Anyone have difficulty dealing with a specific type of patient?

in your psych rotation you'll hear about transference and all that stuff. it's always hard to care for someone that touches you personally, like an old lady who resembles your beloved grandma, or your child, or...yourself. with time and practice you get used to it. in this case, as i am sure you've thought of by now, this patient has clearly not taken the good care of himself you take with your self-management. i couldn't take care of children within weeks of becoming pregnant, and it's worse now that i'm a grandma.:heartbeat i also can't stand burn units-- i do try, and i can take care of all sorts of trauma and other gore, but whatever else, my patients just gotta have skin, ya know? so i deal with these by staying the heck away from suffering children and acute burn patients, although, oddly, somehow i seem to have acquired several burn survivors in my (nonhospital) practice.

we see this a lot in nursing school-- so many students are sure they know what they want to do before they really have any clue at all as to what this marvelous profession offers. many want to be pediatric or mother-baby nurses because, ta-da, they have had contact with kids all their lives via babysitting or having them. you have been a diabetic for years, and you want to be... a cde! imagine that!

i think one of two things will happen. either you'll get used to it, or at least learn how to cope with it (perhaps with a little session or two with the friendly counselors whose business it is to help people like you with problems like yours) and you'll go on to the point where as a hotshot cde you'll pick up dead toes off the mattress with nary a qualm. or ... you'll discover something else in nursing that just jumps up and grabs you, and five years from now you'll wonder why the heck you ever wanted to do anything else.

meanwhile. remember: breathe. people get dizzy with hypercarbia, and they also stimulate the vagus nerve when they hold their breaths in an unconscious valsalva which drops their heart rate. either way, it's not a good way to work . time passes.