Is it a rule that you MUST be miserable for your first year?

[leekaye]

What other career besides nursing says that it's normal to be depressed and anxious and physically ill during your first year on the job?

I've been working at my new job Med-Surg NOCs in an inner city hospital for 7 weeks now. Obviously, I have a lot to learn so I'm dealing with the newbie stress and anxiety and having to learn so much. I work my butt off and give my utmost, but like most new nurses, I'm depressed, anxious, sleep deprived, yelling at my kids and my hair is beginning to fall out. In short, I think I'm heading for a breakdown. Worse, my kids are 13 and 15 and are begging me to quit because they don't want to be alone at night. (The job only pays new grads $18/hour so I can't afford to pay someone to stay with them and I have no family.) Our 12 hour shifts always turn into 14-15hrs too.

Everyone has said that the first year is pure hell for a new nurse. I didn't like clinicals and had suspicions that bedside wasn't for me. Now I suddenly have a job offer in my old career which pays more and is a day desk job. But everyone has told me that I should just stick with this bedside job and that it would be a complete waste of my nursing school if I quit now.

So here's my question: Is it a rule that you MUST suffer a nervous breakdown for a year in your first nursing job? Will I never be able to use my nursing degree if I don't work bedside for a year? And has anyone just ever got that degree and said it wasn't worth it and done something else? (I know people say keep going to school for more options but at my age, I don't really have the desire to go to school until I'm 60 and I wouldn't be able to recoup the cost of the additional education since I don't have decades before I would retire.)

What other options are there for a new grad? Has anyone just say f*** it and gone on to a different career after getting that nursing degree?

(Thanks everyone in advance for your advice! This board is awesome.)

[leekaye]

Are you saying that new nurses are stressed because they're just not well educated?

[icuRNmaggie, BSN, RN]

Ill equipped, unprepared and thrown to the wolves does not necessarily mean uneducated.

[leekaye]

I see your point. Our classroom work was very rigorous, but I do feel that I personally did not get enough clinical hands on experience. Other than passing meds and a handful of observations, we mainly did the CNA jobs as the hospital cut back to one CNA per floor on days students were there. It was not uncommon for us to step off the elevator only to be handed sheets and instructions to clean up a patient before we even had our coats off.

It wasn't so much our instructors as the hospital admin reducing the student scope out of liability fears. I lost track of how many times I was told "We used to let students do this until one student screwed up so now students are not allowed to do that." I saw little difference from my first clinical to my last in regards to what I was doing. It was unfortunate.