Confessions of a Registered Nurse: September 2006

September 28

The results are in....

Did you notice my new banner? That's right, I passed!!!!

I'll fill you in on all of the details tomorrow after work!

September 25

I don't want to wait another month to get this test out of the way, so I went to the doctor to see why I am STILL sick after six days. I no longer have the flu, now it is just an upper respiratory infection. The doctor was awesome- she gave me a steroid shot, an antibiotic shot, and a prescription for Cipro (strong antibiotic) and some cough medicine with codeine so I can sleep tonight. The steroid shot hurt more than I was anticipating, and it still hurts now, but it will be worth it when all of my swelling goes down and I can breathe without fighting so much! The cough is a lot better than it was the other day- it really only affects me when I am lying down. So as long as I refrain from passing out during the NCLEX, I think I will be fine. And I won't disturb the people around me (I'll have cough drops just in case). Thank you all for your advice, you had some great points.
After getting one shot in each hip today, I have decided that I definitely prefer being the one to give the shots. I'm still a little bit nervous when I give a shot, so sometimes I say, "Here comes the poke," and then pause a second before I actually poke the person. The nurse did that today and it was really frustrating! I braced myself, then nothing happened so I thought, "Hey, that wasn't so... OUCH!!!" It startled me, so I jumped, which made it hurt even more. So I will make sure in the future not to do that to my patients! It's interesting the little things that you notice when you are able to experience a situation from the opposite point of view. I'm going to spend the rest of the day studying, I'll let you know how the test goes tomorrow!

September 23

Tough decision

One of the first things my preceptor said to me was, "This winter, you are probably going to be sick at least every other week. That's just what happens when you first start working in a children's ER." Why was she trying to scare me away before she even had the chance to get to know me? Does she not like my hair? Am I too short? Too annoying? Well, it ends up she wasn't trying to scare me away. Three days after her warning, I came down with an awful cold that lasted six days. When I finally felt better, I was relieved that I had paid the price of being around all the germs early and had it over with. I normally only get sick twice a year: my birthday and New Year's Eve. I don't know why it always falls on those dates, but I figured I had gotten my birthday sickness out of the way a few weeks early. As I'm sure you have already guessed, I was wrong. On Wednesday, my lungs started hurting. Within a few hours, it had spread to my entire body. I felt like I had been hit by a truck. I had the flu. Already. I still was not fully recovered from being sick last time! So here it is the day before my birthday and on my "power cram" weekend for the NCLEX (which I take Tuesday- I put the wrong date last time) and I feel completely awful. I have only put in a few hours of studying and can't concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time. I thought I'd be better by now, but I actually think I am getting worse (the awful cough that actually causes me to throw up just started yesterday). So, do I go take the NCLEX without studying, or do I push it back and have to worry about it for another month? Right now, I'm leaning towards taking it sick and without studying. I'm very anxious to get it off my mind! But am I making a huge mistake? If I fail, I'll be demoted to a patient care tech until I can take it again in a few months. But if I push it back, I might lose my mind, which would probably result in losing my job too......

Maybe I do have cooties. Anyone remember how to give a cooties shot?

September 18

Life as an intern

For some crazy reason, I was under the impression that after I finished school, life would be calm and boring. I think I was a little bit off on that one! Work is going well, but it seems like I am always there. I'm in a 14-week internship program, so I have class and I work with a preceptor (an experienced nurse who teaches me everything my school didn't). My preceptor's name is Tanya, and I really like her. She knows what she is doing and has a lot of patience, which is crucial, especially because it takes me forever to do even the simplest tasks.
I'm working in a pediatric ER, and working with kids is nothing like working with adults. When starting an IV on an adult, you enter the room, tell them you are going to start an IV, then start the IV. With kids, you enter the room, explain what you are going to do, answer a lot of questions from the kid and the parents, comfort the child while he cries before you even get the needle out of its package, then attempt to start the IV while the kid is being held down, and the mother, father, siblings, aunts, uncles, neighbors, and everyone else the child knows is standing there cautiously watching. No pressure, right? I shake just putting a band-aid on a child with all those eyes on me! I think it is absolutely wonderful that these children have so much support, and I wouldn't want it any other way, but it definitely makes things more uncomfortable when you aren't confident in your skills yet. So hopefully I get that confidence soon, because starting an IV will be much easier when I'm not shaking!

It seems like the kids I have worked with so far like me, probably because they think I am another kid too. Yesterday a nine year old boy asked me if I had a boyfriend. I didn’t think I looked that young…. And I thought nine year old boys thought girls had cooties. Whatever happened to cooties? Maybe the alcohol scrub gets rid of those....?

September 11

I'm a GN!!

Thank you TX State Board of Nursing for processing my GN letter the same day you received it (instead of taking two weeks)!! Maybe you guys could hear the panic and frustration in my voice and you took sympathy on me. Or maybe you were just really sick of me calling every single day to check on my status... Either way, I really appreciate all of your help!

Now if I could only get over this nasty cold.....

I take the NCLEX (licensing exam) on September 28th, so for the next few weeks, I'll be studying and working at my wonderful new job! Please don't get upset if I'm not around too much!

Congrats to Rachel & Jason on their engagement!! Jason, you are definitely a lucky man! Rachel is one of the most amazing women I have ever met. Rachel, don’t let Research dampen your excitement, keep bugging them and they will at some point send your transcripts too.

And to the staff at Research College of Nursing (I know some of you read this), THIS IS RIDICULOUS!! You need to send your students’ transcripts!! There is absolutely no excuse for sitting on them for over three weeks- you are causing people more stress than you can imagine.

September 07

Any school but Research!!!

Last night Mike and I played an awful joke on Skitzo. We told him that we were enrolling him in nursing school at Research College of Nursing. This news upset him so much that he actually pooped himself right there on the kitchen floor.

Poor guy! We thought that after all I have been through with the school, he would have known that we were just kidding. But obviously he took us seriously, and a temporary loss of bowel control occurred.
Lesson of the day: Don't even joke about sending someone you love to Research College of Nursing. It's not funny, and you might get stuck with a huge mess on the floor.

September 05

I hate being right

When she said she would overnight my transcripts on Thursday, I wanted to believe her. I really did. But I knew she was full of it, and I was right. At noon today, I got a call from the woman at the Board of Nursing letting me know that they still do not have my affidavit. I give up. I wanted to make this posting funny but seem to have misplaced my sense of humor. Don't worry, once this mess gets cleaned up, I'll find my humor again. And I will use it at the expense of the idiots who have made the last few weeks a living hell. Buckle your seat belts, administrators at my nursing school, and remember, you started it.

The good news is that I will not lose my job over this. My manager seems pretty laid back and understanding, and she said that I can continue with my internship, I just can't have patient contact. So until I get my GN license, I will be shadowing a nurse instead of doing hands-on stuff. This is completely fair and I really appreciate their willingness to work with me. The bad news is that this makes me look like a complete idiot!! I met one of the other girls in the internship with me, and she is taking her licensing exam on Monday. She graduated at the same time as me, but her school was able to figure out how to get the envelope into the slit on the side of the mailbox, while my school is still working on that task. So I will not even have my Graduate Nurse license and my co-intern will be a Registered Nurse. LOL..... looking good so far at the new job, huh?

September 04

Too many hoops!

I wrote out this long blog entry explaining to you guys why I haven't been posting lately. But after reading it before I posted it, I realized that is was way too negative and depressing to make you guys read. So I decided I will just give you the basic facts about what is going on, and I will post something again soon once everything is worked out and I am in a better mood.
~ After fixing the transcript fiasco two weeks ago, I thought my transcripts were in the mail and my Graduate Nurse (GN) License would be issued any day.
~ A woman in the HR department at my hospital called on Thursday to let me know that I am not officially a GN on the TX Board of Nursing website. I checked it out and she is correct. I called the TX Board and it ends up that my school never sent my transcript or the affidavit my dean was supposed to sign on the date of graduation. I gave her an addressed, stamped envelope and even included a sticky arrow pointing to the line she needed to sign. The directions were highlighted- there was no way for this to go wrong. But it did! She never put it in the mail.
~ I called the dean and her assistant and told them that they needed to overnight my transcripts to TX. The assistant said she would, but at this point, that is of little comfort to me.
~ So here's my current situation. Even if they did overnight my information on Thursday, it will take ten business days for me to be issued my GN license. I start tomorrow. What a great start to a new job, huh?! I'm not sure what they are going to do- they can't delay the internship program for me, so are they going to kick me out? I guess I'll find out tomorrow....

Confessions of a Registered Nurse

Sunday, June 13, 2010

September 2006