My last day! It was sad to leave today, I was really beginning to get to know the porters and the hospital well and I was enjoying it more and more as the days went on. However the whole week was a really great experience, and more than anything the best thing about it was just to experience the hospital environment and to get an idea of how a hospital works from an inside perspective.
Today I was stationed with the same porter as yesterday morning which I was happy about, it's lovely to see how he cheers up patients and makes them feel at ease even though he is only in contact with them for a few minutes. As usual we did a wide variety of jobs and he allowed me to push a patient in a bed to x-ray and back again once they had finished with him. I found it was my turn to make him feel at ease and to cheer him up and I enjoyed it a lot. We also had to transfer a child of about 10 to MRI and this made me realise how children have to be treated in an entirely different way to adults, I had never thought how completely different paediatrics is to every other specialty.
So overall, this week has taught me how incredibly hard hospital staff have to work. I could tell this about the porters from my first day, but I noticed more and more as I experienced the hospital that the doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals were working non-stop, and a lot of the time for longer than their shift. One doctor I spoke to asked if I wanted to be a doctor and after I said yes she replied "do you want to work 16 hour shifts?". This was a difficult question to answer at the time despite her exaggeration; no one wants to spend their lives just at work. But if it comes with the territory of doing a job that you love for the rest of your life, it is most definitely a sacrifice worth making.
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