Anxiety over graduate school/rotations…You can do it :) If I can do it, anybody can…

I’ve had quite a few people now e-mail me to let me know their favorite posts are the more personal ones dealing with anxiety, etc. Let me tell y’all, I’m a walking DSM-IV-TR of issues. 🙂 Always functional for work though, hello bosses and insurance companies (:::waves::…seriously though. I LOVED LOVED LOVED OT school, but the parts I loved most were with my butt in a chair – I love learning and I can memorize things and take tests really well. I was valedictorian with Virginia (who I am seeing Saturday!) as we both had 4.0 GPAs. After an undergrad dealing with neuroscience, OT school was super easy compared to my undergrad…the hardest parts were time management and dealing with being in like fifty small groups at once. 🙂 Every time we had labs or rotations or anything hands-on, I got anxious. I hate to look stupid or not know what I am doing, and I get nervous and uncoordinated and forget everything I know, so even though most everyone else liked labs and real-world stuff most, that just wasn’t my personality. I had three, three month Level II fieldwork rotations. My graduate school makes us do 9 months rather than the more typical 6 months because it requires us to have a mental health rotation, which is relatively unusual. ALL THREE of my fieldworks fell through, so my plans changed last minute. So I ended up starting with an outpatient pediatric setting (in Mississippi) and that was a pretty good starting rotation for me as it was in pediatrics which I felt strong in, and the kids we were seeing were semi high-functioning, ie we weren’t seeing kids that were super complicated from a physical standpoint. My second rotation was in a hospital and IT NEARLY KILLED ME. Thank goodness it was a smaller hospital and we didn’t get the super complicated stuff. I loved my supervisor and we are still friends, but, not kidding, I was taking quite a lot of anti-anxiety medications just to get through each day, even with semi-un-complicated patients, because the hospital setting was so stressful to me. Nobody really knew as I am pretty good at hiding it and I did very well apparently, but to me, I was a mess. I felt so awkward and stupid trying to maneuver people in and out of bed. The easiest, most foundational skills of an OT, were the hardest for me. They still are. I was so relieved to be done with that rotation even though I liked the people. It wasn’t that it wasn’t interesting, I just felt soo incompetent, even if I apparently seemed competent to the rest of the world, haha. That’s a common feeling, to feel like a fraud or imposter, when first learning a healthcare trade, by the way. My third rotation was my mental health one (so my first was a specialty – I chose pediatrics, my second was physical dysfunction which was mandatory, and third was mental health, also mandatory for my school). Anyways, I spent 3 months in a locked psychiatric ward, specifically a geriatric one, so a lot of aggressive dementia. That was another one where I was sooo nervous each day entering the locked ward. We had to take a course that was basically self-defense, but with the defense being only to get yourself out of a tight spot, not to hurt the person. IE, if a person with dementia grabbed onto your wrists as you walked past, how could you get out of that without hurting anyone. Once I was on the ward I was usually ok, and had a hard time leaving it in the afternoon, but each day I was nervous. And each night I went home and slept for hours (I was staying with friends as this one was out of town). IE, get home at say, 5, sleep till like 8…get up for an hour or two, then go back to bed. It wasn’t the rotation’s fault, but my own psychological issues. Nobody knew that at work because I paid for it on my own time, so to speak. I was determined to get through the rotations. I’m not saying this to scare anybody, because again, the rotations were fine – it was me and my problems with depression and anxiety, etc, that made it a challenge. But I *still* got through all three of them with flying colors and was praised to the skies, so I wish I could have relaxed and enjoyed them more, as clearly I was doing okay…And am still in touch and friends with all the supervisors I had, and they all offered me jobs or would have if they were available. 🙂