Communicating without Words
Week 2 Heading link
Julia Tangen, BSN Student; Madison Preiser, BSN Student; and Joseph Dechant, BSN Student
This week, we arrived in Barcelona after departing from Pamplona.
We were all amazed at the beauty of the city, which we got to explore through the several guided tours we went on. These included visits to Park Guell, Sagrada Familia, the Sant Pau hospital, and the Gothic quarter.
These visits were all wonderful, and we learned a great deal about the history of these places. One name seems to stand out among the rest when it comes to the creation of some of these places, and that name is Gaudi.
In this city, you are surrounded by Gaudi, both by his works and by shops and tours dedicated to him. This might be surprising coming from the States, as we do not seem to have the same reverence for architects, but it makes sense once you are able to see his creations. We also had the pleasure of touring and participating in care at several health facilities, from which I learned a lot.
Through Stone
What I think is so significant about his works is his ability to convey so much through stone, and without saying a word. Approaching the front entrance to Sagrada Familia, you are greeted by an incredibly ornate nativity scene.
However, the more that you look at it, the more you uncover. We stood at the front for quite some time, and despite this and being on a guided tour, I was still seeing new hidden details as I continued to stare. While the symbolism is obviously religious, the meaning seemed to extend beyond that for me, as the extraordinary beauty of the front and the inside contrasted the harsh depictions on the back as well as the very imposing silhouette of the building conveys to me the struggle and the wonder of life itself, and especially made me think about my future in nursing.
Through Care
I was able to spend time in operating rooms as well as a nursing home during my time here, and I learned a lot from both. In the OR, the patient is unconscious following the anesthesia. This means that they will have no recollection of what occurred during this time, and they cannot communicate or sense anyone in the room.
Despite this, however, everyone on the care team still treats the patient with extraordinary amounts of respect and compassion. I found this to be amazing, and it showed me another example of communicating in atypical ways.
Finally, I will share a way in which my peers and I were able to embrace this concept. At the nursing home, we were able to help feed the patients and just sit with them through their meal. Many of us are not fluent in Spanish, and some of the patients had dementia, which meant that communication through speaking would be quite difficult.
Despite this however, I still felt that we were able to convey what we wanted to through our smiles, our gestures, our actions, our laughs, and our compassion. This is an important skill to have as a future nurse, so being in a new environment with greater barriers to communication than what one may normally see in a nursing home in the US allowed me to practice and hone this skill.