The devil and the angel
I was posted in a surgery ward two week ago. That means that the cases arriving to the ward will be unlike the other. One client may come with stomach ache, another with a diabetic foot ulcer, a third with simply diffuse signs and sympthoms but with enough reason to admitt them to the hospital.
During that week I was writing a case study which means that I had to select a client, collect all valuable information about the clients - past history, reason for admission, nutritional status, medications that is taken, relate the disease condition with the patients signs & sympthoms and write a care plan. This also means A LOT OF WORK!!
Not just that you have to plan and do things, you have to write everything down, read about the case etc. and of course - one learn a ton by doing it:)
I got a relly interesting case - a Thyroid cancer case where a 80 year old woman got admitted with an tumor on the Thyroid in the size of a football!! The type of cancer was also rare - Thyroid Medullary Canser, which can only be seen in about 5% of all Thyroid Cancer cases!
In the same block that I was posted there is a girl who took take care of her mother who got admitted for a Mesentary cyst. This girl turned out to be soo wonderful and a saviour during the whole week we were there! She helped translating when I tried to communicate with the patients, showed her sympathy when we, the students, got scold by the sister in charge etc.
Cause this ward apparently had a well known sister in charge.
Am not kidding if I tell you that I was almost afriad of disconnecting an empty IV-set thinking that I maybe should ask of her permission first before I even touched the patient. She would scold us for either using the trolley, or NOT using the trolley, and yea whatever reason she would come up with to scold us she would use it. These kind of things could make me very passive and ANGRY. Not being affraid of confronting her, because I did, but being affraid that I would do something that would satisfy her instead of the patient. It makes me feel nothing but pityness over these kind of people who has nothing better to do than to boss around and put people down.
Nursing is not like the millitary (even though one might think that is the case) where one has to be "broken down" to be bulit up...
And there, the devil and the angel, on each side of my shoulder.
One has to be stong to fight the evil. But it can oly be faced with goodness of an angle.