed today. What medications are you currently taking?