I asked my daughter the other night how her clinicals were going. She is going to college to become a Respiratory Therapist. She was uncomfortable with one of her clinical instructors. He had the nerve to make her do things. Things which she had never done before and she felt uneasy doing for the first time with a real live patient. She had mentioned to me that she felt uncomfortable with him in the past. He was pushing her out of her comfort zone.

We discussed how this should be handled. Should she go to administration and complain about him? Or should she prepare better for class, anticipating that he would throw her overboard without a life jacket?

She is an adult so I can not use my helicopter mom instincts and fight this fight for her. I merely said I would pray for her and boy did I pray. Her next clinical day was on Thursday. I was in my bedroom finishing my documentation for my job when she came home. I continued to work until she called out from the kitchen “Do you want to know how my day went?”

Of course I did. Sheesh I love hearing about her days. She is an awesome story teller. When I went to the kitchen she was all smiles. She said that when she first got there in the morning the instructor said, “You,” pointing straight at my daughter, “Come here.” He took her into view an abdominal aortic valve replacement. On the list of surgeries to be able to view as a student that is somewhere near the top of the list but it is a bloody surgery. Last time my daughter saw a lot of blood she almost fainted. She said she was so scared, she was shaking but she didn’t faint.

Then she went to see the patient in ICU after he went through recovery. After that she saw the tail end of a code which did not end well. Then the instructor took her into a patient’s room and told her to extubate the patient. She had only done this once in lab and was quite uneasy. She extubated the patient and she did it well.

We discussed the clinical instructor again. I told her he was forcing her to confront her fears. A friend of mine has told me that you can not conquer what you do not confront. This brilliant instructor is forcing my daughter to become confident in her clinical skills by pushing her out of her comfort zone. He probably knew she was scared of blood and that is exactly why he invited her to watch a very bloody surgery. The only way she will become competent in her clinical skills is to practice them on real patients under the watchful eye of her instructor. I think she may end up respecting this instructor more than most by the end of this clinical.