We Go Together

As I was going about my business this morning (enjoying a rare opportunity to stream some of my favourite tunes while the internet holds up) I reached for my multivitamins and was reminded of something. A small detail from over a month ago that was lost in the fog of chaos at the time. I opened the safety cap, pressing down and twisting, and was brought back to the beautiful, weathered & wrinkled face of an older woman.

I don't remember the details of the patient - heck I'm not even sure which specialty they were - other than it was a child with an elderly grandmother as a caregiver. They had several liquid medications; as I was working through each one, explaining their purpose, when to give them, and how much, we came across a bit of a snag. Grandma was a champ with all the details, repeating the information back to me perfectly. But then I asked her to practice giving a dose of paracetamol.

It's not uncommon for people to have trouble with the child safety caps the first time they encounter them, which is exactly why I asked her to give it a try. This dear woman, though, despite multiple demonstrations & explanations, just could not get that cap to open. My translator and I spent a good 5 minutes on it, and though she continued to smile and laugh through the struggle, I could tell she was getting frustrated. She even tried to fake us out a few times, spinning the cap and nodding as if she had gotten it!

Finally, I reached across my translator to take the woman's hands into mine. I held the bottle, pressing her hand down on the top, and we both twisted together, successfully getting the lid all the way off. We did this once more before she was able to finally get it done on her own, multiple times, and I was confident she would be able to manage at home.

Such a trivial part of my usual day was a nearly insurmountable task for that woman. It was something she couldn't work out without experiencing what the mechanism felt like. Something no amount of explaining or demonstrating could achieve. We needed to walk together through the process, doing the work side-by-side - or hand-in-hand, in this case.

This woman was teaching me, although it took it a month to sink in, an incredibly important lesson.

Loving, serving, teaching, 'helping...' can often be a self-serving exercise that feels good for us but leaves no lasting impact on others. It's not enough to throw money at a problem, to say some half-baked platitudes, to say, "I'll pray for you," if we aren't willing to walk through the challenge with them. Empathy is one of those concepts they talk about a LOT in nursing school. I don't think it's importance can be overstated in this profession, but I also don't think it's something that can be taught in a classroom. It's something you have to experience. You have to stand awkwardly under the wing of a more experienced nurse while they help a patient through pain - physical, emotional, spiritual, or social - and you begin to understand empathy in practice. You have to resist the urge to laugh at what might seem a stupid question, and realize how unsettling and scary it would be if you didn't know the answer. Your patients teach you how to imagine their experience through their eyes, and walk together with you down this road of better understanding.

Thanks for walking alongside me.

À la prochaine,
-D