This weekend I had the distinguished honor to attend the nursing school graduation ceremony where I saw eight former students become nurses. It was an interesting experience for many people, but most of all I found the paradoxes entertaining. Despite all the other times I hear the cliches about nurses and care, they continued to preach them from the pulpit, and one of the students still believes she's a nurse because she cares about people. How I love naivete!
First among the paradoxes comes the fact that nursing students are not treated with care. Besides the tongue in cheek references to courses or professors the graduates detest, it struck me that the people reading names didn't care enough to ask ahead of time for help pronouncing difficult names. some of the graduates confided in me how poorly they were treated by professors. Just like my own graduate school experience, the nursing faculty seems to think themselves gatekeepers for whom they deem worthy rather than being objective. I know that these students go through a grueling academic regimen only to expect further mistreatment.
One of the speakers spoke about how hard their next year will be. The torture isn't even over yet. These are now brand new nurses, and senior nurses will treat them like incompetent boobs even though these students perhaps worked with those same nurses as students. The hours suck. The load is enormous, and they'll need the four days off every week to recuperate from being overworked and overrun. Some of them will quit after a few years because they burn themselves out trying to get extra shifts and spend their own efforts going above and beyond. there are too many patients and too few people caring for them to do it well, no matter what the keynote speaker admonished.
Finally, the act of nursing begins by dehumanizing the patients. They come in, and we ask them to disrobe, leaving them naked in front of strangers. Then we poke them, prod them, inject them, inspect them, detect them, and all too often neglect them. As a speaker detailed some experiences, it struck me that hospitals resemble in some ways the death camps of genocidal regimes. We distill people down to numbers and treat them like cattle and then claim we care? I don't think that's possible. Deep down, people fear this treatment and consequently delay attending physician visits until the conditions grow worse. In our hour of greatest vulnerability, we stand completely naked in front of strangers who may not have time to care. They see everything, except they do not see us as we are. Patients are people too.
What's missing most from academia, from medicine, and from society generally is a recognition of the humanity of man. A car cuts us off on the highway, and it's easy for us to condemn because we do not know them. It's easy to steal or take advantage of others because we will not see them suffer. it's easy to poke and prod patients because we don't know their pains or travails and because we won't see them again. It's easy to drone on and on as a guest speaker in front of a room of people you never before met and probably won't see again. We forget all too often that what we do always affects people. People need our patience, they need our love, and they need us to pay attention to the fact that they are people too, people who hurt, who bleed, who feel, and who are loved as we are. I know it's easy to point out the problem, but I don't think you can really care about or for people you don't actually know. The patients who feel we really do care can tell. One day, you may be that patient. Will anyone care for or about you?
No comments:
Post a Comment