Reflecting on my clinical experience, I have found each day to be enlightening to the realities of being a nurse. Each minute from 6:45 A.M. to when we leave around 1 P.M. has shown me as much, or more than lectures in my nursing classes. We have only had 2 in-person clinicals which have required very different communication tactics for my two patients. My first patient was an older male who just wanted to be listened to and heard. He hadn’t been to the doctor in like 30 years, so he didn’t understand that things in a hospital just take a lot of time. He didn’t understand how you rarely see your doctor and he didn’t understand the severity of his heart issues yet. I found waiting for someone to pick him up from radiology difficult because he wanted to ask a lot of personal questions and I wanted to talk to him for a while, but I found it uncomfortable to reveal too much about myself. Overall though I found that if I was honest about that and redirected the question to him, he was more than willing to keep the conversation going by revealing information about himself. For my other patient, she was an older ex-military nurse who was in a lot of pain and didn’t want me to assess her or take her vitals. Also, she was in contact and droplet isolation which made a lot of the PCAs less inclined to check on her I believe. In the moment of her getting angry, I remembered that she was in a lot of pain, so I didn’t take her anger personally. Later, after food and medicine. She was more than willing to communicate about her life and even shared with me a book her daughter had just written. She obviously was just particular, so considering the situation, giving good care to her helped her to open up.