I met a boy this week. He is 16. He told me that he likes school and gets good grades. He asked me if I like my job; he wants to be a firefighter. We had this conversation as I was shoving gauze into the nearly 20 bullet holes tunneling into his body.
He is lucky that he was able to have a conversation at all. I feel lucky to have had one with him. The first day I took care of him he was still intubated and sedated, unable to talk, barely responding to commands to move his fingers and toes. He nodded yes and no to the questions a detective asked him. Police, nurses, and surgeons were all impressed that he was alive after the shooting, when whoever did this to him stood over him and fired repeatedly into his chest.
He told me that he isn't in a gang, that he was in the wrong place in the wrong time. The detective seems to think someone close to him is in a gang and that's why he was targeted. Regardless of who he knows, what he does in his spare time, or where he was at any given time, it is all so SENSELESS. It makes me angry at a society that has bred children who shoot other children; a system where guns are so plentiful and readily available. Mind you, I have never been a proponent of gun control.... but seeing up close and personal the havoc they wreak on a human body has definitely given me food for thought.
I probably won't see him again. Today is my day off, and by the time I am back on this weekend he will most likely have been moved out of the ICU to make room for the next patient or victim, shuffled along through the hospital until he is stable enough to go home and continue the long recovery process that surely lies ahead of him. He can't move or feel anything on one of his limbs now. I hope that the surgeons are able to work some miracle and restore full function to him. He will need it if he wants to fight fires someday.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
12.1.09
So apparently I am not so good at regularly updating my blog. STOP THE PRESSES!! Seriously though, no big shock there. I will now add blogging to the list of things I am horrible at, despite my best intentions: writing letters, doing laundry, grocery shopping, Skyping my sister, and lately, riding my bike. :(
My sister, speaking of, never ceases to amaze me. I jokingly call her my "mini me" but she is really so much more than I could ever dream of being. She is a pre-med student yet somehow finds time to run marathons and volunteer at homeless shelters, among countless other extra-curricular activities. Did I mention that she is studying abroad in Costa Rica right now? And that she is leaving her host family early to volunteer at a hospital in Honduras? Amazing, right? Read more about her adventures here!
As far as my comparatively mundane life goes, not much to report. I have been bounced around to several units and two different shifts at the hospital to continue my orientation. While in theory, orienting to different settings with different patients and different nurses is providing me with some great experience.... it is also making it a bit harder to find my "groove". After a few days on one unit or shift, I seem to get my bearings and feel semi-competent. Unfortunately at that point I am moved again and start all over. I was so happy to finally get back to my home unit but I then had a couple of really bad days that left me feeling incompetent and scatterbrained, which in turn led to a lot of laying awake at night beating myself up over things I "could have maybe done differently." Needless to say, not a productive use of my time, especially much-coveted time off over the holiday (since I'm still on orientation I get holidays off... SCORE!).
Somewhere around my second semester in nursing school I realized that this was the kind of job that no one is really great at when they start. No matter what your GPA in nursing school is, you aren't a "good" nurse right away. It takes time. Since that point, I have tried to mentally prepare myself for this feeling. Unfortunately all the mental preparedness I could muster wasn't enough. It still SUCKS. This post from Not Nurse Ratched compares being a new nurse to being a newly licensed driver, and it makes a lot of sense to me. Being granted a drivers' license doesn't mean you are a good driver, it just means you meet some minimal standard of safety. I don't remember there being a tangible transition from "new" driver to "experienced" driver but it definitely happened somewhere along the way. I suppose I just have to trust that with time and experience and continued focus on learning, the same sort of transition will happen for me in nursing. Some days, I wish there was a fast forward button though.
My sister, speaking of, never ceases to amaze me. I jokingly call her my "mini me" but she is really so much more than I could ever dream of being. She is a pre-med student yet somehow finds time to run marathons and volunteer at homeless shelters, among countless other extra-curricular activities. Did I mention that she is studying abroad in Costa Rica right now? And that she is leaving her host family early to volunteer at a hospital in Honduras? Amazing, right? Read more about her adventures here!
As far as my comparatively mundane life goes, not much to report. I have been bounced around to several units and two different shifts at the hospital to continue my orientation. While in theory, orienting to different settings with different patients and different nurses is providing me with some great experience.... it is also making it a bit harder to find my "groove". After a few days on one unit or shift, I seem to get my bearings and feel semi-competent. Unfortunately at that point I am moved again and start all over. I was so happy to finally get back to my home unit but I then had a couple of really bad days that left me feeling incompetent and scatterbrained, which in turn led to a lot of laying awake at night beating myself up over things I "could have maybe done differently." Needless to say, not a productive use of my time, especially much-coveted time off over the holiday (since I'm still on orientation I get holidays off... SCORE!).
Somewhere around my second semester in nursing school I realized that this was the kind of job that no one is really great at when they start. No matter what your GPA in nursing school is, you aren't a "good" nurse right away. It takes time. Since that point, I have tried to mentally prepare myself for this feeling. Unfortunately all the mental preparedness I could muster wasn't enough. It still SUCKS. This post from Not Nurse Ratched compares being a new nurse to being a newly licensed driver, and it makes a lot of sense to me. Being granted a drivers' license doesn't mean you are a good driver, it just means you meet some minimal standard of safety. I don't remember there being a tangible transition from "new" driver to "experienced" driver but it definitely happened somewhere along the way. I suppose I just have to trust that with time and experience and continued focus on learning, the same sort of transition will happen for me in nursing. Some days, I wish there was a fast forward button though.
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