Not a real nurse?

[nrsman1]

I have been in the OR for about a month and a half and cannot help but get the feeling every once in a while that I am not a real nurse I feel like all of my schooling went to waste and all my skilled are evaporating away. How do you get over this feeling?

[LAM2010, BSN]

I haven't even started my circulator job yet - I am almost finished with the week-long facility orientation, and I think I still have to rotate to some other departments to get an understanding of how they operate before or after a patient is in our OR. I often have thought the same way, but then I realize that only a nurse could do this job. Not just because of the skills, but because of the person a nurse is. One thing that attracts me to the OR is that it is one of the scariest things a patient has to go through (*I* am even afraid of ever having surgery!), and I want to be there for those vulnerable patients. That person is in our hands while their surgery is happening. And we know the basic things that we have to protect.

Plus, look at all the commercials recruiting nurses - they always show an OR