Saturday, July 04, 2015

Life at the Bottom of the Pile

As I fumble about learning new skills at the vet clinic, I make mistakes. Thankfully, none of them so far have been irreversible. 

I hold bottles of drugs up next to doctor instructions, double checking the name (I have to learn the drug name, the commercial name, and the shorthand name because different doctors and nurses use different names). I double check the amount I need to pull, pull it into a syringe, then double check that ("measure twice, cut once" applies here). Many of the injectable drugs that we regularly use for pain relief or sedation can kill an animal just as well as they relieve pain or sedate if given in the wrong dose. When I have to calculate the milliliters of drug that I need, I write the calculation on the back of the care flow sheet so that if questions come up later, I can "show my work." Mistakes in these tasks would not be irreversible.

The night nurses have to round with the day nurses at the shift change (7am). Almost every morning, the day nurse calls me out on something I did during the night but didn't record properly on the flow sheet, or points out that I failed to complete something that needed to be done, like get a couple of blood pressure readings or weigh the animal.

Part of learning is making mistakes. I learn quickly, I learn best by doing, not watching. And I own my mistakes. I apologize if that is necessary, correct the problem if I can, but always, always, I admit that I made an error. I also say, it won't happen again, and I make sure that it doesn't.

In fact, I turned my learning curve into a bit of a running joke: if something goes afoul, I'm almost certainly responsible for it. That sort of backfired because then I started getting blamed for all kinds of canine flatulence and dead batteries and paper cuts and other random things. It was all in jest, and I'm glad my co-workers think it's okay to tease me, but the jokes increased my worry that I was hindering more than helping.

To my complete surprise, the nurse that I've worked with the longest told me tonight that she really enjoys working with me, and that while I say that I know nothing, she thinks that I actually do know a lot. I found myself almost getting teary. I thanked her for telling me, told her that it meant a lot to me that she said that, and continued loading more piss-soaked and bloody towels into the washing machine (I wear gloves when handling the laundry).

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