Ok, that's not true, I suppose. This week in PBL, I was given constructive feedback! So this week was tough because one of the presentations was on palliative care and that's always a difficult subject for me just because of family history. So during the presentation, a lot of tears ensued for a lot of us (in a class of 12 girls, does it surprise you if they are even mildly similar to me?) and a lot of us have had ppl close to us die and just sharing that information (though not the first time) is tough. So I wasn't as active as I normally am and I was told to be more consistent. The thing that I found hard was that I was still asking questions during presentations and participating in them, but I was told that "I didn't ask any questions that made everyone think." I was really shocked by that because I'm still trying to find a balance between talking too much and apparently now, talking too little. It just made me feel like, "uh, ok, so I'm not allowed to have an off day? Like...everyone can take a sick day but I can make it to class, ask regular questions, and not be allowed to not ask deep and profound questions?" So I felt kind of upset about that. But I took it, said thank you, and really thought about it when I got home.
I have concluded that my classmate was right. I need to learn to dissociate personal from professional. I'm going to have patients who die and I can't allow that to affect how I treat the rest of my patients. I'm allowed to have a bad day, but I still need to move on and work through it. The thing with good constructive feedback is that it's supposed to make you feel uncomfortable, and I give major props to my classmate for being so honest and bold - because all too often we tip-toe around what we want to actually say so as to not offend the person. Tough experience to take in at first, but I worked through it and I have a lot of respect for that classmate!
Clinical this week was awesome - I really look forward to the car ride home because our carpool group is a great way to debrief the day. This week I was crazy busy on Thurs but I didn't mind because I was able to do a dressing change and remove a foley catheter. Oh! I gave my first enema on Thur, too!! So even though I learned it in level 1, I'd never done it before! On Fri, I did another dressing change, took out a saline lock, and removed a snyder drain (which is used to drain the fluids after a surgery)!
One thing I've discovered this week is that I was so task oriented with the new skills I was doing that I compromised my people skills - at least that's how I felt. My awesome instructor says that it's kind of normal to do that and I will only get better and learn to multi-task as I do them more often. I felt bad because when I was removing the snyder drain, I was pulling and pulling and I didn't even look at the facial expression of my patient because I was so nervous about the first time removing one!! Later when I debriefed with my instructor, he was saying "normally it's a bit painful when you remove a snyder and ........" and I responded with..."yeaaaaa.....I'm having a hard time balancing the human approach with these tasks....when you said that it causes pain, I didn't even NOTICE that...." but my instructor was really supportive (one of his strong suits!)
So here's a warm and fuzzy nursing moment for you faithful readers:
One of my patients was getting discharged and I was doing my discharge teaching and whatnot and he was this super cute old man! On Thur, after I removed his catheter, I told him to show me his first void so that I could assess it and he came tottering out with his IV pole and tugged at the arm of my scrub top and said, "I go peepee." Now while you may not think that's very cute, I loved it and it made me smile from the inside out. The second story that tugged at my heartstrings was when he was getting discharged, he offered me flowers!!! I thought it was the sweetest thing ever.
Here's to another 7 weeks!
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