Dear Mentor

Every nursing student, or nurse probably has their own horror stories to share of bad mentoring and spiteful mentors. Such experiences have sometimes left me wondering if its even worth it to finish my degree and to pursue nursing.

I know that many of my class mates have had exceptionally traumatic experiences here in Finland, simply because they were foreigners.

I’ve been wanting to write a public statement and letter to all mentors for a log time now, to help shed some light on some of their behaviour. However someone at Allnurses.com beat me to it, and wrote a heart breaking lamentation about her mentoring experience that I am sure almost every nurse can relate to. Check it out: Dear Preceptor

One thing that became actually a common experience here for me in Finland was that my mentors never had the guts to tell me that they had a problem with me to my face. they would often talk behind my back, and ask someone else to approach me, concerning perhaps something I might have said weeks ago. Now what makes this particularly annoying is that it often has to do with a misunderstanding, owing to my not so perfect Finnish skills.

The last time this happened, it was actually the mentor herself who told me that I said something the previous week. It made me so angry because she heard me completely wrong, and so I told her that it was completely unfair of her to only approach me a week later, and that it would have saved a lot of tension if she just had the guts to ask me whether or not she had understood me correctly.

Constructive criticism is an art, and I believe everyone can learn it, and I feel that if a nurse is training to become a student mentor, the training should include criticism techniques. Nursing students are scared, fragile beings that often hang on every word the mentor speaks (especially so in the beginning of the studies), and thoughtless, insensitive behaviour can have devastating effects on the confidence and motivation of the student.

Anyone want to share other experiences concerning mentoring?

Health Tip: Sneezing and coughing on public transportation during this so called swine flu season may induce mass panic attacks amongst paranoid passengers. For your own safety, make sure to be discreet in public places with any non swine-flu symptoms that may resemble swine-flu.

Phlebotomy

So, with about 1,5 months to go until we graduate, running around like headless chickens at our school, trying desperately to hand in drafts for our theses, getting papers signed and filed, writing last minute re-exams, attending courses that were missed, just when our schedules cannot get any more full, a message arrived in our inboxes a week ago:

”you have to attend compulsory venipuncture lectures and skills labs.

Regards, your isp supervisor”

Well, at least we got to do something fun, like stabbing each other extracting blood, it really helped to vent the anger that had been accumulating this Autumn semester.

I love that word Phlebotomy, by the way…you can do so much with it.

random friend: ” Oh hi there, I see you have a hole in your arm, have you been to the phlebotomist recently?”

me: ”Oh actually it was a coincidence really. I was walking in the street one fine day and then I heard a Pssst! in an alley, of course being so curious I had to find out where it came from. Next thing I feel someone poking a needle in my arm. It was only later that I realized I had been phlebotomized.’

random friend: ”I see. being phlebed is considered to be a right of passage in this part of the world. you can officially call yourself an initiated phleber, or  phleb for short.”

me: ”I’m a phleb! why I never thought it would have such a nice ring to it. thank you!”

Salutations to all who endure blood donation, and support the red cross. I’m very jealous of you guys because I recently found out that it will take three years before they would consider accepting my blood. apparently having lived in a malaria infested area before the age of 5 (WHO sees durban as malaria infested), and having recently returned to a place rife with malaria (Zambia), they discriminate against my blood and thus make me wait three more years before I can become a part of the club.

oh well, I’ll just keep my malaria infested blood to myself then, and not feel at all any guilt about it.

Health Tip: Donate blood! It’s the right thing to do!