April 25, 2009: American Eagle Rocks!
I have made myself a promise to write at least a word or a sentence about every day in my year, as a kind of daily diary type thing. Every post will highlight something from the day and what it means, if anything.
Today was my second shift at American Eagle, a 4.5 hour shift that changed my perception of the job. I love it! I'm rocking the customer communication, the cash registers, the fitting rooms; I'm having a blast!
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Working from the Bottom Up
The medical field is a hierarchial one. And to get anywhere in medicine, it's expected that you work your way up from the ultimate bottom, from the place somewhere below scut work and above waste manager. As a pre-med, I've had four different jobs in the medical field so far. In this post I'll tell you about the grungy work that went into each and every one of them, and then maybe you'll see a theme. My red connective line this time will be 'feces'. Come with me, this will be a stomach upsetting journey.
My first stop in medicine was one I actually look back at as a rather nice memory, my time in the Emergency Department, as a volunteer. Not being formally trained, and not being paid, surely had its advantages. I'd come in after class a few days a week, stay for 3-4 hours, and go home. The work consisted of mopping up the pools of blood, urine, vomit and other fluid-based excrements, as well as changing the sheets on the various beds in the examination rooms (by room we all know that the ER means 'bed surrounded by curtains'), and empty trash cans and sharpie-boxes throughout. A janitor with patient contact, in other words. The thing about this job was, though, that the tasks themselves weren't all that time consuming, hence leaving me plenty of time to peek in on the various freak and non-freak accidents and cases presenting in this dramatic department. And yes, mere observation was worth it. I remember changing pillow cases in one of the rooms between patients one day, when one of the nurses told me to quit what I was doing so that I could see 'something I'd probably find cool'. Across the ER, a man in his 40s was sitting on his bed, sinply staring shocked at his right hand. I went in to him, and the nurse told me the reason his hand was missing 4 fingers and bleeding was that he'd put it in under his lawn mower when it sounded like it had stopped. It hadn't, and instead the blood thirsty lawn mower had feasted on the bare hand, leaving only his thumb. I felt for the man, it must have been a horrible loss and a traumatic thing to go through, but on the inside I was also shamefully excited. The nurse was right, the bloody hand was morbidly cool, and I finally knew I had at least one speciality I would add to my list: Emergency medicine.
The second job I had was not paid either, in fact it was my school practicals for the year I dabbled around in nursing. The practicals were at a nursing home (more on the indignity of this kind of institution later). Since I was more in a learning situation than anything else, I got to choose some of the things I did throughout the floor. Mostly, though, this choice came down to the morning washing and dressing of the elderly, the wiping of the elderly's poop-a (yes, I invented a weirdly sounding word for feces, since I needed a happy place to go to while scrubbing diarrea off old women), the serving of breakfast and dinner, and the occasional companionship of conversation. This was my first actual patient contact (except for
the CVC I got to assist with in the ER one time, off the record, of course), and I'm sure it can be justified as a good experience in some ways. I can not see myself working in a nursing home ever again, not so much due to the standard of care given, as to the plain boredom of the work.
Every day is exactly the same, and I just can't do that. And in addition, you are doomed to see these poor, adorable old people's souls wither away and disappear a little each day, as the routine usually incorporates at least 5 hours of nap time in the course of a typical week day. The activities offered are usually as mindnumbing as the floor itself, and some places it's like the nursing home's primary function is to save the state money by speeding up the whole death process, slowly stripping the residents of the will to keep on living. I have never actually felt the meaning of the term 'bored to death' as intensely as I did during my nursing home rotation. And I refuse to go back.
My third and fourth jobs were both paid, and thus much more hands-on and engaging. First I had a few weeks in the orthopedic ward of a local hospital, and then I transferred to one of the region's largest hospitals' Cardiac ICU. All I need to say about the orthopedic stint was that it really resembled the second job I had, and that the orthopedic part of this given hospital was mostly hip replacements for the 80+ crowd. But the Cardiac ICU, that's somewhat of a different story.
I'm still a poop-a scoop-a, let me just start by saying that. No glorifying it, I still wipe the hind quarters of both the young and old, but now they're usually incapacitated by either a AMI (
heart attack), PE (
pulmonary edema), or some form of
cardiomyopathy. And that makes it more instantly more interesting, since there's finally some acuteness and urgency to the care. Action, I guess you could call it. While performing the same washing, dressing, wiping, diaper-changing, feeding, and cleaning tasks, I'm now expected to make some more relevant observations while doing it. Observing the skin, breathing, range of motion, level of activity, and so on, in addition to documenting all the department's patient's vitals (that is, heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation and body temperature) is finally in my job description. And hey, get this: I finally get to work with advanced equipment! I get to do EKGs! Yay.. kinda. I put the stickers on the patient, connect the wires, push a button, and voilà! Out pops the sheet with heart rhytms on it. Fine, it's not rocket science, but hey, at least I make somewhat of a difference in the patients' treatment.
It's been 3 years and 4 jobs from the ER to the EKGs. I guess you have to walk before you can run, and even crawl before all that. The point is that no matter how one gets involved, as long as its in the field you love and see yourself working for real some day, the ground work will prove beneficial some day. After all, without a foundation, the house crumbles like a cookie when the storm hits.
Labels: Advice, Medicine, Pre-Med, True Stories, Work
