This thought was written to the class I taught before I retired from teaching. Good advice to all for 2019. And I still encourage young people like Elder Carr at the temple visitor trailer.

                                                                                                   We keep plugging along. That is the best advice to stay young!

written in 2013

“Look for the Good”, an encouraging thought from your professor.

     With a new class of students on the horizon and a new hospital to take them to; I have my nasty-people worries welling up within me.  Will the mean old doctor be there?  The one who gets mad if you sit in his chair? Really, I never saw his name on it.  Or will the physical therapist be there who is so tall he can’t help but look down his nose at everyone?  He somehow scares away any intelligent answer a young nursing student may have. 

     And then there is the eerie green reflection of the monitors in the Definitive Observation Unit onto the thick glasses of the woman who acts like she can see into your soul.  Rumor has it, that she has had her big rear in the same seat for twenty years and treats everyone as if she was the Queen of England.  She even talks about herself in the third person.  “Beverly wants you to know, if you can’t get the cardiac monitor leads on correctly, THEN DON’T TRY!”  The first time she reprimanded my nursing students, (who I know have more education in their toes than she has in all lobes of her cranium) I thought, “Who is this Beverly? Some doctor…cardiologist, administrator, who? Guess what? That Beverly was HER!  Imagine, I expected her to begin the royal wave!”                                                                                 

     As a nursing student you need to have a very thick skin.  Or at least it’s something I try to have and teach my students to do the same.  Somehow most of the workers at hospitals treat students and their professors, like door mats and expect them to bow and scrape. I did that in nursing school over forty years ago but things have changed, or at least they should have. I then tell my poor abused young men and women to remember how it feels, and then in ten years or so, when they are in charge, to remember and “Be kind to the students.”  It has been said that nurses eat their young, but these days after everyone else in the hospital take’s their bite there is very little left for the nurses to munch upon. 

     I try to prepare my kids. I call them that because most of them are really young, some younger than my grandkids.  I become a protective tiger mom while I have them in my clinical nursing class. One particularly difficult day as we sat behind closed doors discussing our patients before we left the hospital several of the students were concerned about the cool reception and mean comments made by the staff.  I said, “Don’t think if someone acts nasty or mean that it’s you or anything you have done.  It could be something else has gone wrong in their life.  Like the doctor who has a wife who just left him, or the nurse who has a sick child or sick cat, or maybe even, gosh, I don’t know, something like her dog died the night before.  And remember, “If it’s you or something you did, I’ll let you know.  I’m here to make the road easier.  I’m here to help you get to the finish line, I’m not a scary mountain to climb over…so talk to me, ask me questions, and don’t worry about the crusty looks you get from others. I’m the one who gives you the grade.” 

     About a week later one of the more shy girls who tried to do everything right and had great critical thinking skills, pulled me aside and said, “I know what’s wrong with that one really mean nurse.”  “Oh, you do?” I said, thinking she had some special insight.  “Yes,” she said with smile, more wise than her young age.  “I figure she owns a kennel, and has lots of dogs, and every night one dies.” She turned away with a special spring in her step.  And I thought, “Ya know, maybe she’s right.”

     Mean people suck!  I know that’s not a nice word, but the truth hurts…for those who deserve it.  I guess, Pollyanna is my middle name, and if something goes wrong, I figure the odds are that something soon will turn out right…like the saying, “There is so much horse plop out there, if you dig deep enough you’ll find a pony.”  And, I know some folks see everything through cracked glasses, or have the chemical thing going wrong that puts them on a downer.  And I know I’ve been lucky in that for the most part, even after my youngest son’s severe head injury, I was able to find something decent about the bad situation. 

     I believe I began to recognize small moments of tender mercy on one crazy vacation.  We were delighted to be staying at a friend’s cabin in Tahoe but things soon went very wrong. Our car had so many problems I lost weight running down the road to the service station looking for parts to repair our worn out station wagon.  So, I realized later when I got on the scale at home, that when I usually gain weight on a vacation, this was one of the few where I lost weight.  And then at the end of the trip our old car finally rolled to a stop in the middle of the 110 degree Mojave Desert.  We had visions of our entire savings being sucked up by some greedy repair man.  However, after my husband and son walked several miles to the nearest gas station we were helped by a kind grandpa who refused payment.  Oh, we ended up being towed backwards while all of us were still sitting in the car.  We looked like a re-run of the worst moments of the Chevy Chase “Vacation” movie since our station wagon was an exact copy of the one used in the film.  Our two teenagers wanted to put paper bags on their heads they were so embarrassed.  But now, in retrospect, they all admit we saw the most amazing sunset, which we would never have seen if we were driving towards home and all facing in the other direction.  And besides that our faith in repair men was restored. 

     Part of being a teacher is to encourage and guide so I tell my novice students, with the wisdom I have gained through the years that, “Before this life is over trials will come to you all.  Oh I wish they did not, and none of us had to deal with such things but this is our test and is not for us to decide.  All we can decide is what to do about a situation within the time we’ve been given.  I have found good or bad, bitter or sweet, depends upon your point of view.  Where or how you see a situation determines if you find it positive or negative. I know that there are many forces at work beyond our control and I also know that most of those forces are good and are much more powerful than bad or evil.” So I say to my young charges, “If all seems lost and you are full of despair, get up! Change how you look at things or give it a bit of time, your perspective will change, and you will discover it’s not so bad after all. And that’s an encouraging thought.”

Happy New Year...and happy to be here in my 75th year!