Well normally I would have lecture tonight and be able to come back here and post scintillating information about whatever diseases we learned about that night, but alas, that is not to be! Its the day before Thanksgiving, so no class tonight! Whee!!!!!!!! And clinicals are over for this semester too, so my weekends are my own once again until the end of Jan.
Anyway, what I really wanted to post up about tonight is this really crazy dream I had last night. I dreamed that I was in the hospital, during clinical. I was on the same unit that I have been on all semester, except that it wasn't that unit. You know how in dreams you might be at your friend's house but the actual building around you is NOT your friend's house? That type of deal. I was also with my same instructor from this semester, as well as all of the same group members I was with. Anyway, I was in my patient's room getting ready for the day. Now in real life, we are assigned to one patient for both Saturday and Sunday, and we are expected to attend to all of their needs, including bathing, helping them eat, helping them walk around, etc, and we also administer medications one of those days. In this dream the patient that I had in the beginning was a woman I had never seen before, and she was what we in the nursing community call a "walkie-talkie". A "walkie-talkie" is a patient that is alert and oriented (ie not confused), can walk around without worry that they will fall on you, and is independant with all their self care needs (ie bathing, eating, toileting). Basically a nursing student's dream patient.
So, getting back to the dream. I was in this patient's room, and my instructor walks in with a few other students, including one of my friends that was in my group in the dream, but not in the program anymore in real life. My instructor tells me there is a patient on the unit that is dying, and she wants me in there with this patient today because all of my other classmates have already seen someone die. (Which is not the case at all, only one person in my group was actually with someone when they died this semester). I started FREAKING OUT that I did not want to see anyone die, and that I was afraid to touch a dead person. I really am terrified of touching dead people. I am scared I'm going to touch them and they'll pop up and be like, "BLLLAARRRRGGGGHHH" or something. I guess I have watched one too many zombie movies.
In the dream, my friend demonstrates to me how a person screams just before they die, and that made me get even more upset, but my instructor told me it was just something I would have to do.
So I get to the patient's room and the room is HUGE, probably close to 5 regular hospital rooms put together, but its what you would imagine a 1950's hospital room would look like. There are 3 CNA's in there taking care of this woman who is elderly and morbidly, morbidly obese. She was wearing an oxygen mask, breathing very fast. The CNA's keep trying to raise the head of her bed, and end up raising it to the point where the bed is perpendicular to the floor and the woman slides down the bed onto the floor, so they pick her up and put her back in the bed and lower it so she is laying flat on her back. At this point she starts seizing, so they raise the head of the bed to about a 45 degree angle and she takes off her mask, looks at me, and asks me to please pray with her. There is a rosary on her side table and she hands it to me and I start saying the rosary. After a while, it looks like she's not going to die yet, so my instructor has me leave the room. Finally, another of my classmates comes running in the room saying it looks like she's going to die at any minute. I walk back in and instead of this morbidly obese elderly woman in the bed, it is the same woman, but she now she is very thin and fragile looking. There is a priest in the room and everyone is singing, "Amazing Grace." For some reason, only the priest and I know the words because we are the only two Catholics in the room, but I know that's ridiculous because pretty much all Christian denominations sing that song. Anyway, that's how the dream ended. I never actually saw her die.
So now I'm wondering what does this mean? I mean, I know that actually seeing someone die is probably one of my biggest fears. So is having to touch a dead body. Nurses do BOTH of those things on a pretty regular basis, so I'm going to have to get over that. I don't know. Any ideas?
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