Bad placements and failing (again)

I have mentioned before on a few occasions the "bad placement", that thing that most (if not all) student nurses encounter at one point or another. I was a little cocky and smug about the fact that although I have had placements that I have enjoyed less than others I have never had a really bad placement. However, this semester this all changed:

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First off, and this part was no-one's fault, I was pitched from pillar to post and back again due to a missing mentor, a secret reshuffle of placements and a bit of miss communication. After all this, a week into my placement I was moved from my nice, if a little dull, placement in a doctors surgery to a team of "district nurses" about 7 and a half miles away.

My somewhat temperamental baby 

So - off I set on my trusty steed to the office where I was told I would meet my mentor a "district nurse" - I arrived 15 minutes late due to a left turning that I made for no apparent reason, to meet my mentor D. I was quickly corrected and told that despite being informed that this was a team of district nurses - I was actually going to be working with a team of health visitors (HVs).

Now, for those of you who don't know (this included me prior to this placement) the HVs are the nurses who take over from the community midwives when your baby is 14 days old, and will continue to monitor the child's health and development up until the age of 4, when school nurses take over. 

I am an only child ... we wont go into my in-depth
knowledge of Balamory.

As an adult nursing student I felt a bit lost, the other student on the placement was a children's nurse and so was at an advantage to me, in that she'd spent 18 months working with children and learning how to interact with parents and children while my involvement with babies and their families was few and far between. I have friends with babies and small children and while I can do playing with Lego, and singing along to Balamory (really showing my age here). My medical knowledge of children and their development ect. is patchy at best. And I felt out of my depth pretty much straight away and I will be the first to admit that I didn't address that as well as I should have done. In fact I dealt with that pretty bloody badly by going a bit quiet and rabbit-in-the-headlights-y. 

The placement was not only completely outside of my comfort zone it was also a total baptism of fire, I like to think of myself a reasonably un-shockable young woman, I am used to people destroying themselves or being destroyed by others but some how in all of this I had completely neglected to consider people who harm children. They are always so pure and un-complicated to me, children, they have the whole of their lives before them and they are filled with possibility - and who could want to hurt that? Now I'm not naive, I'm not unaware that people do hurt children, however I suppose I always thought in my safe, if complicated, family that occasionally bad people hurt children, but it's rare and they are bad people. Black and white, crystal clear and simple.

I was wrong.

Sometimes hurt and destruction is born of love, the mother who can't see she is hurting her child, the abusive father who really does believe that it was all a mistake and will never happen again. And everything in between, from the people who haven't got the capacity to care for their child, no matter how much they love them and would never actively hurt them, to the people who are poor decision makers and believe the lies of the people they love. This struck a chord regarding my own family, and while that isn't something that I'm going to go into right now, this made it very hard to deal with some of the cases I had. 

It taught me that I have a long way to go before I can really be detached and view every patient I see and case that passes through my hands with total detachment and impartiality. And on the flip side is that a good thing? Should we, as health care professionals want to be detached? Or is our humanity part of what makes us good nurses? I have no idea in truth, but I think being truly impartial and un-shockable is probably a good thing.

I hated that placement, I am sorry - but I really did, I felt physically sick most days and lost every single moment. I had a bit of a run in with my mentor D, which again I wont go into for the sake of professionalism but - give me half a bottle of wine and you might just get it out of me. So all in all ... not an overall success.

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Talking of not succeeding, you may recall (or maybe you have better things to remember) I spoke a long time ago about a three hour exam this semester. 

Which has now been and gone

YAY!

And I've had the results back

So much less yay

I failed, I essentially drowned the patient in saline and then didn't create a good therapeutic relationship with her father which is a massive failure on the whole. But it's OK, it's all cool - I have a re-submission, one last chance to save myself before I'm chucked back into the sea of would be nurses.

So that's just ... bloody brilliant!