How to get over hospital fears

[desereelynn]

Hello AllNurses!

I am heavily looking into becoming a nurse. I am a senior in high school about to graduate. Unfortunately, I have spent half of my life in hospitals and have had many bad experiences. Because of these experiences, I have minor fears of IV's, etc. They aren't major and they are getting better, but there is no doubt that i get the shivers when I have to go into a hospital. I really feel like if I was the one working there and helping others, it wouldn't be as scary of a thought. I want to know if anyone went into college with these fears and how you got over them? Especially during the clinical practice of inserting IV's and withdrawing blood? Thank you!

[twinmommy+2, ADN, BSN, MSN]

I think your personal experiences will be quite the asset to your future patients. I say go for it, talk to your clinical instructors and they might even give you extra experiences to get you used to it, at least being around it.

[meljonumd]

I find there is something different between doing a procedure on someone Else and having a procedure done on Me.

Something having to do with my clinical side taking over, but when I am doing a procedure on a patient, such as wound care or working with a patient with a broken ankle (my personal squeamish thing lol), it doesn't bother me, unless I switch over and start to think about it happening to ME.

Maybe and hopefully when you start working in a more professional capacity you'll find this to be true. To start on this path, I strongly urge you, then, to start working with people! Working with people in an intimate capacity, doing toileting hygiene, caring for them when they are sick: that's how you start to realize that everybody is just a body.

[HyperSaurus, RN, BSN]

IVs gave me the heebie-jeebies before I started working as a nurse. For me, constant exposure dulled the 'weirdness' of them.

I was very squeamish when I started nursing school. The site, smell, and sound of vomit, stool, blood, and phlegm grossed me out and I'd nearly hoarked over the simplest things like cleaning dog poop off the patio or changing my kid's diapers.

Watching needles and scalpels do their things freaked me out.

I'd had a couple of near-syncopal episodes in my life watching various medical procedures as a volunteer and as an EMT student.

Even in nursing school, I had a couple of vagal responses to stimuli.

4+ years into the profession and it's all gone. Even some of the nastiest things... horridly infected abscesses on druggies or streeters, brutal trauma, and full-thickness burns... ain't no thang (though I recently was working with a severe burn patient and had his tissue coming off in my hands as I was trying to start a line and then had his gooey burn flesh touch my exposed arm... it grossed me out a little but didn't impact my ability to hang in and do what needed doing).

Probably you'll be fine.