Wednesday, May 28, 2008

The Wheat and the Chaff

Driving from patient to patient today in the admittedly not-so-big city, I found myself wondering how much longer I can do this. From pot-holes to one-way streets and buildings close to being condemned, I realized today that this job's days may be numbered. Actually, having just signed on to begin providing per diem hospice and palliative care closer to home, I realized that I very well could be seeing my final days of urban visiting nursing.

Now, of course there is excellent fodder for writing while seeing patients in the city: drug abuse, litter, homelessness, squalor and the like. However, those things exist everywhere, and every interaction, every moment can be fodder for writing if one sees things through that incisive lens.

As far as being professionally challenged, quick visits to the mentally ill in the city do not necessarily provide much in the way of clinical learning, and after quitting my full-time job in January where learning was de rigeur, hospice and palliative care are the place where I feel my clinical skills can truly grow.

So, as The Part-Time-Nurse-With-Five-Jobs, I am seeing that the time to separate the occupational wheat from the chaff is upon us. Has anyone seen my thresher?

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