Today for example a suctioning lab brought back a lot of bad memories from a hospital experience I have previously had and it took a lot for me to not think about that experience and focus on the task but it was incredibly hard, now I understand what they mean by flashbacks. How can I distance myself from the pain that I could be causing because of my treatment and how can I objectively treat the patient?
I sometimes really feel these incredibly raw emotions that I have no idea how to handle, how can I handle seeing a patient struggling to breath and being powerless at helping them? How can I look at someone knowing they only have a few months to live yet have to treat them like all the other patients? How can I repress my emotions to keep my objective thoughts?
Yeah, I always thought that the hardest part of the program would be the anatomy but over the past 2 months I learned that anatomy is really straightforward, the hardest part is learning how to deal with the emotions that come with treating actual patients and actually learning to distance oneself from their problems becuase becoming too involved is very very hard and painful.
So far I have decided that dwelling on these feelings is not the best since they just encourage more negative thought process so deploring distraction is probably best. So my coping strategies have included alcohol (no surprise) although there are more unpleasant effects of this but do block these raw feelings. Other strategies I found helpful are reading something unrelated to school since somehow reading about other people's problems distracts one from my own and also my new coping strategy is writing about it, since putting it in writing somehow makes it easier to deal with the problems since I'm not thinking about a million of them at one time.
Well that's it for my very optimistic post for today, stay tuned for next time!
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