I'm a new grad and was hired August 20 for a job in the ICU. Since the critical care training program did not start until mid October, my manager told me that she would place me in the cardiac procedure unit to orient until that time and sign me up for the various orientation classes I needed as a new hire to the hospital. Well, the first month went very poorly. When I showed up in the CPU, nobody was expecting me, nobody knew why I would be placed there, no preceptor was available, etc... I wound up taking an eight hour tour of the hospital with a nurse who obviously had better things to do than to babysit someone's mistake. The next day, I had a preceptor, and we took one patient. The day after that, I had a different preceptor, and we took two patients. The following day, I had the first day's preceptor again, and I was scheduled to take four patients alone (including two new admits and a discharge) with the preceptor shadowing. I told the preceptor that I didn't think I would be able to handle it, particularly since I didn't have my own access to the Pyxis for meds. She was angry and basically then took all the patients herself with me shadowing her and pretty much begging to be shown how to do anything. After that week, I was sent to the TCU, where again nobody was expecting me or knew who I was. They sent me back to the CPU, who sent me to the ASU and so on and so on.
I must have oriented one or two days in every unit and floor of the hospital. After I spent one day in the ICU shadowing a very unhappy nurse, the assistant manager there decided that I needed a definite plan. I was to begin training night shifts in the TCU that next day and to stay in that unit until my critical care training started. When I showed up at 11 that night, nobody was expecting me in the TCU. I couldn't help it, after a month of the same, I started to cry. They sent me to the CPU, where, remembering the three days I had spent there a month before, I actually fared pretty well, taking a full load of (mostly sleeping) patients. The next night, the TCU was ready for me (sort of), and I had a preceptor. I've been working nights there for the past three weeks, and I haven't had the same preceptor more than three days in a row. I am so miserable that I cry every night before I have to go in to work. Every time I show up, the charge nurse looks irritated that she has to find someone for me to work with, and the person I'm assigned to looks positively burdened to have to work with me.
On top of it, most of the nurses in the unit are all from the same country. Although I speak Spanish and Russian as well as English, I (and nobody in my family) would ever dream of speaking those languages in front of people who did not understand them. I don't think that there is the same custom in these nurses' culture as, all night long, they speak their language around and over me as if I weren't even there. Although I'm surrounded by people, I have never felt so lonely.
Last night I felt so nervous about going to work that I couldn't stop throwing up and so I called in sick. I've never called in a sick day at any job before in my life. All of my previous (non-nursing) employers have loved me. I never missed a day of school and graduated near the top of my nursing class. Now I feel like the biggest, dumbest, most unwanted loser. I'm trying to hold out until the promised critical care classes begin in twelve days, but I dread even going in to work tonight.
Are all hospitals like this? Is this what everyone goes through? At nursing school, I was led to believe that there was a system to training new nurses, but I have received nothing resembling a systematic training. Should I look for a new job? This hospital pays the best in my area and has fantastic benefits, but the nurses here seem more unhappy than in any of the other places I rotated through in school.
