Taking your work home with you

So my placement is at VGH. The biggest hospital in BC. Many people from  all over the province go to this hospital for care.

I am working on the Acute Medical Unit or “AMU”. My preceptor refered to the ward as a leftover pile, basically if you don’t fit into any of the other wards like: surgery, cardio-pulmonary, transplant, spinal cord, stroke, orthopedics or the ICU you get place in a bed in the AMU. So its awesome that I have been exposed to a lot of different patients. I have seen a wide variety of medical conditions, even though its only been a week.

However, patients are not only a set of vitals, or lab results or a pair of lungs or a low white blood cell count, they have complex social histories to go along with their illness. I found this hard to deal with at first working Peds in Penticton too; the foster kids who had a low chance of being adopted, the kids exposed to alcohol in utero, the kids who were born to really young parents who were trying to give their kids everything they could.

The patients at VGH are causing me to empathize as well. A lot of them have been dealt an unfair hand in life. They are just going a long doing fine and a series of really bad things happened to them and that’s how they ended up in hospital. That is not always the case though, they sometimes bring it on themselves through lifestyle choices, but still its hard to judge when you don’t know their entire life history and what had cause them to make those decisions.

Anyways, I guess it’s a part of my personality. Scratch that. I know it’s a part of my personality to care and to empathize. That is one of the reasons I chose health care and physio chose me.

Going home after the day is done I am finding it hard to switch off the empathetic part of my brain. Maybe its because its early days and I am naïve and un-jaded. Maybe also its because its all new to me and its sort of overwhelming. When my mind is not actively engaged in something else I am just thinking about the patients I saw that day and thinking about their social situation or their medical status and functional capabilities and how these things are going to play out for them for their future quality of life.

I think if this was to carry on for any length of time that I would burn out.

Hopefully it would end after becoming a little more seasoned, more experienced and less naïve.

In the meantime I am going to try a few strategies to see if I can have some brain time that’s “off” from physio.

·      Allow myself to talk about placement only until I have eaten dinner if my brain wants to go there.  After my dinner I will not dwell on any thoughts by bringing them up in conversation. I will let them go.

·      Cardio vascular exercise after placement hours to clear my head.