Friday, February 16, 2007
broken
I went back to clinical this week now that my instructor is feeling better. The extremely broken girl I mentioned last week was still on the unit on Tuesday, so I selected her again (since I'd already written a care plan for her!). I also selected another patient and wrote a care plan on him... and when I got to the hospital on Wednesday he had been discharged. Crap. So, I asked my nurse if she had another patient I could pick up, and then I basically followed my nurse around like a puppy all night. Well, I guess that's not true, I did do quite a bit of care on my own and with a classmate. I stood by and handed my nurse lots and lots of gloves while she did a manual disimpaction on my second patient... if you don't know what that means, consider yourself lucky and think no more about it.
Caring for the extremely broken girl was emotionally difficult for me. Partly because I was afraid of hurting her because she had so many injuries in so many places, and partly because she has some brain damage which makes finding the words she wants to say difficult for her. She's very young and tiny, also, which just adds to the impression of vulnerability. I felt *really* bad about giving her injections because she got very upset when I did it. She's so thin that I imagine even the tiny sub-Q needles hurt her. Fortunately classmate M* came into the room with me and held her hands and helped me reassure her when I had to give her shots. But, even though I found it emotionally difficult, I was able to do a good job caring for her. That kind of surprised me. Similarly, I was surprised and pleased with myself later in the evening on Thursday when one of classmate M*'s patients had a respiratory crisis, and both of us worked in conjunction with the patient's nurse to make him more comfortable. We've learned enough at this point that I could do useful things instead of just stand there looking dumb. That was a nice realization.
This coming week I have a break from actual patient care - I'll be observing in an endoscopy suite one day and shadowing a respiratory therapist another day. The nice thing about the observations is that they're during the day, so I won't have to be up late at night and spend no time with R*! We'll get to eat dinner together every night just like an actual married couple.
Caring for the extremely broken girl was emotionally difficult for me. Partly because I was afraid of hurting her because she had so many injuries in so many places, and partly because she has some brain damage which makes finding the words she wants to say difficult for her. She's very young and tiny, also, which just adds to the impression of vulnerability. I felt *really* bad about giving her injections because she got very upset when I did it. She's so thin that I imagine even the tiny sub-Q needles hurt her. Fortunately classmate M* came into the room with me and held her hands and helped me reassure her when I had to give her shots. But, even though I found it emotionally difficult, I was able to do a good job caring for her. That kind of surprised me. Similarly, I was surprised and pleased with myself later in the evening on Thursday when one of classmate M*'s patients had a respiratory crisis, and both of us worked in conjunction with the patient's nurse to make him more comfortable. We've learned enough at this point that I could do useful things instead of just stand there looking dumb. That was a nice realization.
This coming week I have a break from actual patient care - I'll be observing in an endoscopy suite one day and shadowing a respiratory therapist another day. The nice thing about the observations is that they're during the day, so I won't have to be up late at night and spend no time with R*! We'll get to eat dinner together every night just like an actual married couple.
Labels: nursing school
