Part 2

And in contrast, why, the rest of my week near destroyed me.

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I was assigned a patient on Tuesday and one whom I knew I was going to be slightly intimidated by, but I was unaware of the extent of my fright.

This gentleman had been in medicine previously, slipped in the bathtub and became a quadriplegic meaning he has no movement or sensation from his neck (around C5– cervical vertebrate #5) down. He was now in hospital, has been for the past 10 months or so because his wife can’t care for him on her own and hes 100% deadweight.

I knew that he would be constantly judging me as a first year nurse, but I was there to learn, to make mistakes and to understand and prevent them from occurring again.

I grew more and more pressured by his steely gaze that I began to make little mistakes and embarrass myself– I would drop a bit of scrambled egg onto his shirt, I would forget his abdominal pad, I would mix up which sugar went in the cream of wheat. Every new thing that I could screw up on, I did, and never once did that silent stare leave me, even when I turned beet red.

I would bumble and mumble and forget and make silly mistakes and all the while grow more and more embarrassed as I knew he was shaking his head at my incompetence.

How dare you come into the hospital setting, pretending to be a nurse. How dare you impose upon what I worked so hard to create, and now you, you are turning this esteemed area into a zoo. What have you done?

And I could just picture myself in front of a panel of judges, each one of them drawing a picture of a noose and sentancing me off to the sidehall where I would be condemned to wait for my death to come about.

I explained that I was worried, to my instructor. I explained that I was nervous and making mistakes and that no matter my efforts, he would not converse. The best I did yesterday was learn that he had never been to Ireland; yet all the words got stuck in my mouth like honey and when I finally managed to spit them out, he would give either short sentences, a grunt of yes or no or one word answers.

How can I practice my hopeful future profession (providing that he doesn’t personallly see I get expelled from the order) if I am unable to work at my best?

I endured this merciless pain, hoping to help and generally only furthering my problems. I tried to be the best I could be but I just kept failing and failing. It hurt my pride and I realized that I had very little to begin with.

I had brought high hopes of learning to this environment just to have them take away by someone who could not move.

My heart broke for him: for his depression; for how he was being treated; for how he was once a vigourous man, like the proud professional individual standing with his wife in the pictureframe on the windowsill.

I talked with the instructor again and told her my fears. She said that I should say that I did not feel I was really caring for him: was there anything I was able to do for him?

I was prepared to be shut down, but it was my responsibility to ask, she had said.

I took a deep breath, entered the room and found something that I needed to be doing. Mercifully, I did not mess it up, but I could still feel the steely gaze perched between my shoulderblades as I worked quickly and quietly.

I left the room and entered the conference room to begin my charting. My instructor asked which dialect of his mother tongue he spoke, I claimed that I did not know and she said she wanted to find out.

The next week, when we would be paired with a different patient, she wanted to see if a colleague of mine would be better suited to hopefully speak the same language he did.

She came back without an answer but with a comment that nearly made me break down entirely.

‘I didn’t find out what language he spoke… but… well I’m not going to tell you what happened. Well, actaully, I’m going to. You see, he won’t have one of us next week, he says he does not want a student.’

I crumbled. What had I done?!

I took this man and changed things about so that he not only did not want to have me help him, but no other student either!

I was wallowing in my misery twenty minutes later when the instructor came back to me.

‘There is a student nurse on evenings too, you know. It’s not any strict reflection upon you.’

‘I understand, but I still feel as its all my fault.’ I was reassigned a new patient for the next day and I hope to have things change about, things for the better.

As I got into my car, I sat down at the steering wheel, bits of me falling to the ground as I was unsure of how to handle this situation. And then I kicked myself for not praying sooner.

Yet He provides. He knew that this was exhausting me and destroying my short stock of energy, the minuscule reserves that I had tucked behind my ears.

He knew that this was an episode that was draining me emotionally, psychologically and physically. He knew that I wasn’t able to do my best.

He knew this and he helped me. I start with a new patient: tomorrow is a new day.