Bedbaths and walking sticks

I used to dream about being a nurse. There was me, in my nice little fantasy world, dressed in lilac with a frilly lace cap taking pulses and chatting to kindly patients all day. Oh how different is the reality!

On day one as a student nurse on the wards, I was thrown straight into the deep end of patient personal care. I was handed a sponge and told to give an elderly lady a bed bath (no Powerpoint, no lecture). I awkwardly fumbled about unsure of what I was doing. When I realised that I actually had to strip off this woman and clean her myself I was shocked and uncomfortable. I was told by a member of staff to wash the patients as I would wash myself. This sounds simple enough, except I tend not to lie in my bed when I need washed. Needless to say it didn’t go well, I didn’t put a towel under the patient and so her bed ended up more like a water bed, I didn’t know if I was using too much soap or too little. In the end, the patient had to give me a tissue and comfort me as I burst into tears.

I have since learned to laugh at myself and not take every situation so seriously. I learned not to pull at a bedpan that’s stuck in a commode. I also learned to double check (even triple check) that the valve at the bottom of a catheter bag is closed.  I put the bad situations down as experience and went on from there. There do seem to be some situations that just can’t be avoided however, such as just after you finish a 30-minute bandage the doctor will come around to look at the wound. It also feels as though as soon as you put on gloves and an apron or facemask, that your nose will start to itch.

One thing I have learned very quickly is that patients come in all shapes and sizes, and with very different personality types. They are not all ‘kindly’ and ‘grateful’ at all. Instead, many seem to have mistaken the H on the building for HOTEL not HOSPITAL.

Nursing students need a high level of YT  – Yuck Tolerance. Which I was grateful for when I was first asked to collect a sputum sample. Even the word made me queasy, while the patient was coughing up a lung, I was holding back tears and fighting the urge to boak. Again, I had similar experience when a patient first threw up on me. Not near me. On me, in fact all over me and my new clean uniform, which by then had shrunk to my size. It’s true what they say; that once you come into hospital you leave your dignity at the door, I would include student nurses in that.

Friends and family that are not medical professionals don’t fully understand how interesting aspects on nursing can be. For example, the first time I catheterized a patient I felt excited, proud and wanted to share with my family. Needless to say my mum was not exactly comfortable with my in-depth description of this experience over the dinner table. Especially when I shared with her the advice I was given from a helpful male nurse: “to always aim for the highest hole” (it was good advice). It turns out if you talk about medical procedures at meals, your friends are likely to lose their appetites.

It is not just what happens on shift, but what you have to take home as well. By the end of the first day, my hands were red and irritated from washing them every three minutes. By the end of the week, I was lucky to have skin left. I could have done with my own bed in a Dermatology ward for my hands. The only thing worse than the aching, itchy hands is spending all day covered in other people’s bodily fluids; vomit, sputum, blood, and urine. Now I understand why they gave me six sets of uniform! It seemed excessive at the time but now I think it’s barely enough to get me through to my next viva.