After nearly four decades, I still remember my miserable, awful, no good first year of nursing vividly. It was my first full time job, the most responsibility I'd ever had and the achievement of a goal I had been working toward for years. The first year of nursing is miserable, it really is. Sometimes you are so miserable, you find yourself alienating your co-workers without realizing it. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. Hang in there, and it will get better.
NursesNew NurseArticle
The first year of nursing is miserable. Everyone is miserable during the first year of nursing. You go from being a college student to being responsible for a full load of patients, and you aren't sure you're up to it and you're worried about what would happen if you made a mistake. Not IF you made a mistake, but when you make one because you just know that you can't do this and you're going to kill someone. You go home worried about whether you did enough, noticed any potential harbingers of a decline in your patient status or passed on everything you needed to pass on to the next shift. Sometimes you stay awake all night worrying about it. Or you fall asleep only to wake in a panic, sure you've forgotten the one crucial detail that could have prevented someone's demise.
The first year of nursing is miserable. I'll say it again. The first year of nursing is miserable. Even after 38 years, I remember vividly just how miserable the first year of nursing can be. I worried that I had missed an order or an important lab value. I worried that I had signed off an order but had forgotten to actually DO what was ordered. On one occasion, I actually got up in the middle of the night and drove to the hospital, sneaked up the back stairway to my floor and ducked into the end room to make sure I really HAD decreased the Heparin drip as I was supposed to have. (Someone had -- I'm still hoping it was me and not the night nurse who found the order when she went through doing 24 hour chart checks.) I was so afraid I'd do an IM injection wrong and injure someone's sciatic nerve, dooming them to a lifetime of pain and suffering that I'd have to go into the bathroom and vomit before giving an injection.
The first year of nursing was miserable. I felt as though I was overworked, that no one appreciated me and that I was an inch away from making a potentially fatal mistake at any moment. I worked as hard as I could, but my time management skills weren't fully developed and I didn't have the experience to detect trouble on the way as the more experienced nurses could. Instead, I detected trouble right about the time the feces hit the fan . . . far too late to head it off at the pass and just in time for one of my more experienced co-workers to save my (my patient's) bacon.
Truly, I WAS unappreciated -- which had a lot more to do with my own attitude and my inability to get along with my co-workers than it had to do with my co-workers, who probably would have liked and appreciated me had I been a bit more likable. But I was too stressed, too convinced of my own incompetence to be able to spend the energy on the social niceties that would have helped me to fit in to the team.
I didn't have the option of quitting my job and moving on. I was supporting a husband who was going to school full time, and health insurance at that time was not portable. I had to make my job work. And as time went on, I had a few scattered moments when I felt as though I could handle it. And then a few more moments. And then most of a day went by, and I handled what came my way, noticed signs and symptoms ahead of time and was able to head off potential badness before it became a full-fledged code. There were times when I was able to lift my nose from the grindstone long enough to notice that a co-worker was in trouble and needed help.
As I developed time management skills, assessment skills and interpersonal skills, my job got easier. I was able to interact more positively with my colleagues. I got to know the people on my shift, and we went out together. Some of them became friends. As I became more competent, my co-workers became nicer. (I know it was ME, not them. I became more likable and they responded positively.) Somewhere around the two year mark, I realized that I liked my job, my colleagues and myself. I had become competent.
Had I changed jobs, it wouldn't have happened, or it wouldn't have happened as soon. I was lucky, in a way, that I was forced to stay at my first job.
The first year of nursing sucks, but it does get easier, trust me. And one day you'll look back over the years and remember how lost and scared and incompetent you felt . . . and know that it was all worth it.
