I'm Back!

SO it has been over a year since I have come back from Africa and I just wanted to let you know I am going to start posting again! I would like to say it is because of great demand but the truth is... I need to write here... I think it might be cathartic for me. I started a job on August 8th and after about 3 weeks I was already tired, stressed and a little jaded! Sure acute care is intense and fast and you need to know a lot about medicine... I like that part... the hard part is the sick people. (pause for sarcastic comments about working in a hospital) I don't easily brush off other people's pain and suddenly I am surrounded by lots of pain! As a student I really struggled with the physical pain... patients yelling or crying because it just hurt so bad. My heart would drop a little each time. But now I am struggling with the emotional and mental pain. Years of family pain brought to the surface by an aging parent who is no longer safe at home. Anxiety of being in a new place with a different language where you either can't hear or you can't understand. And now that I am an OTR/L, it is my responsibility to recommend where I believe in my expert opinion a patient should go. Anyway I need to find the gold nuggets. The bits of my job that remind me why I went to school and why OT is such a good fit for me. I like to think I am compassionate. I acknowledge that I will become jaded by the system and angry at it's injustices and frustrated by my inability to do anything about them. But I don't want to become jaded toward patients or to what I am doing. I don't want to blow off my job or my patients because I can't handle the pain... but I sure can't ignore the pain. And I am an extrovert so talking/typing is helpful in processing. I think that some days the pieces of good will be easy to see... like yesterday when a patient told me that I had a great personality for what I was doing and how she liked me and thought we could be friends in different circumstances. How delightful to be that kind of encouragement to someone in the 30 minutes I have with them. And the very next patient was comfortable enough to ask how he was going to wipe his butt with hip precautions! Last night I was thinking if I could just do the orthopedic case load everyday I would have more obvious moments like these. But today I think differently. I had to evaluate a little old white haired lady. This is not unusual since about half of my patients fit this criteria! But this lady had an old stroke and the left side of her body was contracted. She was on a stretcher looking lost, confused and afraid, her only ability to communicate was with her eyes and face. I was one of four people who transferred her back to her bed and it took two of us to sit her on the edge of the bed and one of us to keep her sitting up. At one point during the beginning of the process I just went to her side and held her hand and introduced myself. When our eyes locked, she had a flash of recognition, and I thought "she thinks she knows me". I started thinking... do I look like someone in her family? or one of her care takers? this could be my mom in 20 years... this could be me in 50 years... alone in a sterile place where strangers are pushing and pulling and demanding. Several times during the assessment I found myself holding her hand and she continued to look at me like she knew me. and I swear that when I spoke to her a little fear left her eyes. It wasn't until I was writing her note that I realized I had seen her before and assessed her... could she have possible recognized me from when I saw her last month? Could it possibly be that in her limited awareness she looked into my eyes and her soul said "we could have been friends in different circumstances"