They say nursing school just gets you ready to pass your boards, that it teaches you how to not kill someone. This is true, but a majority of the learning is after you pass nursing school and your boards happens when you are out on the job working. Actually working as a nurse and nursing school are two very different things, but there are some things that not even nursing school can teach you.

Nursing school can't teach you compassion for a patient. Instructors touch on it briefly when they say "The patients are sick, they don't feel good, they don't want to be at the hospital. So, no wonder they might not be in the best mood." I only took that statement skin deep until a couple months ago, when I became the patient. It's a totally different world when you are the one doing a head-to-toe examination on a patient versus when you are the patient being examined from head-to-toe.

This is something that I never really thought about until I was the one laying in a hospital bed. Beside me was a nursing student asking me different questions about my diagnosis. So, all I ask is that the next time you walk into a patient's room, put yourself in their shoes. Don't think about all the paperwork you still have to do or the work you have to do when you get home. Don't think about the medications that you are going to have to pass in a couple hours. Think of the patient. You could be the one going about your everyday life when you get a call from you doctor saying that you need to drop what you are doing and come to the ER because you are more sick than you thought.

Think about the hospital that you have to travel to is hours away because your condition is so rare that you need a specialist help to treat you. You have to put your life on hold because your body isn't cooperating or working the way that it is supposed to. You underestimated the severity of your condition because you thought that nothing bad could ever happen to you. You will never really be able to put yourself in your patient's shoes unless you have been there, scared out of your mind, because you don't know what the future might bring.

I only ask that the next time you are at clinical or work or in a healthcare setting, that you just look at the faces around you. All with different lives, backgrounds and diagnoses. Your patient might not be very talkative because there might have a million different things on their mind at the moment. Your patient might not seem sad because they are still in shock. Your patient might seem angry because they feel that everything bad happens to them.

It's something nursing school can't teach you. It's something you have to feel for yourself.