Peruse this story, if you will, and when you come back I will share my own story:

Student nurses ‘left unsupervised with patients’

Okay, so this story about nursing students’ lack of supervision has surfaced in the UK recently. I was prepared to read about something shocking, like say a nursing student who was left alone with a coding patient. Instead I read that this student was complaining that he had been left alone with a patient from a dementia unit that had soiled himself.

I do remember being a student: the horror, the feeling of ineptitude, the hopes and prayers that you don’t kill someone…but still. This is something you have to get over. If you come across a demented patient who has soiled himself, HELP HIM GET CLEANED UP FOR GOODNESS SAKE!

Students, am I being too tough here?

If you answered, yes, then you will surely enjoy this true story of my own ineptitude as a student nurse:

I was working through my med-surge rotation when one of my fellow students rounded some us up to “help him clean up his patient.” Like a good student nurse comrade I offered my help. Four of us went into the room to clean up his patient who appeared to be sleeping; very deeply sleeping. At one point one of the more enlightened of us stopped what she was doing and said, “Um, is this patient alive?” She checked the patient’s pulse, there was none.

Instead of panicking or calling a code, we all simultaneously came to the realization that this patient was, in fact, deceased. She had died during a procedure and was brought back to her room to be cleaned up so the family could visit her one last time. As far as I know, the nurse hadn’t specifically told the student that the patient had died. I think she had just said something like “Go clean up the patient in room 22 before the family comes!” And then rushed off to do something else.

At any rate, never have I felt so foolish and inept as I did knowing that I had failed to recognize that this patient was, in fact, dead. My only consolation was that 3 of my fellow students had failed to recognize this as well.

We all gotta start out somewhere, you know?