yesnoyes

A nurse I worked with once told me about a similar problem he'd had, except the patient's urethra was significantly ABOVE the privy parts. He told me he felt so bad for the patient, he'd been digging around trying to find the right place and just couldn't. Turns out the patient didn't realize she was built a bit differently either, and just found out as a result of this experience, at 80 years old.

We've all been there. Seriously. I remember my very first foley insertion, I was going along doing everything absolutely fine, until it came time to drape the patient. You know when you have sterile gloves on, and you have to pick up the fenestrated drape in that specific way, with the corners between your index and middle fingers, palms facing ahead of you, with the drape over them? So you don't break sterility while putting the drape down? For some reason I just COULD NOT figure out how to hold my hands to get that drape up. My instructor was there with me, she even pulled out a kleenex to demonstrate for me and I could NOT do it. It honestly took like seven minutes for me to figure it out. I was almost in tears. The patient wasn't super impressed either, but thankfully he was quite pleasantly forgetful and managed to forget I was an idiot by the next time I saw him. But oh my god. SO embarrassing. And of course this was near the beginning of the rotation, so my instructor thought I was a total idiot right off the bat...

I agree. I personally wouldn't say I feel satisfied, specifically, but I definitely do feel relieved and less anxious while caring for them.

I am also grateful for nurses that let me work with them during clinicals. Even aside from my clinical instructor, who, by the virtue of his/her job, signed up to work with students; I'm thankful for that RN that showed up at 7 AM only to be told "Oh hello! You're Susie? My name is Emily and I'm working with your patients X, Y and Z today." They don't know in advance they have students and I know for a FACT that some days we are EXHAUSTING. But I am so, so grateful for all of them, particularly those that take the time to show me how to do things, save me some skills on their other patients, and even THANK me at the end of the day for my help. My gosh. I get a little teary thinking about all of the nurses that have helped shape me into the (nearly finished) nursing student I am today.