A thing I love about nursing is that you never know what you’re going to learn on any given day. ventilation

Today I had to go to this class about ventilators. I don’t like to go to classes about ventilators because ventilators are kind of confusing, and every class that I ever go to that discusses this particular topic only serves to muddy the already-murky ventilator waters. It’s hard to know who to trust about them, too, because I don’t have a keen enough eye to be able to differentiate the good Respiratory Therapists from the not-so-great ones, and the Respiratory Therapists are the ones that (should) really KNOW about the ventilation stuff. Doctors and nurses can tell you all about the lungs, but if you want to know about the VENTILATOR, you’ve gotta go to RT.

But then I was sitting in today’s class and I had this breakthrough. All of the sudden everything that I had memorized about ventilators finally came together and I understood. The numbers and the vent settings and all of the things that I knew before, they all became things that made sense. Things that I could use to help me determine the health status of my patient. Ventilator settings and read-outs have never been that for me before, but now they mean things, and I am blown away.