"It's not a real patient!" I woke up saying yesterday afternoon. I had just had a terrible dream where my patient had died for a very long time and somehow I had never noticed. This was a result of a grueling week of exams and papers, and two clinical days where nothing seemed to go right.
Things Go Wrong
Granted, they weren't my patients, but anytime something bad happens to a patient I start to worry that something bad will happen to one of mine. In clinical this week, one patient stopped breathing, one patient's condition suddenly deteriorated to the point where they had to assign the student nurse to a different patient because the condition was too critical for a student nurse to manage, and one patient was delirious and pulled out all of the tubings and IV. It was a student nurse's worst nightmare.
You can rest easy knowing that none of these things happened as a result of anything that the student nurse's did wrong. We literally walked onto the surgical floor, went to check on our assigned patients, and ran out calling for help. Sometimes bad things happen on a surgical ward because patients have complications from the surgery, different tests, and medications. Luckily, this was our first experience with this since starting in surgery, so I guess it's not that common.
Needless to say, I was running at maximum adrenaline levels. I was in constant fear that I was going to do something wrong. Unfortunately for me, this was also the day that my teacher assigned us two patients instead of one. She also wanted to give us some more complicated cases. *groan*
After running around like a chicken with its head cut off, I came home, showered, and collapsed into bed. I was out in seconds.
Such is the life of a nursing student in second year. There are always too many assignments to do, too little time to sleep, too many exams that coincide with other projects, and waaaaay too much that we don't know yet. In clinical, we are constantly flipping through our textbooks to look up different conditions, reviewing how to do something, what certain medications are for, etc. It's hectic.
Sweet Patients
Of course, not all is bad. I still get nice moments with clients. I was in the middle of rushing off to do something yesterday when one of my clients started calling, "Nurse! Nurse!" I rushed over to see what was wrong. Instead of reporting something frightful, he flashed me a big grin and said, "Nurse, you are doing a great job! I can see you are very busy today, but I know you are going to be a great nurse one day." *sigh of relief from the nursing student*
When I told him at the end of my shift that I was going home now, he exclaimed, "What am I going to do when you're gone? I am going to MISS you!" Lol, I'm going to miss you too, lovely client.
