Life is Beautiful

A couple days ago I was a yoga-doing, herbal tea-sipping woman reading in bed about Rembrandt.

What happened to the stressed out Nursing Student?

Well, she re-surfaced the next day. Don't worry.

I just wanted the world and myself to know that I am capable of doing cool things like Yoga and reading for Humanities.

This semester seems as though it will be intense, but it really hasn't picked up yet (hence the reason I have time to post). I am loving my D&C class, Humanities 202 class, and surprisingly...my Psychiatric Nursing Class! Acute Care (ICU) class is okay so far--after all, any class that is three hours long is hard to love. Back to Psych: I am doing my clinicals at the University of Utah Neuropsychiatric Institute (UNI) in Salt Lake. Each week I dread waking up at 5 am and am less than happy to be going, but then I go to clinical and LOVE it!

This past week for an assignment we did a video-taped role play. I acted out the role of a psychiatric nurse counseling with another student playing the role of patient with a mental disorder. The point of the assignment was to work on communication skills. Sounds easy enough, huh? Well, that's what I thought too so I didn't study or prepare beyond glancing at a sheet of "therapeutic communication skills."

It turns out that watching and evaluating the recording with my teacher was the longest, most drawn-out 8 minutes I've had in a while.

Painful.
Embarrassing.

I remember vividly the TWO times my teacher made a positive comment (I'm proud to say that I'm somewhat capable of doing a suicide assessment and asking an open-ended question. yay.)

As my teacher talked to me and gave examples of how to communicate with psych patients--how to dig deeper and get to the root of their problems, I realized that communication is an art...one that I need to practice.

To demonstrate, my teacher asked me questions and I pretended to be the patient, I was amazed at how AWESOME she was at communicating. By the end of the little demonstration I almost believed that I WAS depressed and thinking about OD'ing on Ibuprofen (really just kidding).

So communication has been on my mind a lot lately. Maybe there'll be more on that later. And maybe I'll start reading for Psych class.