New Grad Nursing Journal

August 20^th, 2007 seems SO far away…670 days to be exact (not that I am counting), and how far we’ve come since that day.  The day we walked into the skills lab, learned how to make a bed and were petrified when we thought we were going to be tested on this very technical, complex skill.

Like I said…. We’ve come a LONG way!

And we all had to make sacrifices along the way.  Although it may not have seemed worth it at the time, it sure seems worth it now.

During the more difficult times in nursing school, many of us had to do things like…

-       let dishes remain in the sink for days on end

-       allow the laundry to pile so high that our kids played king of the mountain on it and, well, our husband’s just bought new underwear

-       eat fastfood so often that everyone at Wendy’s knew us by name

-       study so late for so many nights that our spouses thought spending time with us was falling asleep on the couch next to us and our textbook

-       miss so many of our friends’ parties that when they told us they liked our new haircut, we didn’t have the heart to tell them…. we cut it 4 months ago.

We appreciate our families and friends for enduring these times with us.

BUT, with all of those sacrifices came wonderful rewards

Delta college really prepared us well for the field of nursing…but you know, there are still some things that we feel would’ve prepared us even better.  So, if the instructors could make a note to address these few issues that we are still unsure of….

….like

-       what to do when a TV falls on a pt

-       what to say to the doctor with waxy ears who wants to borrow your stethoscope

-       what to do when you have just fainted after watching a tube being placed down someone’s nose

-       what to say to an elderly female patient when she becomes a little too fond of her male nursing student

-       what to do when a doctor mistakes you for a resident and pulls you in to help with a delivery

-       how to not feel awkward when you walk into an Indian patient’s room and mistakenly speak Spanish to her

-       how to keep a straight face when you remove a patient’s socks and the air fills with foot dust

-       how to look professional after you have hit your patient in the eye with the cap of a syringe

-       how to get up with dignity when your gurney catches onto your watch, dragging you with it straight into the wall

-       how to keep a straight face when a patient loses control of their bladder on the front of your scrub top

-       how to inconspicuously make your way to the break room to change when a delivery ends in an explosion of who knows what all over your arm

-   at what point we will realize that when someone is calling, "Nurse, Nurse", they're talking to US

-       what to do when you are with someone for the first minutes of their life

-       or what to say when you are with someone for the last.

Okay, so maybe we just need to figure these things out for ourselves, but I can tell you that our instructors left us with a strong sense of pride. Pride in our profession, our school and the types of nurses we know we will become.  We can now take a step away from the days when we were nervous about our bed-making capabilities and a step toward becoming a confident, competent, empathetic and understanding Registered Nurse.