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Well since January.. I have been busy learning and doing so many things! Its best to start where I left off with my MNT rotation at Aurora St. Luke's. I spent a total of 14 weeks in my MNT rotation, every 2 weeks I would rotate areas and dietitians to get a wide variety of MNT experience. I spent time in cardiovascular ICU, oncology, surgical, and outpatient. All of the rotations had a new aspect with a different learning milestone in my career. I by far enjoyed my oncology rotation the most, I can't quite put my thumb on it but for some reason I loved the patient population and working with them. One of my most difficult rotations was the cardiovascular ICU, these patients had either had open heart surgery, a heart transplant, or a ventricular assisted device placed and therefore were in very critical condition. This rotation became helpful for my staff experience that I completed in a general cardiac unit and orthopedics unit. I spent 2 weeks doing my staff experience, where I "pretended" to be a real dietitian! I found out that I learned a lot and now actually feel confident as a almost dietitian!

Following my time at St. Luke's I spent one day at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin in the oncology unit (and I got a little extra tour of the PICU and NICU!). It was an amazing day to see and witness the care in a children's hospital. I saw amazing kids that are fighting cancer like champs and tiny tiny babies! I also had the opportunity to see the cardiac ICU where I saw a 2 year old with an open chest. She had recently had a heart surgery but due to the inflammation they could not close the chest right away. With her chest still open and covered with a "saran wrap" type material protecting it, I could actually see her heart beating!

I then spent a week in long term care learning about the documentation and nutrition care process used in LTC. It was a very interesting experience and I am not sure if it is a setting I would want to work in full time. I loved the older adults, most of them had funny jokes and were very friendly, but I am just not sure if it is right for me.

NOW onto the elective rotation which I have been counting down since I found out about it! HY-VEE!
I started at Hy-Vee in Madison on Monday working with the dietitian there and I LOVE it! The first day I spent time getting to know the store and the products and putting out dietitian's choice signs throughout the store. We also prepped food for Deana's (Hy-Vee RD) segment on NBC 15 that was taped on Tuesday. On Tuesday, we started out the day at NBC where I watched Deana record her 3 minute segment on spring greens. It was awesome to see behind the scenes of TV and hopefully I wake up early on Sunday (7:40 am) to watch it air! On Wednesday we spent all day at Sun Prairie High School health class answering questions about nutrition, it was fun but boy were we tired at the end of the day! I am looking forward to next week when I am going to do a food demo at the store, work in the garden, and prepare for the Gluten Free Gala on Saturday!

Other than becoming a dietitian life has been pretty busy, for one I moved a majority of my things to Madison where I am staying with my lucky boyfriend Eric and his brother while I am at Hy-Vee. (Trick is now I am never leaving ha-ha!)

This past weekend was my little sister's prom, it was soo much fun to watch her get all dressed up, such a lady!

I have also been job searching and interviewing hoping to find a position that fits me. It is tough work and very stressful, but I know it will all work out in the end.

Here is my inspirational quote for the month...

The longer you wait for something, the more you'll appreciate it when you get it.Cause anything worth having is defiantly worth waiting...

MNT | Aurora St. Luke's Medical Center | General Medical & CICU

After the quick holiday break from the internship, I FINALLY started clinical! My entire MNT rotation is 14 weeks long and is broken up into 2 week increments. My first 2 week rotation was in a general medical floor and cardiac ICU. The hospital I am doing my MNT rotations at is a huge cardiac hospital in Milwaukee, around 500 beds and over 100 ICU beds. The first day was pretty overwhelming, to say the least, but since then has gotten much better! 

The first dietitian I worked with on the general medical floor and CICU did a lot of tube feedings and wound care. After my two weeks with her I have done a lot of tube feedings and am starting to feel pretty comfortable with them. She also taught me a lot about wound care; focusing on increased calories, protein, vitamins and minerals. During this rotation I became more comfortable with EPIC medical record charting formats for the hospital and writing PES statements with an intervention, monitoring, and evaluation component. Being in a large hospital provides opportunities to see very different patients and conditions which has been very interesting! 

While the first two weeks in the clinical rotation were a struggle and each day is a challenge, I am slowly but surely getting the hang of things and retaining new information. The hardest part is wanting to look up every term I don't understand when I see it, but that would take all day, and there are tons of patients to see!

I have now moved on to my second preceptor into a new area which I will blog more about later but I have been working on talking and interviewing the patients on my own, which sounds a lot easier than it looks!

-Success doesn't happen overnight. Keep your eye on the prize and don't look back.-

Overdue update on my life as a dietetic intern!

Since my last post in September (sadly) I have been pretty busy trying to get a grip on what is all really going on in this life as a dietetic intern. It has turned into a lot of being flexible, doing things to get them done (and trying to learn something along the way), and letting things roll off of my back. For those of you who new me in my undergrad, most likely you would be wondering who this girl is! But in all honesty once I got the internship and got into it my focus switched from grades and GPA to learning the most I can and not necessarily needing to be a perfectionist or total schedule freak :). Its honestly a relief, but now as we are well into November I am realizing that the quest I went through to get an internship is now about to begin again but for something different, a J-O-B, a start to my ever anticipated career that I have been so desperately waiting for! So that's a catch up on how I am personally feeling in a nutshell but now onto the fun stuff.. what am I really doing in Milwaukee on a day to day basis??
I finished my rotation at UW-Extention in Waukesha about 4 weeks ago. Although there were things that I didn't necessarily like about it there were definitely things that I loved about it. My favorite part was all the nutrition education classes I was able to observe and participate in, my favorite group were the kids, every age from head start to elementary levels. They are just so darn cute! This is a population I thought I would like to work with before the internship but has now been confirmed and I will keep this in mind when it comes to my job search!
Now I have moved on to food service management at Greenfield School District. Heading into this rotation I wasn't necessarily sure that food service was my thing, and I am finding out that it probably isn't my thing. That doesn't mean that I hate it, I enjoy the things I get to do there and the days go super quick, its most likely just not for me. I have a long list of projects to do at this rotation and my preceptor has a very "let's get this done" attitude which is awesome. I am currently working on developing the menu for all the schools (6 total) for December. For those of you who aren't aware in July new regulations went into effect that all schools must follow who are on the National School Lunch Program, this means making this menu is kind of like solving a puzzle. The new regulations focus on fruits and vegetables as two separate components, whole grains, vegetable sub-groups, and min/max calorie levels. Each day for a meal to be considered reimbursable by the government a student must take 3 of the 5 components (fruit, vegetable, grains, dairy, protein) in addition one of the three components must be 1/2 c of fruits or vegetables. Vegetables this year are also broken up into subgroups with weekly requirements for each group. The vegetable subgroups are dark green, red/orange, beans/peas (legumes, starchy, and other. At least half of the grains offered must be whole grain (made with 50% or greater whole grains). Long story short this has created quite a few problems in schools, check the news if your interested! I have worked the register line at the middle school a few times and have seen the anger with the required 1/2 c of fruits or vegetables, but all in all I think they are a good thing, it will just take some getting used to! Tomorrow I am going to do my mock sanitation inspection at the high school before the state inspector comes on Friday! Hopefully it goes good!
Also, our DI open house is next Friday at Mount Mary, which I am looking forward to seeing some Stout students at! :)
Like I said the last time, I hope to keep up with my blogging better, but we will see how it goes!

First Rotation | First Day | UW-Extension Waukesha County

Today was my first day of my community rotation at UW-Extension Waukesha County. For the past 3 weeks we have been doing orientation activities to get us back into the swing of things and remember all the great knowledge we learned in our undergraduate programs! It was a fun time getting to know all the other 9 interns, well 8 since my good friend Lindsey from Stout is here with me :). I LOVE all of the other interns and how each of us has something different to bring to the table. The past 3 weeks we learned how to preserve food, everything from freezing to canning and dehydrating, and then took what we learned and taught it to a group of low income adults. I learned how to make fruit leathers (YUM) and can pickles and apple butter. As usual with the dietetics profession there was a lot of taste testing and discovering of amazing foods, yet another reason why I love this profession!

Yesterday was our last day of orientation in the classroom and well to put it mildly I was going crazy from sitting in the classroom. I had the itch to get out, trust me, ask my roomie Kaylee!

Any who, back to the important stuff my first day at Extension! Although this may seem odd I wasn't all that excited about today, mostly because I HATE first days of everything, because as we all know its awkward and long. But, all else fails I am getting into the field, and getting my hands dirty! When I arrived this morning my preceptor had just gotten back from a 10 day vacation and hadn't checked any of her emails.. needless to say she had no idea I was coming! Luckily they have had plenty of interns before and they were able to come up with things for me to do in a short time frame. I spent part of the morning doing typical boring paperwork and then reading more paperwork. But by 11:45 things started to get more fun as I went out with one of the Nutrition Educators to a local senior meal site to listen to her give a presentation on good and bad fats. It was great to get out and see what the educators do within the community. The lady that I was with has been there for 5 years and when I asked her if she still prepares a lot ahead of time she said not really, she mostly just wings it, I can't wait until I get that good!

After lunch I spent the afternoon working on my first project: display boards. Extension has a ton of display boards some of which are outdated due to the change of MyPlate and newer research. My task that I began working on is updating some of the displays and then working on the index of where all the displays are kept.  The first display board I am working on is A Healthy Heart, hopefully I can get my creativity juices flowing!

My goal is to keep this blog of my DI journey up to date about once a week, more if necessary!

I also hope to do plenty of fun things in Milwaukee so hopefully I can get some of those adventures on here as well! Hoping to hit the Farmer's Market this weekend!

| Make Today Ridiculously Amazing |

First Blog Ever!

Welcome Summer 2012!
Get excited, this is my first blog post ever! I decided to give it a try after much inspiration from my BFF's! This blog is mainly about my adventure in becoming a dietitian as I move to Milwaukee and become a dietetic intern for Mount Mary College in August. Until then, and probably after it starts, I am going to blog about my summer adventures, food, and fitness (my favorite things!).
This is definitely going to take some practice but here is to trying new things and letting life be an adventure!

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.” -Dr. Seuss