Before working in a hospital, I had absolutely no experience with hospitals. Whenever my family member's were ill, I wasn't allowed to go with them to the hospital because they didn't want me to catch anything. No one in my family worked in health care so I had no stories and no ideas as to what to expect. So all this was new to me, prior.
So I get into the hospital, nervous as ever, because in nursing school they keep on telling us that if you don't do x,y,z, then you could lose your license. Everything I do, I panic. If a patient's IV infiltrates around the time I am giving them NS, I panic. The patient tells me I'm a terrible nurse because I didn't give them pain medicine within the first 5 minutes of them calling for it, I panic. If it's 12 o clock and I'm not done all of my assessment/charting for all 5 of my patients, I panic. And above all, if I don't know how to administer a certain medication because the specific method isn't provided (what kind of syringe can I use for this medicine?), panic.
Why? Because I thought there was a protocol for everything that's done in the hospital and as a nurse and I figured that if I didn't follow that protocol to a T, I'd lose my license and my dream of being a nurse would go to pieces within the first 6 months of my time as a nurse. so I would keep asking the simplest of questions for fear of doing something wrong.
Come to find out: Nursing is ALL about being creative, even with things like giving meds and that there isn't really a protocol for everything in the hospital. You just have to come up with ways to get your job done. If a patient can't hold a medicine cup in their hand and you're giving them a liquid like robitussin, you can grab a syringe and insert it into their mouth that way. I had to learn how to walk out of a patient's room and not feel like I'm demonstrating disrespect for not being able to carry on long conversations about their family members and their dogs with them. Or that if I've already signed off on the MAR that I've given a medication and then find out that it wasn't completed because the patient's IV no longer works, that I'm not "lying" when I say it was given and that I'm going to lose my license if I'm discovered. It just means I need to get a new IV restarted and then continue to give that medication.
So basically, my anxiety level has slowly been coming down because I realize that everything in nursing isn't a set up for me to lose my license.
