It goes without saying that missing any of your clinical time is a bad idea. My program has no clinical make up time built into the schedule, and our instructors have advised us not to miss clinicals, period. But, one cannot control when they get sick. And, we really should not be continuing the line of thought that we should go to work/school/clinicals no matter how sick we are. It isn't good for the person who is sick... and it isn't sick for those they are exposing to their illness.

So, as luck would have it, last Sunday I woke up sick. I took some tylenol to try to bring my fever down and put myself back to bed for the day. I was hoping to sleep it off and be able to go in to my clinical Monday morning. By late Sunday afternoon it was obvious that was not going to happen. I e-mailed my instructor and let her know I would be heading to the doctor instead.

Yes, I was worried about how I was going to make up my clinical time, or even if I may have been kicked out of the program for missing time. But, I was too sick to go in, and my elderly patients did not need whatever illness I had. I'm a young, fairly healthy adult with a good immune system; most of the residents of LTC facilities are not. What is a uncomfortable, inconvient illness can be deadly for them.

As luck would have it, there were three of us sick and unable to make clinicals last week. We all went to our doctors, and were all diagnosed with the same illness. The incubation period would be accurate for us to have picked this up the week before in the LTC center. Maybe we did, maybe we didn't. We all spent a very uncomfortable week at home and (hopefully) will all be back in class and clinicals this week.

Our program has been kind enough to schedule us a time to make up the hours we have missed.

We are coming to the end of our second quarter! I can't wait for the week long break between classes!!