Just a bloomin brilliant mornin'!

Well, last night I came from work feeling a little like the most evil nurse in the world! Several of my patients were under 2, and you would be surprised how much some of them are either scared of nurses, but largely scared of white people in general. So, unfortunately, every time I tried to give medication or take vital signs, there was a quivering lip and eventually a huge sob. It became a running joke with my colleagues to shout as soon as a baby cried, 'Grace, what did you do now!?' On the flip side, their mum's were so lovely and just laughed it off.
Yesterday was also another 'first' day for me. I put in my first IV cannula, I am so excited! That may sound ridiculous to many of you but I haven't been trained in England (all about the paperwork and competencies there ;-) ) plus I didn't spill or anything. Hurrah!! My second hurrah, was a beautiful new 9 month old orthopaedic patient, and he was just precious and let me do everything I needed to do without even a whimper.

My shift today was a little more jolly. I really just wanted to connect with my patients. I managed to remove the most awkward sutures from a patient's eye and lip (eek, blade, eye equals shaking lots!), plus have you ever tried trying to spot dark blue sutures on black skin, through stubble? Not so easy I can tell you that! In fact, this was the guy that I wrote about a while back who had severe seizures and how amazed I was at teh patients all praying so fervently. Now he gets to go home AWESOME!

After that, I managed to spend time with one of my patients who had removal of an enormous tumour yesterday. He is such a gentle nice man. He had quite a lot of bleeding after his surgery last night so I spent some time today helping him wash, change sheets and getting him comfortable. It was so humbling. he was just so thankful and calm. A real privelage to look after and it was so nice to have the time to invest in him.

A little later I spotted a young man (not one of my patients but in my ward), he had had eye surgery yesterday. He was really upset and crying I had no clue why,but I sat and chatted to him for a while. It turns out he had just done his first set of eye wound care - we teach this so they can carry on at home using a mirror. He was obviously quite distressed with what it looked like. He just said to me 'I am just so worried about my eye'. It is all too easy, as i am sure any nurse or doctor anywhere can testify, to forget how significant and traumatic surgery can be. So, we just took some time, chatted and then prayed. Great!

Just to finish off such a lovely day, we went up to deck 7 where we take our patients to see a bit of the outside world between shifts. We took 2 little girls who had had cleft lip repairs (5 months old and cousins (and one of the girls twin brothers) and had a great time just playing. They are so beautiful, and it is so awesome to see them breastfeeding properly like they have never been able to before. It is so amazing to see the difference in the twins size, just as a result of the quality of feeding they have been able to have, one with and one without cleft lip. The girls mum's were sisters too, how great they could go through all this together.

Finally, news from down the corridor...we have had to have one of our wards open for patients with some very bizarre infections, to isolate them from other people. Today we were able to close that as all thpatients infections were either gone/settled enough to join the main ward. WOW!

So, today has been a fabulous exciting, blessed, fulfilling day. I know not everyday will leave me so elated but I am so thankful to be part of this on good days and bad days. These people are phenomenal and teach me new things everyday, and a smile...the key to so much!