This morning, following a rather busy night at work, I had to attend a mandatory class about EKG's. The hospital is going through some department changes and more units will have remote telemetry, so they decided to re-vamp the whole heart monitor system to make it easier to keep track of who does what while we monitor patient's hearts. Now, my unit has used remote telemetry since I started two and a half years ago, but I've always been a little intimidated by the whole process, afraid of misinterpreting a heart rhythm or missing an important detail amidst all those P, QRS and T waves. Cardiac issues scare me. Heart problems just seem to make things go from okay to bad must more quickly than kidney problems. Anyway, the dreaded class ended up being fairly interesting (I can't believe I just admitted that!). We reviewed the physiology of the heart, it's anatomy and how electrical impulses are timed just right to cause the cardiac muscles to contract and send blood throughout the body. And then, when we looked at the EKG strips, it just clicked like it never had before! All of a sudden it just made so much more sense than it ever did before. I know I've studied the exact same material numerous times, but for some reason, it didn't quite make sense to me the way it did today.
That experience made me wonder, what other things should I go back and re-study? And I'm not talking about just medical issues. What things do I need to sit down and examine again? I have a sense that soon I will be learning and re-learning many things as we face graduation, job placement, ministry opportunities, moving etc. I'm honestly just as scared of dealing with these changes as I was of cardiac arrhythmias in my patients.
So, what I'm getting at is this. What do I need to learn to make this whole process less scary? How can I gain back a confidence in Christ and His plan for my future like I gained a new confidence in my understanding of EKG's? I think I need to be spending more time in though in prayer to figure this out...
(A short disclaimer, I've written this having not slept in 24 hours, so bear with my grammatical mistakes and ability to make sense, or not...)
