Being a nurse is hard sometimes.

OK I take that back.

Being a nurse is hard ALL the time. LOL

But being a nurse provides you with information and knowledge that most other individuals are not privy to. By individuals I mean John Q. Public, or any non-healthcare professional. Basically anyone outside of the medicine world.

Is it just me, and I may be spit-balling here.

Is it just me, or are your personal healthcare decisions directed and curtailed by the knowledge you may have about a certain physician, doctor, surgeon, etc.

Where do you go, whom do you entrust your care to, and who do you think will treat you the way you hope and want to be treated?

Do you NOT go to a certain provider because of what you have seen professionally? Because of what your patients have had to endure? Because of what another colleague may have or have not told you?

And when a fellow colleague , friend or loved-one asks for advice? When they ask where should they go? Who do you think they should trust?

What do you tell them?

Is your advice biased? (And if it’s not, you’re lying to yourself)

Here is where the slap in the face comes in.

I am guilty of this, and I’m willing to bet a great majority of us are. We are highly guilty of NOT practicing what we preach.

Do we not educate and encourage our patients to not judge or measure their healthcare decisions by what someone else has experienced?

How many time has a patient said this to you:

“Well if I have surgery, that anesthesia stuff will kill me. It killed my mother, don’t you know?”

“Why you checkin’ my sugar? I don’t have sugar problems. Wait, this is like my sister’s friend who came to the hospital for the flu and got that Diabetes. Do I got it now? Is that why your checkin’ my sugar?”

“Why you need those things on my legs that pump up? I don’t have any blood clots? Those things caused my grandfather to have a stroke and go to the ICU. And you know what happens when you go the ICU? They kill you. That’s what happened to my grandfather.”

Every patient will react, recover and rehabilitate in their own unique way, regardless of who they know, and what happened to them. Regardless of how that person is related to them, whether kin or not.

Even with an identical procedure or illness. No two patients will have the same experience.

So why do WE think that?

Carpe Diem

Tags: care, health, knowledge, patient