Day Nine

29/5/14

Nearly the end of week two already! And another flat out shift!
Highlights of today were working with patients I have been with all week. Its nice to get to know the patients who are staying longer on the ward, and to see them improve and progress towards being discharged home.
I was given free reign to remove the remaining staples from an abdominal surgery of which there were approximately thirty. The patient was a very small woman and the staples ran from navel to pubis. As I was a tad nervous and turning red from concentration, I didn't notice the patient's discomfort until I had taken out about 5 clips. We had a wee break and she perked up immediately once we began talking about cooking. She talked me through her favourite family recipe (baked fish) while I removed the remaining 25 clips (which she later told me she'd barely felt). It felt like rather a steep learning curve and a bit of a eureka moment for me. There will always be times when patients will experience discomfort, changing a dressing or removing clips, and besides pumping them full of painkillers using distraction techniques by simply having a good conversation can work very well just to get you both through the experience. It's something that I already knew in theory, but I had been too focused on getting the procedure correct to remember the person underneath the staples. These are the lessons you cannot learn in a classroom.