New nurse doubts

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Hi everyone, I am new to this site and I am also a brand new nurse to a cardiac step down unit. I have been in few classes and orientation for three weeks and will probably be taken off of orientation soon! However, while I am excited I am very intimidated. I constantly second guess myself and I'll obsess over these second thought and worry about "what ifs." My anxiety is through the roof and I can barely sleep at night. I feel like just quitting already :/. While I know mistakes happen, my biggest fear is making a mistake! I am doing my best to study cardiac specific procedures, meds, etc. so that I can have more confidence. I never thought I would feel so inadequate at my first job. Is it normal to feel so overwhelmed, emotional, and stressed? Any suggestions or feedback to help this new nurse would be appreciated :)!

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It is very normal to feel overwhelmed, especially through your first year or so of nursing!

There is a lot of responsibility involved with nursing and you don't learn anything close to what you need to know to survive as a floor nurse in school. Give yourself time and permission to learn. Ask questions of trusted preceptors, nurses and physicians. Talk to your patients and have them tell you their experiences. Study just like you're doing and expand your knowledge base.

I know it probably feels like you've been thrown to the wolves, but hang in there! It WILL get easier!

In the meantime, take care of yourself. While studying on your offtime isn't a bad idea, make sure you're still seeing people you care about and doing the things you enjoy. That will help you de-stress and separate work from your personal life!

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I was terrified my first six months or so!!! It's completely normal and it's also good to be scared at first. Anyone who isn't scared probably should not be taking care of people's lives. Give yourself some time and it will get easier. I probably didn't calm down until maybe a year in. Relax and just ask as many questions as you need to. Better to ask questions then make a mistake no matter how annoying you may think those questions are :) You WILL be ok and it WILL get easier! Take care of yourself

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Specializes in Anesthesia, ICU, PCU.

Hi Jk91,

I am also a new nurse and I think that every new nurse feels the way you do at some point. Sure they might acclimate sooner or not let on to their feelings of doubt, but we all feel it. To some degree, I'm sure anybody out of college in their first job feels this way.

I just got off orientation a week ago and the first week on my own was hell. The first day I had a severely hypotensive patient who we were bolusing copiously (eventually started on levophed) while ruling out a PE. I had put in maybe a half dozen IVs on orientation and, needless to say, wasn't very confident in the skill. So here I was suddenly in a situation where a critical patient needed additional access. Oh the doc was standing right there the whole time which as a new nurse I'm sure you can understand the pressure associated with that! Took him down to CT, which I wasn't too thrilled about because of how unstable he was, but they needed to r/o PE whereafter we might start a heparin drip. Well for the test he needed to lie flat which he didn't tolerate - desatted in the 70s with little improvement from the 100% NRB - and I wanted to stop the whole test for my patient, so I called the MDs who promptly came down. But proceeded with the test anyway - guess I should've just kept my mouth shut? Once he got back up we started levophed for the hypotension which normally means the patient goes right to the ICU from our floor, but since there was no bed for him (until change of shift of course), we had to run it for over an hour. Oh did I mention I had two other patients and no documentation done because I was with this patient the whole time? Ugh.

The third day we had a rapid response on the floor while one nurse short and two of us with +1 patient over our "normal ratio." Yet again I stayed late to finish documentation.

Sorry for the rant but both evenings just made me feel so damn inadequate as a nurse and unprepared to be on my own. Each of my three days on my own I've felt like I've forgotten some assessment, focused assessment, documentation, or piece of the plan to report to the oncoming nurse. I thought night shift was gonna be a nice change of pace after my orientation on days. That I'd have more time to read up on my charts and paint a pretty picture for the oncoming day nurse... boy was I wrong. I have a feeling we can both relate on some of these feelings, and I'm sure we'll both improve tremendously over the coming weeks, but until that happens just know there are others (and plenty of them at that) in the same boat as you!

TU RN

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