Aug 30 2007
Last week of the first quarter, or, The beginning of the rest of the year
Last week of the summer (first) quarter. I’m responsible for total care of one patient. I think I managed it pretty well…except one day when I was so engrossed in the care of one woman that I forgot to give an antibiotic to another patient. This was a good lesson learned: It’s all too easy to give my all to a patient, but I can’t afford to do that. I need to stay vigilant of the fact that other patients relying on me.
I got to change the dressing of a deep wound abscess. Instead of freaking out about it, I dove right in. I know myself—if I didn’t dive into it, it would’ve built up into this scary concept in my mind. My patient and compassionate clinical instructor guided me through the process…It was like 80 degrees in the room on one of these recent hot San Francisco days. As sweat slowly beaded up on my forehead, I prodded a long Q-tip into a wound on a guy’s back. “Pry deeper,” my instructor told me, because there was “tunneling” beneath the skin that one couldn’t see but that had to be packed with gauze so that it would heal properly. I prodded deeper. And deeper. After determining how far the abscess went, I withdrew the Q-tip and slowly packed in the gauze until the inch-deep wound was filled in. I covered it with the right materials and signed the date, time and my name. There was my first mark.
Last week of the first quarter. I feel like I’ve been in school for 6 months instead of two. My classmates all look at one another and marvel at how far we’ve come. It’s a pretty amazing feeling.