Losing a patient never gets easy and neither does delivering anything but compassionate care. I commend and thank our instructor for sharing the story about the death of her daughter today, as I am still shaken up.

I am proud that I have cried during rounds and have held patients and their loved ones while they (and I) cried. This week, we have talked about how little support loved ones receive following the inpatient death of a patient. Not to belittle this fact at all, but tonight, some of us talked about how little grievance support there is for medical staff.

I found out that one of my favorite patients died in November through snap chat, and I am beyond ashamed to admit this fact. His death was written on the white board of our work room – as if this announcement was comparable to our unit’s hand-washing statistics.… Continue reading →

“What we call experience is often just a dreadful list of mistakes” 

Poetically, this was the first post I saw on my Facebook timeline after class. Today, and our assigned readings, have really resonated with me. I taught nursing students last semester and my elective course this summer is on clinical teaching. The past two weeks we have been learning about clinical mistakes and resilience. The literature is 100% correct: in nursing school, we are NOT taught about our inevitable imperfection. We are NOT explained that mistakes can, should, and will happen during clinical rotations where the setting is more controlled and supervision is heightened. We, as nurses, are primed to be perfect and concurrently set up for failure. I left class today empowered with even more confidence in acknowledging that I am not, nor will I ever be, a perfect provider and that is OKAY. I… Continue reading →