At the hospital, this past week was much harder for me emotionally than the weeks before. While I have seen how limited resources due to systemic barriers can impact care, a death on Friday June 14th particularly affected me. A 44-year old patient died during ward rounds in the ICU and it was difficult to fully process for a lot of different reasons. Due to the inability to constantly monitor vitals, the nurses and interns did not know how low her blood pressure was until we started conducting rounds in the ICU. Moreover, there is no physician that only works in the ICU. Rather, physicians from other wards, like the male and female wards, come to check up on their patients in their ICU when they start rounds. This time the ones in charge were mere interns which I struggled with. Ultimately, they tried to resuscitate through a variety of methods but none were successful and this death was much more difficult to process as I witnessed the bad news being delivered to the husband, and father of their children. Also, there have been over nine deaths just this past week, most of which I have witnessed. One of the deaths didn’t occur in the hospital but soon after the patient was discharged against medical advice. Witnessing so many deaths in one week was challenging for me to fully cope with.  Quite frankly, I think working as a CNA in a nursing home in Gainesville and having experience with dealing with the death of residents greatly helped my ability to witness and cope with the many deaths. 

 

Ultimately, I did accomplish a lot more interviews this week though. As of June 21st, I have a total of 27 interviews completed and have done the rank-ordering with seventeen different people. I plan to prioritize interviewing health care professionals my last two weeks here considering most of those interviews can be conducted in English and I will be by myself for the last two weeks. Overall, I am discovering a lot of recurrent themes through the interviews and observations concerning pain and aging. Some of these insights include the perception of an elder's pain happening merely because they are “uzee” (or old). I have also found that there are differing perceptions about what could be done to help elders. Some blame individual families for not caring more for their loved ones, others blame systemic barriers, and some blame the elders themselves for being stubborn. For the rank-ordering, I have been surprised about how different everyone’s answers and explanations are, which goes to show the diversity in perceptions of how age impacts pain and the type of care received in a medical setting. Ultimately, there are lots of different kinds of pain elders face and when conducting data analysis and writing my thesis, I plan to explore the psychological forms of pain more in-depthly than I thought I would have before starting the research.