Sunday, May 31, 2009

Lost Heart

For those who have been reading my blogs about my job hunting these past weeks--Thank you so much! =) But I want to tell you some other things that does not really play around my mind but more of my heart. When I was I kid what I wanted to become was a Businessman. A person who has the money and the brains to put up any business and will always succeed. I have a strong desire for money but more so with helping people. How? By being a good boss and giving what your people deserve. I guess that's the reason why my parents was able to convince me to become a Nurse. The first two years of nursing was really hard and I got to the point when I told my Mom that I wanted to shift to another course but she did not really listen but just told me that I might learn to love it later on. So, I went on to continue the course until I went through my internship. True enough, I've learned to love being a Nurse. Knowing that you are healing people.

Let me sway around a bit, Doctors cure, but Nurses heal. We are always the one in direct contact with the patient and relatives. We listen to their outburst and random thoughts. We touch them whenever necessary. We speak when needed. But I also realized that Nurses are under appreciated. People always talk about how good the doctors are, here in the Philippines at least. Come to think of it. Doctors only come to the patient's room once a day and spend 5-10 minutes with him/her, write his observations and orders and leaves. Then nurses carry the orders out. Then the thing is, when the order is erroneous and we failed to notice it, it backfires to the nurses. If the relative asks for their doctor and the doctor fails to make his rounds, we are in the crosshairs of the relatives. There was also this one time when a doctor told me "Don't you know that what I am doing is more important than what you do?!" in all his anger looking for the patient's chart when I was trying to finish my charting because I did his orders and I didn't know that he was already there looking for it. What the hell was that? Can he imagine a hospital without nurses? These are few of the things that I've come to realize.

Going back to what I was talking about before. It feels really good just hearing your patient say "Thank you so much for looking after me" just as he is moving out of his room on a wheelchair. It was priceless the first time I heard it. It melted my heart and it was like a dose of epinephrine that suddenly boosted my already tired body from a long duty. I get this from time to time until I finished my degree but this was not enough to make me want to pursue nursing any further. Yes, I took the board exam, became a Licensed Nurse, now a licensed Intravenous Therapist but I still don't feel the contentment from all of it. I was like "Ok, so, I have finished all of these, now what?" Just before I started to write all of this down, I was thinking of having a job wherein I personally help people. Like being in WHO or something. I'm not really sure. I think since I took up nursing I lost my direction. I don't know where to go from here. I don't want to be a Nurse--for now.

**No offense to Doctors but these are based from my experience and I'm not saying that all of you are like that. I also have friends who are doctors and they are really nice. =)**