Their Real Battle

This is our first day of clinical duty at EENT department. I am excited as curiosity pours my mind about what is done in this department for I haven’t been in exposed in areas like Out-Patient Department nor to a JICA unit. As we are new to the area, our instructor oriented us in the different parts of OPD Department. Unfortunately, I was not assigned at the ophthalmology care unit because only two students were to be designated to take the area. Instead, I was assigned at the Acute Psychiatric Unit together with my 2 classmates. We were laughing because we were titled “BS Nursing major in Vital Signs”. To make the task easy for the three of us, we worked as a team and not as individual nurses handling one client each. Nerie was assigned in taking client’s respiratory rate as she document the vital signs taken. Noel was assigned to take the blood pressure of the client as he waits for the thermometer to take effect to get the client’s temperature. Lastly, I was assigned to take the client’s pulse rate and also to entertain newly arrived clients as I look for their record charts. That day, there are no new admissions so we are not able to take the whole experience of being assigned in the area. Hehe. With the experience we had, I realized that our exposure there is not really the same to the experience that we had in Mariveles Mental Ward even if they are both psychiatric case. Beside with the differences in the flow of the activity, the patient themselves are also different from the patients we had in the previous institution. The patients we had this time are more disciplined because they themselves know that they have a mental illness and that if they not go for treatment, they will be brought to a mental institution to go for forceful treatment. They themselves are in the world of reality and if they don’t do something, they will lose their battle in the real world…