RT Student Blog

...the semester is over. I got my report card in the mail (3 B's and 2 C's), I've paid my tuition for the very last time (445 bucks) and ordered my books on amazon (100 bucks but they're not here yet). Now I'm just biding my time until the semester starts January 12th.

Let me explain the structure of our program because I know all programs are different. First of we have 2 teachers, Mrs. H the program director, and Mrs. G the clinical director. The first semester, Fall #1, Mrs. H teaches us Intro to Respiratory. It's the only class the first semester. It introduces us to oxygen therapy, drugs, masks, and patient assessment. The second semester, Spring #1, we have 2 classes and 1 day of clinicals a week. The main class is taught by Mrs. G. It's the most important class if you ask me. Thats where we learn how to give breathing treatments, draw ABG's and all of the other procedures we'll need. We also take Cardiopulmonary Anatomy and Physiology taught by Mrs. H. You all basically know what that one is. For Clinicals we went to 3 hospitals this semester. The class still had about 12 people and the teachers accompanied us to these and taught us patient assessment and breathing treatments.

The 3rd semester, summer, is mainly critical care. This is when we learn Mechanical Ventilation and a variety of ventilators. In order, we learned the PB 7200, Servo 300, Servo i, and PB 840. Final checkoff was brutal because we had multiple scenarios on all of those vents and it took about 3 hours. We also took the Pathology course with Mrs. H this semester. We learned a lot about the diseases. We had one day of clinicals a week and went to a few more hospitals and even did a home health rotation. For the Pathology class we had to pick a clinical patient and do a case study on them. I'm pretty good at writing and made a 96 on the case study.

The 4th semester, Fall #2, is an exciting time. The most exciting part to me was the fact that we have freshmen that we are interacting with. It's a great feeling to be able to impart advice to students who are where I was a year ago. This semester we have 2 days of clinicals a week and it's mainly in ICU's dealing with ventilator patients. We also do our intubation rotation at an operating room. I got all 4 of the intubation checkoffs I need. We also have our neonatal and peds class taught by Mrs. G. We learn everything we need to about babies, deliveries (I went to 4), and neonatal ventilators. NICU is a big part of what we do and learning this stuff is important. We also took a class called Advanced Monitoring and Procedures taught by Mrs. H. It's basically about all of the various things that we hadn't covered before. We learned about things like sleep study (polysomnography), PFT, and cardiac drugs. We also took ACLS this semester. This class is also a review to prepare us for the CRT certification exam. We had a mock CRT for the final and I made a 105 (highest grade in the class).To step it up from the last semester we had to do 2 case studies (1 for each teacher). I made a 95 and 89 (I'm a good writer but Mrs. G is a really tough grader).

Now we are about to begin the final semester, Spring #2. From what I can tell we will have 3 days of clinicals; Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Beyond that we have one class. It's taught by Mrs. H and is basically a preparation class for the RRT (the second certification exam). We also have to do some kind of community project. Most students just go to high school and talk to students about respiratory stuff. We also take PALS (Pediatric Advanced Life Support) this semester. I don't know about any written case studies but we'll see.