Day 16: Pagers, Computers, and Bags Oh MY!

Today was my 1st day of orientation at the actual department I'll be working in. The first part of the morning was spent with some more touring of the hospital, but more specific to floors I'll be working on. I clocked in with my name badge :), got my own pager, and was shown my desk. The PT office is fairly small for the number of people it has to hold so a lot of people are actually 2 to a desk. I will be sharing with a co-worker who is also my coordinator for orientation and such. My orientation will actually be 90 days long. I have that amount of time to get up to the expected productivity requirements and carry the caseload of a full time therapist. I was very happy with that as I was worried how fast they would expect me to get up to speed not only with patients, but also the hospital in general and the documentation. Plus, as a new graduate I imagine I'll be slower at first--more like that of a student on their last internship at least at the beginning. They are very organized with their agenda for orientation with schedules of what to try and do each week and such as guidelines to get everything done and competencies checked off before the 90 days are up. I also found out that during my 90 day orientation I won't have to work weekends! I thought this was kind of strange but pretty nice! I guess they want you to have orientation done so that when you do work a weekend you aren't slowed down by trying to find your way around the hospital or being too slow with documentation and such. My hours, at least for the next 90 days, will be 730-4 to match my coordinator's time schedule. I think I'll like getting off a little earlier and hopefully it won't be too early for me to get up and moving! haha

When I got home I was extremely tired although I didn't really do a whole lot of 'work'. But I think my brain has just been on information overload the past few days that I just crashed--which is actually kind of bad considering I need to have energy to study when I get home! The weekends are definitely going to have to be productive study days and hopefully I can muster enough energy to do a little during the week nights. 

I thought I would show you the fun bags I will be taking with me to work each day! I have a fun tropical print tote type Vera Bradley bag that I've been carrying. I got it over a year ago and used it as my carry-on for our honeymoon. It's come in handy to carry my lunch, water bottle, calendar, paperwork I've been getting, plus anything else!! Then I found a nice Target sale on a new lunch box! so I'm all set!