The Day I Learned To Take A Blood Pressure

It takes me a long time to do it, but I'm getting faster. I am pretty much constantly overwhelmed thinking about all of the things I have to learn, so it feels good to finally have one thing I can do.

In one of our labs this week, we were learning about how to do some other basic things like make the bed when the patient is in it, or how to bathe them. I really like the nurse who teaches that lab. Before we started going over the details of all of these tasks, she talked for a while about how important they are. It is easy to think of them as pretty boring things to be checked off a list, but they're actually a huge opportunity to communicate with the patient and to help them be more comfortable. She talked about her dad who has worked on a farm since he was 13 and how, if he ever has to go to a hospital and can't do things like bathe himself, he would be completely humiliated and it would be incredibly difficult for him. She reminded us that a lot of people are in that situation - they've never had to let someone else do all of these things for them. And so some of them are crabby or angry or depressed and they might be really irritating, but you have to think about what they might be going through and how you can make it easier. Everybody in a hospital has a life that they have just been plucked from, and for lots of them it's not ever going to be the same again.

It made me think about my grandma after she had her stroke and she could only move her left arm and we weren't even really sure how much she was aware of what was going on around her, but every time we needed to change her gown or her sheets or clean her up, her little left hand would always be pulling down her gown because she was so modest, she wanted to always be covered up. I thought it was so cute of her. Sorry for lifting up your gown a little too high a few times, grandma. I'll try not to do it again.

I guess all of this meant a lot to me because I think that the main reason I wanted to be a nurse was to help make things a little less hard, and a little more comfortable. I feel like I have started to believe less in big things - big changes, big ideas, big solutions - and more in little things. Not that we shouldn't try for big, good things because you have to try. Just that the importance of little things should not be discounted. For me, one of the main lessons of living and working in New Orleans was that all of the big things can't be fixed. For many people, it is not ever going to be better, or be the same as it was before. But you can take time to listen to people without needing to fix everything, and you can help them to feel in control of their lives again, even if it's just in little tiny ways.