My first clinical

My cohort is divided into groups of 8 for clinicals.  My clinical is from 7-2 every friday at Rush where I will spend 4 weeks at the Johnston R. Bowman rehabilitation and 6 weeks in the new tower.  We spent an hour and a half just getting to know eachother and going over prodedual stuff for clinical.  Then we headed over to JRB for a quick tour before meeting our patients.  JRB is an intensive rehabilitation center where attmitted patients ages 19-90+ are required to have 3-5 hours of physical and occupational therapy per day.  The therapy center is one of a kind with a variety of tools to get patients ready for home living.  There is an actual car in there and a mock kitchen with true to weight foods for patients to start practicing real life skills. 
Then we finally got to meet our patients.  The goal of this clinical is to work on therapeutic communication and developing a relationship with patients. 


My patient was a very intersting woman and I met her while she was going through therapy.  Before retiring she was an emloyee of Rush for over 30 years and developed a clinic for epileptic patients.  She recently had back sugury and they removed a tumor that was wrapped around her spine.  She was warm and welcomed any question I asked.  While with her, the doctor came and told her that the test on the tumor came back positive with low grade lymphoma.  I wanted to be sensitive to the patient’s feelings while providing a level of comfort.  However, having only known the patient for 30 minutes I found it difficult to do so while still sounding genuine.   While she reassured me that she was fine and had been preping herself for that news since they found the tumor, I could tell it was a tought pill to swallow.  Who could blame her?!  My patient took it in stide though, she had just found out she had cancer and still wanted to finish her physical therapy.  What a champ. 


After meeting with our patients for a while my clinical group met to have lunch together and reflect on the day.  We each went around talking about our patients, what was difficult and what we learned.  For being a 7 hour day it sure flew by and I cant wait to go back to JRB next week.  I just finished my first nursing assignment which was a process recording about a conversation I had with my patients and analysing the dialogue.  It took about 3 hours to complete but I imagine the next one will go much quicker once I get feedback on my first.