I am once again in the hospital, but I am okay with it and figured it was a good time to come in during my winter break.
The First day of a hospital stay is always the most nerve racking, busy, and exhausting day of the stay. I was struggling more than usual with this first day. It started off okay with people poking into say hi, it quickly went down hill when I had 2 residents and 1 med student come in on 3 seperate occasions to get my history. They are usually smart and all come in at once, or at least ask me different questions when each comes in.
As the afternoon rolled on I was hearing of meds being ordered wrong, or not at all. I fly off the handle when meds don't get ordered correctly. As my mom walked across the street to grab us dinner, I was on the verge of a break down. One more little mistake was going to throw me off the deep end. I kept myself busy while she was gone, and managed to get through the day without a melt down.
It dawned on me this evening why I was so on edge today. The control I have over my disease was taken away from me. It is like changing of the guard, and maybe next time I should have a cermony and give my inatament control over to the residents. I should explain to them what it means to give my full control of my disease to them. What it feels like to talk to 5 different people before you get the right med from pharmacy, or not being able to talk to pharmacy directly. Yes, I could be a pain and start requesting to talk to pharmacy directly, but that would put more stress on me, and less time to recover from my lung infection.
There is little I can control of my disease, but I can decide on the pills I take, the times I do my treatments, the times I do my ivs, and not be on anybody elses clock. It is hard to request times for such things when they have a million other patients to take care of.
So now that I have realized my problem, I need to learn how to fix or at least "control" it. But that brings up a good question. If I just handed all of my control over to the docs, how do I have control over anything, including my emotions. Everything that comes with the word control seems to be handed over. This is where the compassion comes in, and the surrendering to the process, and biting my tongue A LOT!
I should realize the docs have a lot to do, and they still are in training and do make mistakes. But that brings up a question in my mind. How can I trust someone who learned about Cf in a classroom, and just started practicing on us 2 weeks prior to my admission? How can I let them make decisions when they have not grown up with this disease, but only learned it about it in a text book a few years prior? How can a doctor know things about my disease when they have only had less than a decade of training? But then again, it is a job just like anything else. You become an expert in your field of training.
Now this seems to be going in circles, and I don't seem to be getting answers. I guess the only thing I can do until I come up with answers is to surrender to the process (best advice ever given to me) and see where that takes me.
Sorry for the long post. I had a lot of pondering questions. Hope all is well!
~Mags
1 comment:
I read your blog by the way! Thanks for putting up a post. I don't check that frequently, but I do look to see what my insightful maggie has to say. I hear ya sister with your post. I would love to talk to you more about it, but the simple answer to your questions is what resists persists, and you must not surrender your control, but surrender your reactivity to the situation. It is important to be the watch dog, but you gotta let that watching not cause any more problems.....
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