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There are days as a nursing student when you introduce yourself to the nurse you’ll be working with, and the response you get makes your stomach drop and you start to think, “Oh My… this is going to be one LONG day.”
Things start out slow, and you try to listen in on the report from the night shift, but everyone is speaking low, and you’re pretty sure it’s because they don’t want you to hear everything. These days don’t seem like they’re going to work out very well, and if you don’t watch yourself, the feelings of dread are going to control your day, and ruin it.
That’s how I thought my rotation was going to be this last week. Things just got off to a grim start. But like I mentioned in a recent post, I am determined to make this quarter different. I did my very best to just stay on top of everything as best I could, and most importantly, I forced myself to ask questions, even though I was super intimidated by my nurse. Turns out, my questions helped out a lot. They showed my nurse that I was trying to connect the pieces together and really understand what was going on with my patient. Even though she was busy too, she turned out to be such a help. She turned the answers to my questions into questions for me, challenging my thinking. And I actually impressed her! She really advocated for me to develop my own way of working my assessment and planning my care, helping with her interjections.
I don’t think I sat down for more than 10 minutes at a time with the one exception of lunch. Vital signs Q15minutes, making assessments, passing meds, and helping out the nurse in each 15 minute slot between charting. It was definitely an eventful day, but probably one of my best clinical days. I learned so much about managing time, about being efficient. Despite the rough start, things started to look up. It was all about showing interest in my patient and my plan of care, asking questions about everything, and proving that I wanted to be there and that I want to be a good nurse. That not-so-friendly beginning turned out to be one of those awesome days.
