Call me Student Nurse Rosenstein

Today in school, I learned my first "real" nursing skill. We learned how to prime IVs AND we got to take our IV bag and tubing home to play with (apparently this is a huge responsibility as these are prescription only items). Priming an IV is the process of attaching the tubing and getting all the air bubbles out of the tube so that it can be hooked up to a patient.


This is me after priming my very first IV (now, you realize that I can't actually do anything with it yet...I can just get it ready for someone else to do something with).And here is my IV, ready for administration...maybe

After we learned about priming, we learned how to manually set rates on IVs. Definitely not an exact science. You open the stopcock (the light blue piece has a little rolly thing that opens or closes the tubing) a little and you count the drips from the bottom of the bag into the fluid chamber (the tan thing to the left of the light blue thing) for one minute. 31 drips/min is not an easy thing to accomplish. There is a lot of trial and error involved. I think the electronic IV pump might become my new best friend!