Nursing School in my third week.

[rivulet027]

We started clinicals this week. Yesterday upset me. The staff was mocking one of their patients. While I can understand that the patient was difficult and the need to vent, it wasn't appropriate. This was one of the patients that I was working with and so I tried to answer the patients call light and take care of any requests. I was shadowing the nursing assistant in the morning and she was more than okay with my taking over assiting that patient since everything the patient requested was within where I am in the program to provide. Halfway through the morning we switched off and I was with a nurse. The nurse confided in me that we had to go into that patient's room and she had been avoiding it as long as possible because she'd heard about how difficult the patient was. I managed to tell her with honesting that the patient had been nothing but polite and apprecuative in all our interactions. This seemed to change her approach and she was polite and so was the patient. Later though the staff was taking a break at the nurses station and they had included two of my classmates. The staff was gossiping about the patient and my classmates were just watching and aborbing this. I walked up to my nurse to let her know I was done with the task I'd been off doing and to see if there was anything else she need, but then she tried to include me in the gossip/mocking my telling me something about how the patient chose to express themselves. I told her that it was okay and she blinked at me a moment and responded, "I know its okay." Thankfully I only had to throw my instructor two looks and she was quickly removing all of us from the situation, which I was grateful for because I was about to take her aside and ask how to handle this. The whole thing was fustrating. I'm a student, a guest, it was my first day working with people that I will be working with until Dec. and while I didn't participate in the mocking and stopped it when it was being done around me I wish there had been something more I could've done. I wanted to bring it up in post conference but my instructor made it clear she wanted me to talk about the blood transfusion that I had watched and she rushed us through talking about what we had learned. I also go a feeling that she didn't want to talk about it.

On a better note I took my first test today. I think I did well. I didn't find the test difficult and only felt shaky on about five of the questions. I did however figure out that I answered one of the questions wrong and am going to review that material later tonight after I get my lab time in.