Everywhere you look, there is some reminder of the upcoming election. (I’m not signing up for a job!) But then I realized that sometimes being a nurse is like being a president.
No. Air Force One won’t come by this morning to get you to work. Most likely, you don’t have a detachment of Secret Service personnel to keep an eye on you around the clock. There isn’t a marching band that plays “Hail to the Chief” every time you walk into the room (but wouldn’t that be great?).
However, there are some similarities. On the one hand, as a nurse, you are almost guaranteed to share this experience with the president: something will go wrong when you least expect it.
The event was Fortune’s most powerful women’s summit and President Obama opened his speech. And then … THUD! The presidential seal on the front of the lectern fell off and fell to the ground.
“Oh my gosh,” he said. “That’s fine.” There, with the eyes of the world on him, President Obama smiled and said, “You all know who I am.”
The audience, both those in the room and those who caught the incident any one of the hundreds of times it was aired on the news, laughed. The moment passed and the president moved on.
I have to say, on a small scale, I know how it feels. Nurses always have an audience watching their every move, and sometimes things go wrong.
Have you ever rushed through the day moving as fast as possible because seemingly hourly rounds means seeing the patient once an hour, not taking an hour each time you do rounds? (Who Knew?) – Just to intervene in what’s known as a Spill of Unspecified Origin and slide around the room?
I know I have. (More than once, actually).
President Obama demonstrated the perfect technique to use in these situations: acknowledge what happened, approach it with humor, and move on.
That is why the best thing to do in these situations, after making sure that nothing was injured in the incident other than your dignity, is to stand up and announce: “It is difficult, training for the World Acrobatics Competition. I have to work. ” in all the practice I can get! “
Your patient will surely appreciate your commitment to the arts of cartwheeling, but that’s not the only benefit of using humor in potentially embarrassing situations.
First, the use of humor can dissipate the tension and discomfort that arise when something goes wrong. Patients know that they do not have to worry about what happened: by joking, you assure them that the situation is not serious. Considering the fact that patients carry at least some tension and stress with them just by the very nature of being in the hospital, it’s a relief.
Second, like the president, a nurse is a leader. And while the fate of our country does not rest on our shoulders, the fate of our patients and their families is something we carry with us, often long after our shift is over. Our patients look to us for many things: information on what will happen next, information on what their experience will be like, and guidance on how best to deal with what lies ahead.
Sometimes the nature of our work requires an emotional distance between us and our patients. But when we laugh, and make it safe and appropriate for our patients to laugh, too, both parties are reminded of their most important roles: members of the human race, in a world seemingly determined to put little obstacles in our way. What can we do but laugh?
Well, laugh and make sure our stamps are firmly affixed to the lectern at all times.
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