no one likes to be accused of any wrongdoing.

this is exactly what happened to M, N and i when we went to 'observe' a certain pulmonary class at a certain hospital. i never liked the hospital or the suburb in the first place so i obviously didn't want to be there, but the hospital i'm at isn't running any of the classes at the moment. hmm. i think there's going to be lots of confusion here, so let's call my current placement hospital A and the place i don't like hospital B.

so, anyway, we had to go to hospital B to watch a class. but when we got there, we were handballed to a grade 1 therapist (who was by the way, the nicest person i've ever met in that hospital) without much of a grunt, then got given a patient each by the grade 3 supervisor (since i've started using aliases, let's call her C) lands on each of us a patient to look after. AGAIN, without any briefing at all. we then had to follow the patient around and watch them exercise and tick their boxes off.

my patient was nice. she was from the UK so she had this crisp british accent. we went around doing her exercises. then we came upon the arm weights where she told me she did the blue ones last week. would you believe her? of course, that was what i did. it was after all her 5th or 6th week there and my first time. so i gave here the blue weights which were 1.5 kg, sat down and watched her exercise.

along came C who checked her weights and talked to her. she explained the colour of the weights she did to C as she did to me. i checked her sheet and she was prescribed 1 kg weights. the patient tried to explain but C just dismissed her and gave her the 1 kg weights. fine. so we continued with the exercises.

at the end of the class, she told us to stick back because she wanted to talked to us. after she finished herding everyone else out of the room, she proceeded to blast us with how we shouldn't change the exercise prescription because they were all carefully calculated using this 'formula' and we should check with her if we wanted to change the 'carefully calculated exercise prescription' before changing it. she ranted on how important it is to watch the patient and make sure they're doing it right, blah blah blah. this was when i found out that N miscounted the reps the patient was taking care of. such a trivial thing.

i could see where she was coming from. they had a collapse a few days before and sure no one wants that to happen again. it's not really what she said but how she said it and how she looked at us. i got the impression that she didn't think much of students and after that incident, it's even lower. it's like she's doing us a really really huge favour by teaching us. well, look at your job description, woman! teaching is written in!

but that's not the end of it.

she called up my supervisor at my current placement on monday morning and accused us of being uninterested and having unprofessional behaviour, then proceeding to demand an apology. i was on my way to sending her an apology but after that, i don't think so. i was going to go as far as excusing her for her behaviour towards us but this is the final straw. accusing not one but all three of us is totally unacceptable especially when M didn't do anything wrong.

my dilemma is whether i should just swallow my pride and apologise for the things she accused me of or totally ignore that demand and ruin it for the other students that are going there to 'observe'. that or confront her about it and possibly get blackmarked for the rest of my career as a physiotherapy student as well as ruining it for all the other students that are going to 'observe'.