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Transitions Magazine

Transitions is published bi-monthly for members of the APhA New Practitioner Network. The online newsletter contains information focused on life inside and outside pharmacy practice, providing guidance on various areas of professional, personal, and practice development. Each issue includes in-depth articles on such topics as personal financial management, innovative practice sites, career profiles, career development tools, residency and postgraduate programs, and more.

Professional, and emotional, growth
Jamila Negatu
/ Categories: Student Magazine

Professional, and emotional, growth

In order to speak honestly and openly with you, I write this column anonymously under the name “Alison.” It is my hope to provide you with insights about rotations and the many pharmacy opportunities I encounter.
 
Hello, student pharmacists! Welcome back and thank you for following along on my journey through APPE rotations. Things have changed drastically since I last checked in with you. I have since finished my rotation in the NICU and Labor & Delivery (L&D) floor, and moved on to rotation number five, the most nerve-wracking rotation of them all. However, I will get to that in a bit. 
 
Working in the NICU challenged me in a way that I wasn’t prepared for, in a way that caused not only growth as a pharmacist, but growth emotionally. I have already spoken to the nature of working in the NICU and the babies that I had the opportunity to interact with on a daily basis. However, at that point in my rotation, I hadn’t encountered much loss. 
 
 

Coping with death

My last day of rotation was a blur. I had just finished rounding on my patients with my preceptor and the other health providers on our team when we received a hurried phone call from L&D stating there would be an emergency delivery in the next 10 minutes. This emergency delivery was for a 23-week-old baby. I remember quickly grabbing the code box, knowing that we would likely have to use it, and running as fast as I could to the operating room. As I entered the anteroom to the OR, all you heard was screaming from a mother in physical and emotional pain, while nurses and physicians ran around in a confident, but frantic, manner trying to prepare. My preceptor and I immediately began calculating the doses of epinephrine and surfactant that would be needed. Within minutes our newest patient, a patient just slightly larger than my hand, was born. 
 
Intubation, chest compressions, and three doses of epinephrine later, the neonatologist called the time of death. My heart felt a pain that was completely new to me. The tears immediately started forming in my eyes. Tears of sadness, but also of frustration. I wanted there to be more that we could have done. I learned more than I could have ever imagined on my NICU and L&D rotation, but I also learned things that cannot be taught in school. I was given the opportunity to see a life come into the world and also see it leave. I was given the opportunity to learn how to cope with death. I have been to many adult codes that ended in sadness, but to watch a child go through that process is entirely different.
 
 

Undue anxiety

At this point, I was ready to move on to my next rotation; however, I was also absolutely terrified. Leading up to rotation number five, it had easily been the most anxiety-inducing of them all. It was my community pharmacy rotation. Go ahead, it’s okay to laugh a little. 
 
I had plenty of experience in community pharmacy, but it wasn’t where I ultimately wanted to be after graduation. My community pharmacy experience was pretty limited to where I work—which is for an HMO—meaning that I had no clue about the basic ins and outs of different insurance companies. My mind was blown by how many new medications I didn’t know everything about that were on the shelf, because they weren’t on the formulary for the company where I work. And what do you mean I have to call prescribers because of prescription errors, prior authorizations, or insurance problems? All of this was absolutely foreign to me. I was terrified. 
 
Fast forward to the last week of this rotation and I quickly realized my fears were premature. Am I the only one who makes assumptions on how things will play out, causing myself so much anxiety, and in the end everything works out well? You would think I would have learned by now.

 

On different pages

The only difficult thing that I encountered during my community rotation was with my primary preceptor. We never seemed to communicate effectively. We were always on different pages. I love being efficient, effective, and knowing my expectations. I didn’t always have that on this rotation. I am usually a person who has no issues confronting a problem, but I felt uncomfortable approaching my preceptor. So instead of addressing the miscommunication head on, I felt unsure of what my role and expectations were the whole time. 
 
So, for our Preceptor Feedback| author:
 
  1.  How do you go about addressing effective communication, or lack thereof, with your preceptor? 
  2. Is there a way to approach the topic with confidence and without offending your preceptor?

Until next time, y’all! 

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