Plants in the Medical Field

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I've noticed that being a new nurse practitioner is significantly different than being a new nurse. In fact, the whole process is different. The best way I can describe it is comparing it to plants: nursing school was a lot of prep work to just vaguely understand the medical field--all of the harrowing [actually, yes, both meanings of the word. this is a great analogy, I can tell] and manuring and watering and planting--and then the New Nurse is gonna grow and experience life-outside-of-dirt and learn from all of the other Nurses, in various stages of growth, around her (or him. but it's usually her).
I don't really feel like, as a new nurse practitioner, I was "emerging" from one world into another. It's more like I was already a flowering plant, but then I decided to become a flowering tree [Which, I realize, doesn't much happen in bona fide botany]. I already know what the medical field is, how the terrain lies in general, but now I'm supposed to fill a different role (maybe like provide shade for my Nurse Plant friends, or be tolerant of birds in my branches, or whatever. I'm gonna end the analogy now.).
I'm about two months in now, and have experienced:

  • walking into the wrong room and interviewing the patient and being really confused why her symptoms and medicines don't match what I had read in the chart. It wasn't much of a loss, because I did need to see the 'wrong' patient anyway, but she probably was wondering why I was talking about treatments she wasn't ever on.
  • having to catch up on notes the next day. I don't like doing that, but since this is outpatient care, no one is asking for a report on what happened in the previous 12 hours.
  • being kicked out of a patient's room. Twice so far, actually, and both in the past week. The first one had decided to exclusively see the doctor, so I just informed the doc his patient was here, and that's one less patient to chart on. The second one, unfortunately, I still had to chart on. She was requesting a test I'd never heard of before, so I googled it in the room, but when I told her the manner of specimen collection was less convenient, she told me I didn't know what I was talking about and could leave now, goodbye. I wasn't terribly offended, because I had been warned this patient tends to be bristly, and you know, I legitimately had never heard of the [outdated] test she wanted, but it certainly made caring for her difficult.
So excuse me, I'm off to learn how to grow bark.

Comments

  1. Lindaswenson2020@gmail.comAugust 18, 2019 at 11:00 PM

    I’m sure you are growing into a beautiful, knowledgeable, and skilled tree!

    ReplyDelete

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