I want it so bad i can taste it

have you ever wished for something so hard and soo bad?
Have you ever hated your wall calendar before because it makes you feel like it's a silent bomb, ticking away your precious days?

welcome to the club.

This june 6th and 7th i would be sitting through an anxiety-ladden, mind-boggling major examinations that would determine my career as an RN. it's a big step in my life--my Nurse Licensure Exams.
Honestly I am sOooo not prepared for it. i have, like 34 days to go, and here i am, STARING at my nursing books, waiting some divine intervention. How on earth am i supposed to read, memorize, master all the crazy nursing subjects that we have?

and hey, to think that the exams do have lucrative questions like:
What is the secret of a woman who ages gracefully?
and the choices are like: healthy lifestyle, supportive family, etc.

geez.reaally.

i guess i just have to pray hard huh?
and start browsing through my books. wahai.
wish me luck.
wish me ALL the luck.

of the grandma i would never see again, of twilight fever and the board exam fright

I've been way too busy these past few months, so i hope you would forgive me for not updating.

with all the subjects I'm taking and the nursing audit classes putting a toll on my too-human energy, i just couldn't ask my brain cells to work way overtime and write anything for me to post.

much happened to me these past four months:

first, my maternal grandmother, the one who has lung cancer, passed away last November 24. She died due to peritonitis, a complication. (remember she just had her chemotherapy, and her WBCs are down, so she was really in a very delicate state). I cried so much for a few days and even up to now, there's still this gnawing pain i feel whenever i remember her. My aunt consoled me at the wake and told me that "at least she's no longer in pain now." i know she's right. but still i'm selfish enough to wish that she's still here with us. I guess it's because i never really had the chance to tell her that I love her. Because all the time she was having her therapy, i kept on telling myself she would survive and in the end i really believed she really would, that i didn't see the need to tell her goodbye and that i loved her.

anyway,
twilight fever had become a pandemic. And i'm one of those inflicted with it. haha. But hey i think the ones who portrayed the Cullens in the movie really did well. The twilight books are evaporating so fast from ALL the bookstores, i was even surprised to see that the little bookstore near our house was jampacked with people buying twilight series, when in all of its existence, its customers never did exceeded five at a time. hmm.
and anywhere i go, there are people carrying, buying or reading the books: malls, trains, even on the bus and on the playground!

so what am i doing right now?
i'm watching the days flew by waiting. tick-tock-tick-tock.
waiting for me to graduate, get my nursing pin, start my review classes (im really confused where i should take my review for the board exam. there are like hundreds of review centers and they all seem the same to me), take and TOP the board exam (that's the spirit, right?).

and then, what? I-REALLY-REALLY-DONT-KNOW.
i guess i'll handle things one day at a time huh?=D

Protecting and Preserving the Nursing Profession

Since the dawn of yore nurses are thought of as mortal angels--- always with a lamp, caring, giving, and not thinking of one’s own ambitious gain. It is a service that has learned to endure various mockery and ridicules associated with it. Centuries have passed and science has evolved hundredfold, unravelling new ideas and innovative ways of preserving human life. And yet nurses remain a profession different from all others mainly due to a single entity commonly tagged as the mark of each and every nurse, the calling and the essence of being a nurse: compassion.

In the country alone, we have millions of licensed nurses. It has been a popular and sought after profession as of today. Some would think that the ballooning population must have been due to dire hopes of landing on a greener pasture; but for nurses like us who have come to love the profession despite of being forced by our parents, it is a calling. A calling so loud and clear it pervades through our very bones and is absorbed by our very soul.

The sad reality is that, in a country filled with world-renowned nurses, our very hospitals stink with its dark secrets. Secrets so dark they would have been thought of as absurd and fictional.

Tough luck for poor and pregnant moms.

"It's you again? Every year you give birth! After this you should have a ligation!" one health worker recalled hearing a male doctor scold a mother in the delivery room.

Getting no reply from the helpless woman, the doctor allegedly was heard mumbling to his assistants: "I hope the baby is dead."

"He got even more angry when he saw that the baby was alive."

The same doctor, graduate from a top medical school in the country, had also performed total abdominal hysterectomy on an unsuspecting mother after she delivered her sixth baby by cesarian section.

He had removed her uterus.

When the mother woke up, the doctor told her he had to perform hysterectomy because she was bleeding profusely.

"But she was never bleeding."

After reading the news article entitled “Dark Secrets Born in Delivery Rooms” published a several years back, I was speechless. Hundreds of emotions transpired in my Amygdala, ranging from rage to the health care professionals involved, then sympathy to the patients, and finally, disappointment to the current health care system. Flocks of nursing schools evolved in the past ten years. And it seemed as though only few of them has inculcated into their students the importance of being a conscientious and compassionate nurse far above the importance of passing the board exams and their NCLEX. Maybe, just maybe, if their Bioethics classes have somehow infiltrated their souls, these dark stories would never have been born at all.

In the pledge of the American Nurses Association, this is clearly stated: “The nurse’s primary commitment is the health, welfare and safety of the client.” Nurses should foresee the needs of the patient in order to restore their optimum level of functioning by eliminating all the expected and present stressors that can inflict harm to the patient health condition. As a health care practitioner, we also have an imposed obligation to promote health and welfare of the patient above other considerations. According to one of the Universal Principle of Biomedical Ethics which is Beneficence, nurses ought to prevent or remove evil or harm and promote good.

"I was shocked." he said. "It wasn't what we were taught in school about patient care. It was completely the opposite."

He recalled one instance when a mother delivered her eighth baby on a stretcher before she could be transferred to the delivery table. "The nurses got mad and said, Why didn't you tell us the baby was about to come out?"

To punish the woman, the nurses allegedly told her to move to the delivery table by herself.

Imagine the pain. You've just delivered [a baby] and you're asked to move with no assistance whatsoever.

In this case the patient is a multigravida, a mother in labour for the 8th time. Being a knowledgeable nurse, we learned that this condition of the mother, being a multiparrous, brought about several physiologic changes to the mother already. To enumerate some, a history of multiple deliveries may bring about weakening of the perineal muscles, a wider pelvic inlet and a shorter time for the dilatation and effacement to occur. Bearing these things in mind, the nurse should expect a faster rate of delivery. As what our clinical instructors once told us, we have to be faster than the fetus, because the fetus would not wait for us to get ready. He/She will come out when he/she wants to.

In the presented above factors, the patient has neither any account nor any liabilities in delivering the baby while she is still on the stretcher. No one has any control about that. Not even the nurse. So the nurse has no right to punish the mother for having a “fast and unwarned” delivery. To punish the mother by scolding, humiliating and telling her to transfer from the stretcher to the delivery table by herself after a spontaneous vaginal delivery is a perfect example of contradicting the Nightingale Pledge. It is a clear mockery to the nursing profession. The act is considered to be irrational and totally, irrevocably unjustifiable.

I am not an idealistic person, I am well aware of the flaws of the country's Health Care System. True, we lack technologies and the problem of medical supply shortage is something we have learned to deal with every day. But being a despicable and lousy excuse for a nurse is tantamount and even worse compared to all the aforementioned problems. I was not expecting a perfect world when I entered this profession. So did my batchmates. But we were all geared up with optimism: we can make a difference.

In nursing schools we are taught how to master our skills and memorize the theories. But far beyond this tangible things we have learned from our great mentors and life experiences during our clinical rotations to various hospitals that instead of finding for the setbacks, flaws and short comings, we should realize that as nurses we are privileged to touch every person’s life and help preserve the greatest gift of God which is life.

***the article cited above was from the PDI entitled, Dark Stories Born in Delivery Rooms published in May 30, 2005***

Gratitude is Attitude

Oftentimes, a familiar storyline on a drama show would be this: children who grew up in a poverty-stricken life. They would work hard, and in the end they would become somebody they aspire for. And they would forget their parents. I told myself, their parents do not deserve gratitude from their child, because what the child has become was due to his own doing alone, and parents are not part of their success. Hence such child does not owe his parents anything. They are unworthy of receiving any appreciation.

I told my father about this while we were driving on our way home from visiting my grandmother last week. He told me that, “A good child would say thank you to parents who has provided him a good life. But a loving child would show his gratitude even though their life was not a bed of roses.”

My father then told me his life as a child. He told me that when he was 11 years old, his father died suddenly due to heart attack. My grandmother was left with 10 children, none of whom has even finished their studies.

So my father and his siblings had to work their way in high school and college. My father would tell us that during his college days, he would study during the day and work at night. What he earns, he gives it to his mother, who would add it to their food budget. My father told us he owns just one pair of slacks and polo for uniform. He wears slippers at school, his baon would be dried fish, and his bag was just a plastic bag.

Now, he is a successful businessman. His siblings are also all affluent. Some of them became doctors, while most of them are now lawyers. And yet, despite the hardship, they do not blame their father for dying early, nor their mother for not being able to provide for them a good life. Instead, my father and all his siblings would humbly say “thank you” to my grandmother for the virtues that she has instilled unto them, and for the loving support she has continuously provided them throughout her life.

Now my grandmother is in the hospital, she is currently comatose for more than a month now. And yet, her children, all living from different places and some are even well-known in their profession, would take turns to personally care for her, showing their gratitude to a mother who have devoted her life loving the children that was left for her care. And this, I realized, is the highest form of gratitude: respect for a person who took care of you with the best of her abilities, and humility to that person even after you have reached your dream in life.

Nostalgia

I regularly check other medical and nursing blogs for ideas, inspiration, and sometimes, out of plain curiosity.

I stumbled upon this blog: About A Nurse, and as i was browsing, a certain post caught my eyes. By the way, the blog writer is a Kababayan of mine, and i was deeply moved by her experiences in a foreign country. Geez. it was really illuminating. I even cried while reading her post, mainly for two reasons: one, i feel her pain and frustrations and all the hardships she had to endure (and will endure) just for the sake of keeping her job and providing a good life for her two kids. two, because i know that i would be experiencing the same horrors of living half the world away from family and friends who accept me as i am.

Don't get me wrong, i would rather stay here surrounded by all the people who adore me. But really, $160 salary/month is not really worth all the 16 hours shift per day and the 1:30 nurse-patient ratio. No matter how much i work my ass off, it wont give my parents a better life. and my younger sibling would not be able to finish college.
They are all expecting that i would land a job in a greener pasture so that everything will be better. I want it too, for my future. However, after reading the post, i asked myself if i'm prepared for all this. and i just can't give a concrete answer that soothes my soul.

to stay, and live a poverty-stricken life.
or not to stay, but have a lonely life.

why the world has bestowed upon me life's cruelest joke is beyond my ken.

welcome to the world

my sister just gave birth to a baby girl.

she's SoooO cute.

great wonders what a baby can do.

=D

saying adieu

why fate has bestowed upon me life's cruelest joke is beyond my ken.
***
i am a student nurse. i aspire to be an ICU nurse. because, like what they said, i could accept anything and everything including death. i see patients who expire right before my eyes. i emphatize with their loved ones, but i also tell myself that death is inevitable. we have no choice but to succumb to that final slumber. for me, what is important is that i have cared for my patients the best that i could, so that whether they live or die, i would not feel my conscience nagging me for being the lousiest excuse for a nurse.

***
the sad reality is that, not all health care providers have conscience. a few of them just own the title (nurse, doctor, etc) , but they don't deserve to be part of a health care team.
***
last week, my paternal grandmother slipped while inside the bathroom and sustained several fractures. she immediately underwent surgery, which was successful. she was transferred out from the recovery room to a regular room. she is ambulatory, she can even go to the bathroom with minimal assistance.



her physical therapist scheduled her therapy to start last saturday, the day that she supposedly would be discharged according to her attending physician.



2 days prior to being discharged, she was given an anesthetic drug through IV. her blood pressure dropped and she experienced numbing sensation on the arm where the anesthetic solution was pushed. my uncle, who was then present, told the nurse not to give the said medication again because of the effects aforementioned.



the following night, a Resident on Duty injected the same medication. this time it was a younger cousin who was attending to my grandmother's needs, so my cousin doesn't know about the said medication.





my grandmother said she couldn't feel her arm, and she fell asleep.

my cousin approached the nurses' station and inform them about my grandma's condition.



you know what the heck the nurse said? she said, "Oh, that's normal."

my cousin went back to my grandmother's room and still anxious, she checked my grandmother, who have lost her consciousness already.



panicking, she shouted for a nurse.



my grandmother had a cardiac arrest.

they were able to revive her (using defibrillator and epi). and end up comatosed in the ICU.

the ROD who pushed the anesthesia was nowhere to be found.



the next day, my father visited her (as he usually does everyday)

he told me that he could not bear to look at his mother (my grandma) because she was having seizure episodes.



our family demanded for an explanation. her ortho surgeon said that he does not know what happened because "it is not my forte." we called her attending physician, who just said that she also don't know what happened, and that she is still investigating the circumstances which lead to the cardiac arrest of my grandmother.





i looked up at my drug handbook for the adverse effect of the said medication. know what? it says it can cause seizure, arrythmia, respiratory arrest, and CARDIAC ARREST.

it's a CNS depressant.



the ROD cannot be contacted for her side of events.



she still hasn't shown herself to us.



i am writing this because right now, my grandmother is comatosed. the doctors said that they'll "give" my mother until thursday to regain her consciousness.and then what? make us sign DNR's?!



i cried all night because i was really close to my grandmother. she practically raised me as a child.

all my memories with her was happy. i am also full of anguish because i am a nurse, i see death lurking on shadows all the time. but i don't want her to give up, even if others say that her body is already tired and longed to give in to that 'eternal peace'.



but i just can't let her go.

i guess love really is selfish.

***

to my grandmother, i will always be your little princess. i am so sorry for the times i was unable to visit you because i was too busy studying. i really regret not having spent time with you these past few months. you know i love you dearly because you have cared for me even if you are already feeble and old.please, please don't give up. not this time. And not like this.