Monday, August 28, 2006
~ All About Work ~
12:24:00 am
This happened not once, not twice, but umpteen times... Countless, in fact...
I'll always have both patients and relatives asking me,
"Are you Chinese or Filipino?"... And my answer will of course be,
"No, I'm a Malay."... And they'll be telling or asking me things like
"Oh, you're so fair!", "Are you mixed?" and yadda yadda...
And that's what that makes me wonder...
Which part of me looks Chinese? My eyes? Can't be cuz I have huge eyes... In fact, I've ever 'shocked' someone with my big, huge eyes... *Hehe*... My features? Well, maybe it could just be my complexion...
Which part of me looks Filipino? Well, probably on the whole cuz after all, some Filipinos DO look like Malays...
But no one have ever asked me whether I'm a Malay... Not even once, to what I can recall of... Even the Malay patients & relatives often mistook me either for a Chinese or a Filipino... Even my own colleagues thought that I was mixed or something...
Weird...
Anyway, work for the past 2 days was pretty eventful... I was doing junior with a Staff Nurse who is, well I wouldn't say new since she's my batch girl, not yet a confirmed staff... My experience? It just spells for disaster...
Yesterday, we had 4 empty beds upon taking over shift... Well, there were no Nurse-In-Charge since we only had 6 staffs on duty... In the end, we had 2 admissions and 1 transfer-in patient... I did helped quite a lot especially in the Nursing Assessment Record, Discharge Planning, etc... But guess what? Upon passing over shift, she had not done any single changes... And since I took pity on her, I took the trouble to stay behind to help her with the changes that needed to be done stat... I even had to go through the trouble to inform the doctor that the transferred in patient had an extremely low blood pressure...
And today... Practically, almost all of her changes, discharges and admissions was done by the NIC... And she didn't even complete her reports upon passing over shift... And worse still, one of the patients had actually absconded... And it was both me and the NIC who did the trouble to search for the patient, called the patient's home, informed the police and security...
I could have almost gone bonkers, man... I really didn't know what was going on with her... I could have been a b**** and left her struggling on her own but I didn't want to do that cuz I knew how it felt to be struggling alone... But hey, when most of the changes was done by the NIC and in fact, she didn't even helped during the turning rounds, so why didn't she just complete her work?
Even the simplest things like weaning of the oxygen and putting up of the intake & output chart, she couldn't tell me about it... I ended up getting 'scolded' by the PM shift junior but it wasn't my fault cuz she didn't even tell me in the first place!!
Thinking about this just irritates me... *Urrgghh*
On another hand, some of my elderly patients are really cute... There's this old lady who could only speak Cantonese and I practically know nuts about the Cantonese dialect... Well, I can still manage a few words and phrases of Hokkien but nil on Cantonese...
So, the way we were talking to each other was really like a 'chicken-and-duck' talk... *Haha*... And I'll be like
"Mmmm, yeah, yeah," each time she talks cuz I just couldn't understand any single word that she says... Well, probably words like
'orh-liu' and
'sek-yok' only...
But I've learnt that's one universal thing that is really powerful... Even to people whom you have language barrier with... Even to strangers... And that's the power of smile... *Hee*...
So moral of the story... Fione, I think you need to teach me how to speak Cantonese... *Haha*... And of course, smile always... Cuz you'll never know who's falling for your smile... But again, smile appropriately... *Hehe!*
written, NaDiaH eRNiYaNTi
