Oh nursing school. If you can survive it, I am convinced you can survive anything. It is not that it is all that hard.....they just make it hard. They fill it full of useless chaos, along with the already rigorous curriculum. Since it is Nurse's Week, I wanted to tip my hat to all of those poor souls who are in the midst of dealing with the chaos known as Nursing School......
It was our first day of clinicals. Up to that point we had only attended our theory classes and conducted bathing and basic need "clinicals" on dummies in our lab at school. To say we were GREEEN was an understatement. We knew how to bathe a patient and how not to kill them. Scary.
Six of us showed up to clinicals at our assigned hospital. We were starched, clean and organized....and completely utterly terrified. Our instructor divided us into two groups of three. The actual staff nurses had already completed their shift report prior to us arriving; therefore our instructor gave us a brief rundown of our patient and what needed to be completed. Bath and bedding change....how hard could it be. My patient was less than pleasant. She did not want to be there and made mention of it more than once while I was trying to convince her the importance of cleansing her nether-regions and changing her bedding in the best Florence Nightingale attitude I could muster. My two sidekicks were right there with me. Each giving the look of "lets just get through this, survive, and check it off our list". We finished and left the room. The other group had completed their patient as well. They were at the nurse's desk waiting to be checked off by our instructor. The instructor was tied up so the charge nurse offered to go in and check things over. She went into the other patient's room first....so naturally all 6 of us filed in there as well (eager to learn I tell ya!). There all 7 us stood around the patient's bed staring at this extremely old man. The nurse just casually said "oh, bless his heart, he finally passed". Mind you, we were green but all of us knew what "passed" meant. All of us...speechless with are eyeballs about to come out of our heads, I was able to muster up a squeaky "um, excuse me?" The nurse, still very calm, said "oh we have been expecting him to pass for two weeks now. See he was here for palliative care. I am just so happy he is no longer suffering." Three students made a dash for the door, two of us stood there not knowing what to do or say, and I believe...to this day...the other one peed her pants. Not 100%, but pretty darn sure (thank God for those white nursing pants!) All I wanted to do was make a beeline to my crotchedy hateful woman and give her a big hug for not dying on me.
So we gathered in the hallway totally convinced that we would be immediately thrown out of the program and charges would be filed for killing our first patient while giving him a bath. Our instructor became aware of the chaos, crying, and peeing of pants and rushed to find out what happened. The staff nurse was finally clued in that the 3 students felt it was their fault the man had died. So there stood the nurse and our instructor trying to calm us all down and explain that it was nothing we had done. By the end of the day "we could all laugh about the situation"....(I still think a few are in therapy), and we all graduated two years later. Looking back I think the little old man made a deal with God. I would imagine he was telling God to hold on for a few minutes because he wanted to scare the crap out of 6 nursing students.
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