In the weeds...
I really got beat up the other night. It was my first my first nightshift with two ICU patients. I came on at 7PM and both of my patients were missing 6PM meds that hadn't yet come up from the pharmacy. Looking back this seems like a minor detail and yet it was enough to put my entire night into a tailspin. I never felt fully in control, and with each hour it got worse. My preceptor was close by the entire night but she purposefully left me alone. I know this is what the preceptor is supposed to do. Otherwise, "how am I supposed to learn?" Persistent thoughts kept cropping up "How am I ever going to be able to handle this?" and "Why did I not become a psych nurse?" I could be sitting in the day room right about now, playing UNO with the mentally ill
So now I am spending my precious free time composing a cheat sheet of all the commonly used protocols that I will be using Calcium, Heparin, Insulin, Potassium all the major players. It's one action that may or may not contribute to my perceived loss of control. I will also go to work and hour early and plan out my night. The rest of the time I will repeat in my head: You can do this you can do this you can do this. And hopefully somewhere in this process I will remember why I am doing this.
It reminds me of when I was 19 and I got my first waitressing job in Ocean City, NJ. I lasted two days and finally gave up, thinking, "I will never ever be a waitress because I totally suck at it." Instead I took my fallback job as a pretzel roller at one of the first Auntie Anne's franchises. I was actually trained to make pretzels by Auntie Anne, herself. Little did I know that I would eventually go back to waitressing and it would end up being a 10+ year career.
