Admit it. In the last four weeks, you’ve had a bad day or two (or three, four, five, six or more). You can’t go to nursing school nights and weekends and hold down a full-time job without having a bad day sprinkled in there at least every month or so. (And yes, you stay-at-home moms, you have a full-time job. You just aren’t getting paid for it!)
I had a couple of those last week, including two days down with a stomach bug and a stretch of testy coworker interactions (it happens when your company’s stock price drops from $75/share to $4/share in six months). On one of those days, after being scolded for a fairly inconsequential infraction, I was grumping to my friend Libby, who is a breast cancer survivor and a hospital chaplain out in Wisconsin. “I’m having a bad day,” I e-mailed.
Libby has the wonderful gift of saying impertinent things without insulting the person they’re addressed to. “Be gentle with yourself,” she sent back. “Ask yourself, what makes it a bad day?” It was a great response. Because first of all, she knew (knowing me all too well) that I was probably having a bad day because I was being too hard on myself (I was). But she also very quickly put it into perspective. Really, was I having a bad day? No, not really.
I thought about Libby’s comments at clinical this weekend, as I rotated into OB and worked alongside classmates I really know very little about. We all bring different skills, different personalities, and different backgrounds to our experience as student nurses. I got to know a little bit more about their struggles and their joys, and it made me realize that we do really need each other to put those bad days into perspective. We need to be gentle with ourselves—and with each other.
I received another e-mail from another wise friend, with this quote from Audrey Hepburn that really sums it up: Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, it’s at the end of your arm. As you get older, remember you have another hand: the first is to help yourself, the second is to help others.
Carry on, “Angels”!
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