Legislature Day

That episode of School House Rock came to live for all of the interns yesterday when we all went to UDA Legislative Day. We are now fully aware of how a bill becomes a law. We spent the morning speaking with members of the legislature and doing health screenings on them. Some of us went with the UDA lobbyist, Candice and her intern, Brock to speak with representatives. It was fun to speak with them about how we are trying to change our certification renewal process.... just paving the way to licensure :) There was an exciting energy at the Capitol building. We had great opportunities for networking with other dietitians and students. Special recognition goes to the one undergraduate that participated: Shannan Brooks.

Of course... we had to do lunch afterward:

Goal: Empathy and Awareness.

In the BYU Dietetic Internship, we have an assignment that is designed to help us develop empathy and awareness of the reality of intensive insulin therapy. In our undergraduate curriculum, we were required to count our carbohydrate exchanges and maintain the numbers in an appropriate range... what we are doing now has been taken to a all new level! For the next three days, we are wearing insulin pumps (using saline instead of insulin) and we are checking our blood glucose at least four times a day. We were given arbitrary numbers for our basal insulin to be set at and then we have to count our carbohydrates and give ourselves bolus insulin as needed throughout the day. We had fabulous guest Diabetes Educators (a RN and RD) come and teach us what we need to know for this experience! We all had to select sites for our pumps to be inserted and we are all becoming accustomed to pricking our own fingers. Wish us luck...

Birthday!!!!!!

The adventures continue... we had our first class on Friday and Anne was lucky enough to have her birthday on the same day so we all fronted some special birthday hats in her honor. All of us are doing our own rotations - Annie/Janelle are doing community with the health department and WIC, Anne is saving lives at McKay D, Rebecca is at IMC doing the same. Emily and Brianna are at Primary Childrens doing adminstrative projects. We are all pretty happy... life is good.

I can't be over unless its blogged about.

We have finished our first semester!

The progression of the pictures indicate what is required to complete a case study:

1) Professional attire

2) Lots of colleague support and opinions

ex.Emily: What the heck does _________ mean/do/matter for?
Anne: bla bla bla (perfect explanation... better than google/NCM/Krause combined).

3) A big fat mess in the intern room and pressure ulcers from sitting in the same chair for HOURS and HOURS figuring everything out.

4) A GINORMOUS stack of books to reference.

Frolic and Play the Eskimo Way

We had our Internship Christmas Party this weekend! Janelle and Adam were kind enough to host it at their house and we all met up for some appetizers, molten lava chocolate cake, white elephant, and sweet conversation. The poor men that attended had to hear all about internship things and they did a great job humoring the women in their lives.

The Other Interns

Since Emily is so good about blogging what they are up to, I figured someone needs to represent the other group of interns...and I guess that is me. Anne, Brianna, and I (Janelle) are just finishing up our Pen Court rotation. We had big shoes to fill after Emily, Rebecca, and Annie but I can definitely say that we have enjoyed pen court more than we ever thought. The highlight of course was our theme day: A Day on Broadway. We got our inspiration after we all saw Wicked in Denver and loved it!

Our menu for theme day included: teriyaki glazed salmon with wild rice, NY pizza with a Caesar salad and tuxedo dipped strawberry, white bean chili, cream puffs with a raspberry sauce, German chocolate cookies, and churros y chocolate. We loooooved our food but it was definitely a challenge getting to that point. We made cream puffs 4 times and went through over 100 eggs before we finally somewhat perfected the recipe.

When theme day finally came we were so excited but definitely not prepared for the craziness that was about to occur. People were lined up outside of Pen Court 1 hour before we opened! Once we started serving, girls were just running all over the kitchen to keep up with the crowd. Our "made-to-order" pizza was so much more popular than we thought it would be. We forcasted for 50 and actually sold 82! There is no way we could have ever survived without the other three interns there to help us. But at the end of the day we were so happy with how things turned out and treated ourselves to a soda with Sister Mitchell.

Pen Court is now closed for the semester and the three of us are just working on getting things ready for next semester. We definitely miss seeing the pen court students every day and really miss the lunches.

ServSafe!!!!

We went to become ServSafe certified. It was convenient that we had Laura (BYU dietetics ALUM) teach us... she managed to entertain us the entire time (which is difficult considering the topics were HACCP and temperature logs.) I considered it a business trip because I got to take the company car and they fed me several meals. It was fun... hopefully we passed the test.