These past 2 weeks in the clinic I have had a lovely 1^st year nursing student from Sydney University.

Her course topic is communication and she is to observe what is involved in being a School Nurse. It has been refreshing for me, making me stop and think about what I do. I certainly don’t want her going away thinking ‘not much’.  And so we have covered anaphylaxis to concussion, vaccinations to sports injuries, mental health issues to medications and more. In between there have been shoe repairs, chewing gum removal, washing of shirts covered in chocolate milk, sewing of pants etc.

Once when I worked as a relief nurse on a high dependency unit in Bankstown Hospital I miscommunicated with a patient. I was looking after a little Chinese lady who had major abdominal surgery. She spoke no English but that was no barrier to me. I smiled encouragingly, applauded her, gave her the universal OK sign with my hand and of course the well-known thumbs up with both hands. We were getting along famously. She kept asking a question and all I could understand was ‘how long’? I presumed she meant how long since her operation so I told her that she had been asleep for 2 days putting up 2 fingers followed by 2 circular motions to represent days and then clasping my hands as in prayer and putting them to my head, tilting to the side as if sleeping. (I would have made a good Wiggle!).

Soon afterwards she made the sign for the telephone which I gave her and she spoke to her family. About an hour later her 3 adult children arrived and gathered at her bed. I was surprised to see them all and asked if there was a problem. Her son said he believed Mum has been told she only had 2 days to live!

I was speechless. How could she possibly think that?  How could I have been so misunderstood? Could she think I smiled because two days to live were at least better than one, that my thumbs up were pointing her in the direction of heaven and that was better than the alternative! I really think the lady was expecting bad news so just couldn’t believe my positive vibes, plus  obviously I wasn’t as good at sign language with a Chinese lady as I thought.  Maybe I didn’t pay attention to her body language. It was a big learning curve for me and we laughed a lot about it afterwards but next time I would use the interpreter and keep my Wiggle actions for my children.

My son as I mentioned last time is at Schoolies this week and he is not communicating very often.  But that really means that he is communicating well because if he was ringing us then there would be a problem. So I am happy that I am not hearing from him?

I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas.

It is that special time of the year where we all make an effort to communicate in our own meaningful ways.

Margaret Bates
School Nurse