Rori roars

After my major grumpus episode on Tuesday I am feeling much better now. I was on the floor to orient to postpartum on Friday and did NOT get shoved in a corner. I was with a nurse who… well, I don’t quite know how to describe her other than she is a character. She obviously knows her stuff inside and out and her patients love her (and she knows it!). I had a couple patients today say to me, “There’s no one better to learn from… all the nurses here are nice, but she is great!” The bad part? Today was her last day for a month and a half! So, so sad about that. But I am glad that I at least got to start with her. And she spoke to one of the other nurses (who also happens to be a nursing instructor) and asked her to look out for me on Monday to make sure I get placed with someone good. I’m feeling slightly more hopeful, but still nervous about the day.

The classes have been going okay. Feels like school, but I’m getting paid to be there, so I can’t complain much. We did have a day on IV therapy. I was relieved that no one else in our group had done IVs in school, either. A lot of hospitals have IV teams (ours is not one of them, but I’m pretty sure we’re the exception) and those that don’t are still loath to have students starting them. So we practiced on some tubing and then on the fake arm. We have to get five successful sticks with a preceptor before we’re off to do them on our own… I have no idea when that’s going to happen for me. Seeing as I’m on postpartum for the next few months the only IV contact I’m likely to have is removing them. However the educator for the oncology clinic had said that she would be willing to take people for a day to do work on the skill, so I think I’ll take her up on that whenever it’s offered.

Aside from work stuff, I entered a new decade yesterday. I would say something profound about age or life or the universe here, but I’ve got nothing. Oh well. It was a good day, hung out with the parents and brother’s family. Going out with some friends on Tuesday, then another friend is coming to visit next weekend.

Now I’m just spending the day attempting to get some semblance of organization going here. Kitties were on the destructive side yesterday… I think they’re protesting something. So I need to clean up after them and get ready for me week. I am not a fan of this five-day work week thing. I hope I can get back to 12-hour shifts soon!

The new grad internship program officially started last week, although I only attended one of the days since it was all the generic orientation stuff. This week we are getting into the thick of it. Monday was a classroom day and, I have to admit, a wee bit snoozeriffic. Lots of checklists were passed out, more discussion about patient satisfaction (have I mentioned that I’ve presented patient satisfaction at our hospital’s skills fair and new employee orientation as well as for a class at school?). The med-surg nurses got to meet their preceptors. And I will mention here that I’m a tiny bit wishing that I’d gone for med-surg after all. It’s a feeling that’s been nagging at me for a while now. On the one hand I knew I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to do maternity, but on the other I’m wanting to take care of sick people. There are some sick people in maternity, but not many. Then I remember what I really want to be doing: NICU. Maternity is nice, but I really want to take care of the sick babies. I think I’m secretly an adrenaline junkie.

Today was a unit day. I’m out of the nursery now, but my postpartum preceptor didn’t happen to be working. And it was a little crazy on the floor. The nurses that were on postpartum apparently don’t like to teach. One of them said I could follow her around, but she wouldn’t teach me anything. Awesome, because there’s nothing I like better than following people around staring at them all day. I mean, I am not totally stupid. I can at least help with some of the baby stuff, I know that! On the other hand, you don’t want to teach? Well, fine, I probably don’t want to learn from you, either. I got pushed off onto a labor nurse who was going in on a scheduled section. She was very nice about it, but again, it’s not like I was going to learn a lot because I’m not going to be doing labor for some time yet. Argh.

I found our unit educator shortly after we came out of the PACU and was able to get her to rescue me by going over the safety checklist which took up a surprising amount of time. She had some CD-ROMs on maternity stuff that she loaned me. I found myself a corner with a free computer and holed up there with the CDs, taking a break to go down to a lunch meeting on geriatric pain (which is so completely irrelevant to maternity, but at that point I was going to take any excuse to get off the floor that I could). In retrospect, I probably should have just gone down to the special care nursery and hung out with them. They would have let me play. Pardon me, is my attitude showing?

Hopefully things will pick up. I see a mock code on the schedule for tomorrow. That is promising. And there’s IV stuff on Thursday. I am itching to stick a needle in someone’s vein (though I sincerely hope that this hospital does not operate on the theory of practicing on your fellow colleague because that’s just creepy). And I think my preceptor is on the schedule for Friday, the next time we’ll be on the unit. I’m trying to stay positive about this… I know that these feelings of ambivalence are normal. But quite honestly, there are times that I wish I could just walk away and not come back. Or that I could just do my quality stuff forever. I spent today feeling rather grumpy thinking about all the work I could be doing downstairs and yet this new grad crap was holding me hostage on the unit with nothing to do.

Sigh… tomorrow’s another day. And I just ordered a bunch of new scrubs. So I guess I can’t quit just yet. :b

In the midst of the rough week at work one of our nursery nurses suffered a loss in her own family. Understandably she wouldn’t be able to make it in for her upcoming shifts. This change in the schedule was further complicated by the fact that we’re in vacation season and another of the main nursery nurses was going to be out and unable to help. This is how I ended up getting tossed out of the nest to see if I could fly.

One day shift and one evening shift down. I haven’t heard back about any major transgressions, so I assume I did okay. I quickly realized, too, that my coworkers really are a good bunch. You hear so much about nurses eating their young, but for the most part I feel a lot of support. The nurses knew I was on my own and came by often to check on me and offer a hand if I needed it. Many of them threw me words of encouragement telling me I was doing a good job. It definitely helped me feel more confident to be staffing the nursery alone.

I’m covering three more days next week, then hopefully on to postpartum. The internship program starts next week, too, but as far as I know it’s just hospital and general nursing orientation for the first week. Our educator told me that I only need to go to the second day of nursing orientation, since I didn’t do it as a student. HR tried to tell me I needed to go to hospital orientation again, but my quality manager talked to them and got me out of that. The following week the real program begins. I’ll be interested to see what all it entails. Looking forward to moving on!

I wrote the following when I got home on Monday:

The other nursery nurse and I sat chatting while we awaited a new baby that we knew was coming our way. We had put together as much of the chart as we could. The warmer was set up. We were set to go and chatted about this and that while we waited. Then we heard the code overhead… the location of the code. We stared at each other wide-eyed, the color draining from our faces, tears pricking at the corner of our eyes. “Jesus Christ,” she said, partly a curse, partly a prayer. I sat in silence and stared at the floor.

The baby arrived at our door as scheduled. No giddy family members looking in the window. No goofy dad speaking in a falsetto voice and marvelling at his baby’s firm grasps on his finger. Just awkward conversation among the nurses punctuated by the baby’s indignant cries.

I did not know the outcome by the time I left tonight. The father eventually appeared with a small group. We invited him in to see and touch his baby, but his visit was short… his mind was understandably elsewhere.

I drove home glad that the route was so familiar so I needn’t think too much about the drive. The radio stayed silent. My usual quick pace was sluggish. I envied the religious tradition of my employer with its ritual prayers for these situations. I couldn’t come up with the right words myself.

I fear what I might learn when I return to work tomorrow.

The follow-up:

Sadly that sinking feeling in my stomach foretold the truth. There was no miracle overnight. A man lost his wife and the mother of his children. We are all reeling from what happened… so rare, yet so tragic.