Exploring Resilience via Lifes Burning Issues

Tag: Patterns (Page 2 of 8)

Always watching and learning

Samuel in Intensive Care Unit

This post is being written sitting bedside in the Intensive Care Unit at the Childrens Hospital…. It’s the second time we’ve been here this year and our seventh time overall  (read this if you want to know the background to how we got here).

I’ve spent the past three days watching Samuel, watching the numbers on the monitors, asking questions etc etc etc…..

But I’ve also had plenty of time to sit here and think about the experiences of being in and around this hospital and the things that I’ve seen and heard in five and half years of being back and forth.

The things I’ve observed are things that go on…..

from minute to minute

from hour to hour.

day to day

week to week

month to month

year to year……..  I’ll share them as a series of observations, so here goes with part 1.

The soft shoe shuffle

The soft show shuffle goes on, on. It consists of all those soft soled shoes that the nurses wear, constantly coming and going. The tempo of the shuffle tells you a lot about what is happening at any given period of time.

The hurried heavy foot steps when a child’s monitor goes into particular types of alarm, or an emergency button is pushed.

The calm stop start as they accompany a child on a walk through a ward.

The tip toe shuffle as they quietly move about in the middle of a night shift doing their checks.

The Tribal Dance

This is a unique ritual that occurs within the hallowed halls of a teaching hospital. The alpha doctor patrols his or her turf with a sense of confidence and ownership, followed by a tribe of beta’s (the registrars) and pack (the residents). They perform their own version of unique rituals as they come to see a child, depending on what specialty they represent.

It’s an interesting dance routine to follow, especially when you have a child that has quite a few of these tribes involved in their care.

Negotiating the dance can sometimes feel like needing to be an international diplomat, the different tribes are concerned primarily with their “patch” of your child, and sometimes don’t think (or appear not to think) about the implications of their directions on the other tribes and the treatments they have already planned.

The diplomat part comes by coaxing them to make smoke signals to the other tribes… OK smoke signals might be a bit off, you know what I mean EMAIL the modern equivalent of smoke signals, and sometimes having to do some translation between the tribes. [ to be fair the tribes do a bloody great job ]

There is also another big challenge in this tribal dance….. the tribes are pulled apart and re-assembled every three months….so after spending three months becoming educated in a particular specialty.. the beta’s and the pack get to go back to scratch and begin working up a working knowledge of a new specialty area and then…… every year members of the pack become beta’s, some of the beta’s become alphas (or go off to practice elsewhere).

Parent also play a big part in the education for the tribes. Parents of complex kids help out regularly by doing “case studies” with the pack and beta’s as they prepare for progression with the the tribe. Giving them a chance to practice getting a full history and thinking about how they would come up with an overarching treatment plan for your child. Practice for their exams as Pediatricians.

Getting them to remember that the parent they are dealing with is the EXPERT in the child they are seeing is a big part of the education process.. sure they have a six year medical degree and a certain amount of practical experience and they may be the expert in a particular field of medicine… but the parent (and/or the child depending on the condition and age etc) are the EXPERTS in how the disease, illness, infection etc is affecting THIS child.. and again to give them their dues the vast majority of the doctors have learned this by the time they assume a Beta position within the tribes… those that don’t, soon become a nightmare for parents, but thankfully this experience has been rare.

 

More to come in Part 2…..

Four lines to change your life.

choose your frame!

I’m going to share with you four lines that can form the basis of reframing every aspect of your life… and challenge you to apply them, but first I’ll share with you how I found the four lines…

It’s that Tim Brownson bloke again!

I know this guy, Tim Brownson, a life coach who you can find over at A Daring Adventure, (but before I tell the rest of this story…. you should read my post on Why I hate Tim Brownson to get some context…).

Tim’s reframing competition.

In his usual tantalizing fashion, Tim recently ran a competition to give away an Amazon gift card and a copy of a book he co-authored with the competition being on the subject of re-framing. As usual, I couldn’t resist so I put my entry in the comments (and like he always does…. he made us wait a while to find out who the winner was going to be.)

Announcing the winner!

When I read Tim’s post “this is how you reframe” I was introduced to the Roy Naim… a worthy winner! Roy’s entry was fantastic and was a real journey on how to reframe…. he successfully reframed a day that would have had most people pulling their hair out and turning feral ready to attack whoever next encountered them. NOT Roy…

Anyway, there are some great entries attached to Tim’s post… so it is worth a read.

Meet Roy….

But Roy’s genius didn’t just stop there… No Sirree… Roy was engaged in responding to comments about his win, Roy continued to demonstrate the aspects that made his original entry so compelling, and had some nice things to say about little old me…I’ll be following Roy on twitter!  In one of his comments, Roy shared a quote from the Silva Method which really set my mind wandering…….

The four lines to help you reframe everything in your life!

“If you like it, enjoy it.
If you don’t like it, avoid it.
If you can’t avoid it or choose not to, then accept it.
To accept it, you must change your perception of it.”

Sometimes it is simply amazing how a simple statement can smack you in the head! This quote certainly did that. I reckon Roy has shared four lines that are the basis for reframing every aspect of your life IF you apply the quote.

What about you?

How could/would you apply this quote in your life? What are you going to reframe?

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/editor/135953989/sizes/m/

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