Nursing Students Forced to Use Zoom Virtual Background to Perform Advanced Suturing II
As many students are rejoicing over the fact that they can now take classes pass/fail without repercussions, others are mourning their social lives and personal privacy. Now that everyone is enrolled at the same university, ZoomU, nursing students are being hit extra hard. If they haven’t already been drafted to volunteer at understaffed hospitals, many are left to finish their studies online. Some are adapting better than others: adjusting their schedules from being busy-as-fuck to just busy. Other veteran nursing students are less lucky, from resorting to practicing CPR on their poor Webkinz to learning how to suture on a less than a spectacular green screen.
“As per the CDC guidelines and FSU’s guidance, we have to change how we conduct our skill labs. Even though we can probably just ship out sets of Hasbro classic Operation, we think it is more cost-effective to use the tools we are already provided,” explained Head Teaching Faculty Bethany Hills, BSN, Ph.D., while throwing sewing kits into an autoclave before shipping them out to her students. “We pulled them out from a clinical environment, but we still want to give them high quality, hands-on experience before letting them battle COVID-19 with handmade PPE in a month after their graduation on Roblox.”
“When we were told that we had to use Zoom’s virtual background to practice suturing, we thought it was a literal joke. How do they think that will prepare us? It would probably be more helpful if they just blindly threw us into a hospital,” lamented fourth-year Nursing student and former bully, Jamie Larkin, as she tried to change the meeting background for the eighth time. “This green screen is nice and all, but how do I let people know that I am a nursing student when I can’t be covered in fake blood or go in the store with my fake scrubs on to buy my third Redbull of the day? I guess the upside of using Zoom to learn how to suture is that I don’t have to wear itchy scrub bottoms while I struggle to figure out the difference between “Connell” and “everting” sutures.
With uncertainty and potential economic downturn looming on the horizon, all we can do is somehow stay hopeful and finish this semester relatively strong (but hey, if we don’t, we have that nice S/U cushion). In the meantime, hats off to all of the medical students that will be in the front lines in a few weeks. For us normies, don’t forget to wash your hands and for real, stop being dumb, stay indoors so we can like, go to Bulls again.