Simple Logistics?

Here I am again. Monday was a national holiday here, so I was excited to start my study today but still needed to print my survey with a few adjustments from a review by the head nurse at one of the clinics. I was finally able to print an original copy yesterday on the nurse's association computer- which was a challenge in itself for some odd reason. The next step was to make MANY copies of the 15 page document which includes, a sociodemographic survey, consent form, microbicide acceptability survey, and my 8 interview questions. I need one copy for each study participant, and I have anticipated a minimum of 100 participants (with many less interviews). So, big issue: how to make all these copies. Oh how I wish I could just run to the copy shop on Whitney. Of course no businesses were open in Georgetown yesterday because of the holiday, so here I am this morning trying to get the copies made so I can get started... I just dropped off the 15 pg document at a copy place and when I requested 50 copies (I really wanted 100) the woman working there looked shocked. Reason being, that amount of copies will be quite expensive (about the same price as it would be in the States) which is a lot of money here. I was too nervous to ask for 100 copies because of the amount of cash I'd have to pull out when paying. So, as it goes I am in limbo as I had to drop off the order & they said to call in 2-3 hours to check on it...

Will I become a researcher really one day, this afternoon maybe? Am I already a researcher? It seems a bit surreal: me being a researcher. I was emailing my friend Eden yesterday who is beginning to conduct her own research in Uganda. She mentioned how she really just wanted to be a clinician, and here she was putting so much thought & work into becoming a researcher (I am paraphrasing of course). I empathized, and her words definitely got me thinking about the many roles of a nurse, and how I see myself. I realize that I spent all year in a dual world. I was preparing myself clinically, to see patients and attend to their healthcare needs, advocate for lifestyle changes that might prevent disease, perform skills and tests that sometimes felt like magic, understand the body and its intimacies, and learn to listen, listen, listen- to determine diagnosis. And at the same time, I was formulating my research proposal and later protocol. Working through many drafts and many, many hours of literature review, preparation, interviews, ethical review. Through my first year working toward becoming an Advanced Practice Nurse, I was simultaneously navigating the language of research protocol, and the language of nursing and medicine: a 'triangulated' study versus 'phenomonology', this as foreign to me as the subtleness of the variation in heart sounds, murmurs, and the words used to describe and define them. How to write a 'protocol' of my proposed, hypothetical, research, as mind boggling as the art of conjuring the correct descriptors, to formulate the verbose, almost poetic, details necessary to 'chart' what I previously might have called a simple, 'pink rash' on an extremity.

The familiarity I am still only grasping, of how to incorporate nursing theory into my research design, and how to assess 'normal' when palpating the ever-challenging, ever-individualized, thyroid. This was all new territory for me, challenging me, on both fronts: clinician & researcher- a novice in both. Dealing with certain logistics, I have decided, might make you question anything.

What is my role as a nurse? Am I forgetting my newly acquired clinical skills while being here in Guyana, considering so many other things, none being the innumerable adaptations that occur in the female body during pregnancy or the countless maneuvers to perform during a musculoskeletal exam. Should I review the cranial nerve exam when in the taxi? I have not felt divided until now. I was caught for a moment with my clinician guard down. Is that OK? I know I am a nurse. Because I routinely remind myself of this relatively, newly acquired role: 'You are a nurse. You are a nurse.' I am also a researcher (note to self) as I sit here in a wireless cafe in a foreign country awaiting some of the logistics of my study.

Excerpt from 7/8/08 blog - Regina Longinotti