PeanutintheOR

I've been working in the operating room since I graduated, just over four years ago, but with a seven month break last year (bad idea, but it's a long story). In all of my previous jobs, I've done well. I've had my stumbles, but overall, I've been a competent nurse, and I've always had very positive performance reviews. The trouble has been in my current job. I got a traveling gig after my break, and got assigned in Portland, OR. Maybe it's the time off, maybe it's my relative inexperience as a traveler, but I just haven't been bringing my A game to this job. I make stupid mistakes, like forgetting to have a patient remove his dentures before coming to the OR, or leaving the chart on a stretcher when transferring a patient to another bed. No matter how hard I try, I can't seem to stop screwing up. The nurses at my current assignment seem to like me, but about half the scrubs seem to be dead set against me. I've overheard them whispering about me whenever I make a mistake, saying that they can't believe I want to extend my contract. If it were just one, I'd ignore her, but there's a group of about six "mean girls" who just seem to be watching me all the time to note every mistake I make. Some of the things they talk about aren't even my fault, like when a nurse who relieved me for lunch forgot to put away the Contact Precautions sign. Or they're really minor, like forgetting to erase the patient information from the white board in one room (this being on a weekend shift, when there was almost nobody around to see it). I'm miserable, and I can't sleep at night, which makes me even more prone to mistakes. When I do sleep, I have terrible nightmares and wake up exhausted. On good days, I want to quit OR and go into another branch of nursing. On bad days, I want to quit nursing altogether. Unfortunately, I'm stuck here until February 28 (just signed my extension), so I don't know what I can do. Has anyone else had experiences like this? How can I make it through four more months without breaking down?

Well, the Nurse Manager is so busy she's almost impossible to find, the Director even more so. And the Supply Director I've never seen, but apparently neither the Nurse Manager or the Director has any authority over the supply people at all. I forgot to mention in my wall o' text that two weeks ago the management decided we needed an extra operating room, so they cleared all our supplies out of the spare OR they used to live in, and moved them to two separate rooms (so you now have to guess which one to look in first when an angry surgeon wants to know why you don't have any spare prep kits in the room. Joy. ). Anyway, that's another reason I couldn't find what I needed when I needed it. I like to think everybody is tearing their hair now, because I noticed something strange about my scheduled cases the very day after this whole debacle. The last one was scheduled as "exploratory laparotomy, axillary node dissection." OK, that doesn't sound right, either. Cautioned by the day before, I asked the charge nurse to verify the procedure with the surgeon. Surprise, it was supposed to be an axillary exploration! That's right, we somehow scheduled an 83 year old woman for a completely unnecessary major abdominal surgery! Hooray for us! The best I can figure out, our new scheduler hasn't had a course in medical terminology, and so doesn't understand what she's being told to schedule. So she just schedules everything that _sounds like_ what she heard the surgeon call in (ex lap, axilla, whatever, right?) and figures we'll sort it out on our end. She surely doesn't know that we get our preference cards from the schedule, or that we won't know that the schedule is wrong until we check the consent, at which point we'll get chewed out for delaying the case while we get the right things together. I need out, STAT.

Hi all, I am quitting the OR. I just can't take it anymore. A little background: I'm a relatively new grad, about two years out of school, and I went straight to the OR after graduation. At first it was really hard, but I'm proud to have stuck it out longer than a lot of folks. My first OR hired ten new grad nurses in the time I was there; all but me and one other had quit by the time I left ten months later. I've had trouble in all three facilities I've worked in: the first one had a lot of bad-tempered staff and surgeons, the second had absolutely insane management, and the last...well, I'll tell you about it. For some reason, this hospital just couldn't get it together. The in-room staff was great, but the support staff was awful. Our supply person never ordered anything until we were completely out, and because of arthritis in her hip, she wouldn't get up from her chair to help find specialty items. She'd just tell us "Oh, we don't stock those anymore," and I, the circulator, would have to go back into the room and tell a surgeon, who knew perfectly well that we _did_ stock the item he'd been using for the past ten years, that I couldn't get him what he needed. The instrument technicians could have been replaced with recordings that said "Find it yourself," for all the help they gave when your last pair of tenotomy scissors had just fallen on the floor. And the schedulers, they were the ones that pushed me over the edge. It was funny in a "Why us, Lord?" sort of way when they scheduled twelve laparoscopic cases in one day (we only had five laparoscopy sets. Some cases were delayed by two hours while we turned them over.), and when they put our only MRSA case in as the first case of the day, we just moved that patient to the last case and had them sit in the isolation room in pre-op all day. But imagine my surprise when I came in one morning to find my first case scheduled as "Parotidectomy, sigmoid colectomy, and perianal sigmoid colon resection." Waitaminute...parotidectomy AND sigmoid colectomy? It's been a while since I had basic anatomy, but aren't those at opposite ends of the body? And aren't they completely different specialties? And wouldn't there be some kind of contamination issue with working on the colon and the parotid at the same time? I left my poor scrub alone to open while I went to sort things out. Come to find out, only the perianal colon resection part was on the consent. OK, I thought, we'll just set up for that. I consulted the preference card. It looked plausible. Lithotomy position, Yellofin stirrups, General Basic instrument set. We set up that way, and got ready to bring in the patient. Enter the surgeon, who promptly asked, "Where's all my prone position stuff?" Yep, our card was wrong. Totally wrong. Abominably wrong. You see, the cards were generated based on the (completely erroneous) schedule, and consequently what we had was an excellent description of how to do a sigmoid colectomy with perianal resection, instead of a simple perianal resection. Oh, and our useless supply person was on leave having her bad hip replaced, so we had only a clueless temp worker supplying the OR. It took me almost ten minutes to find a lousy foley cath kit. I spent about 80% of that case out of the room, running to get supplies that we should have had pulled before the case. In my mind I pleaded with the patient, "Please don't code. Please don't code." My counts came out correct, but in my consternation, did I open something countable and forget to write it down? I honestly can't remember. I was so flustered and upset by being caught unprepared that, to my eternal shame, I started crying in the middle of surgery. In front of a student who happened to be having an OR observation day. Yeah, that's one that's never going to work in the OR, ever. Thankfully, the charge nurse saw what bad shape we were in, and came in to give me a break. I ran to the lounge, still sobbing, and kicked the bejeesus out of several hapless chairs. When I calmed down, I scribbled on a piece of note paper "Can't take it anymore. I quit. My last day will be Sept. 30." and taped it to the manager's door. So, I need to get out of the OR. When it goes well, it's the best job in the world, but the stress is too much. I'm not sleeping, I'm eating compulsively, I'm suddenly afraid of a lot of things that never scared me before. My boyfriend tells me I'm much more irritable when I have a bad day at work, and there are so many bad days. Problem is, I still have to pay bills, so I need to find somewhere else to go with decent pay. Also, I've identified myself as a tough OR nurse for a couple of years; I have trouble allowing myself to do something I see as "not elite." Are there any ex-OR nurses out there who found happiness in other areas of nursing? Any suggestions on where I should go from here? Any advice on where to go from here? Thanks for reading, Peanut