Thursday, April 10 - 9:15 PM:
At the moment I am in my psychiatric nursing clinical rotation. What I can tell you is that I think psychiatric nursing is both great and terrible, heroic and sad. What do you do with someone who is no longer able to function or someone who is so depressed or is convinced that they hear voices or that people are living in the walls of their home or who might want to kill their neighbor or thinks their neighbor wants to kill them? What do you do? If they are silent, or shun you, or tell you to go away, or say the same thing over and over and over again, what do you do? I don’t like to think about it. I would rather not have to face it. I don’t know if I could day in and day out, week after week.
I am glad there are people who choose to think about it, who get up early in the morning to walk right up to it and face it, and care enough to have hope that the answers will come to these strangers who have lost their way. I am thankful there are people brave enough to try things that have never been tried, not absolutely blindly, even if they are pretty near blind, but making as educated a guess as anyone can honestly hope to make about which treatment or drug or procedure might work for so and so. The patients are interesting, but what surprised me the most is the fact that the doctors and especially the nurses are what fascinate me in psychiatric medicine, especially the ones who have been at it for a long, long time.
I think I may have finally come to understand a bit more why doctors dash in and out of patient’s rooms in a blink and why their handwriting is so awfully messy. Following them on rounds I was impressed to see how many people with complex histories they were considering and visiting. Then I would sit with them as they sat down with colleagues for hours to discuss their patients and make treatment plans for them. Once decisions were reached one would feverishly scribble down the order on a paper chart while the resident pecked away at a computer documenting before a nurse would pick up the next piece of paper full of numbers, lab values and accounts of past events. All the while the clock ticked toward the next appointed time that everyone was supposed to be present for…another meeting, lunch, handing out medicines, that time promised to a family who is waiting to know what to do next with their father, the man in their lives who at one time had all of the answers for them.
I gained a new respect for how much these people have to do in a morning before lunch, or in an afternoon before dinner, or at two in the morning before they try to take a cat-nap, not just the doctors, but a multidisciplinary team of doctors, residents, students, social workers and nurses…people who want to help people. They are dedicated to (some even obsessed with) solving the questions in people’s lives that most of us can’t or won’t deal with.