Second Career, First-Time Lessons
A 57-year-old nursing student learns about patient care
Gary Sorock
“Take early retirement,” my
Toward the end of my first semester, I had a clinical placement in a long-term-care facility. Working with and caring for older adults was the reason I chose nursing as an encore career, following a 25-year career as an injury epidemiologist, and so I eagerly awaited the first day.
One of my first tasks at the nursing home was to give a bed bath to an 85-year-old man who was severely disabled by rheumatoid arthritis in his hands. When I quietly looked in on him, he was sleeping and appeared a little scary with his mouth open and partly uncovered. His nursing aide introduced us. I was worried about getting his bath water warm enough and having to clean between his legs. But my concerns were unfounded – he ended up walking me through the entire procedure, picking up on my anxiety as a first-time, bed-bathing, nursing student.
As I gently washed his eyes the second and then the third time, I felt an intimate closeness I had not expected. He was a gentle soul, who told me about his WWII adventures in
Another part of our curriculum involved interviewing a “standardized” patient who had high blood pressure and other “more personal concerns.” Our goal was to find out about her concerns and check her vital signs. A few minutes into the interview it became clear to me that she had something on her mind.
I asked her about it and she told me that her father, who had just moved in with her, had Alzheimer’s disease and could no longer recognize her. She was worried about not knowing what the future course of his condition would be and how to best care for him at home. I listened as best I could, but remained focused on my task, talking about her blood pressure being back to normal after a course of a month of medication she had just started. At that point she began to cry.
In retrospect, I should have said, “You know, it appears to me that you are really stressed by your current home situation with your father;” or “What are you doing to cope with this stressful situation now?” or “How have you coped in the past with similar situations?” I could have shared with her that my own grandfather had Alzheimer’s disease and that I understood the difficulty of dealing with such a situation at home. Perhaps, I could have helped her locate a local chapter for an Alzheimer’s disease mutual-aid/self-help group or referred her to a social worker.
In our debriefing session after the interview was over, my “patient” echoed the thoughts I was having myself. She said that I was very skilled technically but did not give her what she was looking for. She said she wanted to hear something that would give her hope that she will be able to manage her current family situation. But I only gave her numbers.
As I am coming to learn, empathy and hope are core values in health care. But as of yet, we rarely discuss them in our classes. Why is that? Is it because they are too intangible, and can’t be easily measured on a scale of 0-10? But then again, when I was younger, I became ill with a chronic disease. I received medication and am fairly certain that part of the reason why it proved to be so effective physiologically was because I put a lot of hope into the treatment working.
When we get out of the classroom and into the clinical practice, remembering to have empathy and to give hope will be indispensable assets to being good healthcare providers. I hope that the next semester reinforces these qualities for me, and I will continue to work on developing them.