New job!

Congratulations.

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I don't know you sweetie, but I'm still SUPER EXCITED for you.

God Bless You And Your Family.

Be the best GI nurse you can be.

Congrats!!!!

gi office is great u get a mix of medical visits and procedures! congrats!

Congrats!!!!! I believe everything happens for a reason . All those other doors where closed so you could find the place you need to be. Good luck in all your future endeavors.

Thanks everyone!!

Five Weeks to Burnout

So you killed yourself to get straight A’s in order toget into nursing school and then learned to accept that once in nursing schoola 93% was no longer an A. Then yousuffered through what seemed to be the most disorganized schooling you had everheard of and then you graduated. Whatyou didn’t know then is that all that disorganization and learning to cope withangst was probably the most valuable thing you got from your education. As you sit a work and then re-work yourresume in the hopes of finding a nursing job you wonder, why did I do thisagain??? Oh yes, I wanted to help peopleand provide comfort and care in their time of need, yes, that was it! It has been 6 months since that fateful daywhen your NCLEX exam abruptly shut down and sent you into a three day long tizzy until you found out that you had passed, and you still have not so muchas gotten one call back from the hundreds of resumes you sent out. Three more months pass and your “temporary”waitressing job starts to feel permanent and you begin to wonder, will I everget a nursing job. You were uberoptimistic as you sent off your resume regardless of the fact that every singlejob requirement stated in bold NO NEW GRADS. You have spent countless hours filling out online applications and havenever met nor spoken to a live person. On the verge of giving up you re-work your resume one last time and youdecide to ask every single person you know if they know anyone in healthcarewho can possibly help you to get a job. Bingo Bango, you have just discovered the key to success innursing. Silly you to think it wasgrades, acumen or skills. Silly indeed,do not worry though you will be needing all of those and nerves of steel. So you land and interview through your bestfriends’ sisters’ brother in law, and you set out to make a greatimpression. You meet with three people simultaneously who undoubtedly ask you why you became a nurse, why you thinkyou will be good at it and what sets you apart from everyone else they areinterviewing? If you are lucky this willbe the end of it and you’ll be hired, all depending, of course, on how high upyour friends’ friend was within the company. If your thrice removed friend was on the lower end of the totem poleexpect to repeat the above scenario with the exact same questions 2-3 moretimes with various individuals within the organization. Or worse yet you may be subjected to a formalpanel interview, here a group of individuals will be sitting at a table and youwill be sitting in a chair facing them, they will ask you for detailed patients cenarios that reflect specific nursing criteria. You will be expected to answer quickly andconcisely. The good news is if you make it to the panel interview there areonly 3-7 candidates now vying for the position you are interviewing for asopposed to the 1000 applicants that applied.

Oh glorious day, you got hired as a RegisteredNurse! You interviewed great, you askedall the right questions, you feel great about the 10 weeks of training and the3 patient maximum on your unit. You setout for orientation which is hosted by a group of individuals who have ingestedquite a bit of the company Kool-Aid which clearly also contains RedBull. You are pumped, their enthusiasm is utterlycontagious, your benefits rock. Let’s dothis! Your preceptor-to-be texts you to see how it is going and you get weepy as you text back “I’m so excited!!!”

Day 1 of preceptor training, your preceptor-to-be callsout sick and you are placed with another equally qualified nurse but she is notin your exact department. You try not toworry as you leave your floor to go to her department; you assume everything will be fine. The hard part is overright, you got THE job. Your preceptorfor the day is nice but a tad on the doomy gloomy side and she starts to warnyou about “things”. A little nervous you listen and hope for the best. Towards the end of your shift you witness yourcharge nurse gossip to a small gathering of co-workers about anotherco-worker. At the end of your shift yourcurrent preceptor confesses that she is quitting and proceeds to tell youexactly why, which is of course not good. You could really use a shot of the company Kool-Aid right about now, butyou head home distraught instead.

Day 2 arrives and you show up to work re-energized and jazzed about your new gig, only to find that your preceptor, you know the oneassigned specifically to you, will be out of town for three weeks. You are assigned to another equally qualified nurse who is less than enthused to have a tag along. Her solution is to give you one of herpatients. She pretends to give you a choice and then assigns you a moderately ill male. You think, “Um, what? A patient, it is mysecond day of orientation and my first day on my floor” but you say, “you aregoing to be here to help me right?” She says yes but what she really means is don’t ask me for help and I do not likeyou. You fumble through your morning byassessing your patient from head to toe in such a thorough manner that he isconvinced that something is wrong with him, when what is really going on isthat you are mortified that you will miss something. After reassuring him that everything is within normal limits, you head out of the room to review his chart. Once you figure out how to get into the computer and find his chart, surprise, he had meds due at shift change and youare now an hour late. No worries you think, I will go ask my preceptor where meds are and what to do if I am late giving them. You find her in the lounge and before you can get your question out she blurts out “I gave YOUR meds, weonly have an hour window you know so you are gonna have to speed up if you think you’re ever gonna be able to handle 4 patients!” You try desperately not to cry as it sets in that all those super pointed questions you asked in your interview, were answered with big fat lies. The rest of day 2 is a blur as you try to keep up with the dizzying pace of vitals, intake and output, hourly rounding, urine dips, meds and more charting than you could ever have possibly imagined. You go home, you cry yourself to sleep, and you wash and repeat.

Day 3 brings another new preceptor and guess what she iseven less enthused to have you so she pawns 3 of her patients off on you and then disappears from the floor. Yup, 3 patients on day 3 and it will be this way for 2-3 more days at which time you’ll be given 4 patients. With no preceptor in site, you are left to ask your co-workers for help, who for the most part are supremely nice but keep telling you things like “it never gets any better” or “I dread coming to work all the time”. You muddle through but decide to ask your supervisor for help and you realize in that conversation that they are expecting you to be ready and on your own in 4 weeks time and you are not ready.

11 days and 9 different preceptors into your first nursing job and you feel like a complete failure, why/how did I ever think Icould do this you think. On this day though, your preceptor is everything about nursing that you love; she is kind and compassionate and she tells you that she has felt exactly the way you do now. At the end of your whirlwind shift during which she was at your side virtually every moment, she tells you, well she practically begs you to speak up to the powers that be. She tells you she had 3 months of orientation. You go home and cry yourself to sleep, you wash and you write an email imploring your bosses for help. They politely decline to give you the help that you requested but do agree that you may not have been trained properly. The solution is that they are now going to give you the SAME preceptor from now on and they will give you an additional week but technically it is only two days more.

Day 12 you arrive with as much excitement as you can muster but it is quickly deflated when you are told that your preceptor is not in and you will get yet another nurse. She is nice but by now, it just doesn’t feel like you are ever going to get it and even if you do, will you like it? You fumble through another day and manage to impress yourself and your preceptor. You leave smiling and fall asleep exhausted. You awake at 3AM and realize you have 2 more orientation days left and there are so many things you have not done or even seen, you lie awake the rest of the night.

This is not how it should be; this is not what we want for nursing. New nurses need to be trained and mentored not thrown into the fire to see who can make it. Chances are that those that do make are not the best they’re likely just more desperate for a job. No one in good conscience would agree to takepatients alone with this kind of training.

Congrats and best luck! :)

Congrats! gastroenterology is interesting! I love my GI office and it was a nurse there who actually inspired me to go to RN school! Bless you:)

Congrats!!! ^5!!! :up: