golosa82

I am a new grad and I just recently got my first job as an rn at a community home. I had a brief 2 week orientation and was put by myself to work a busy floor my first day alone. I was told to focus on passing medications only because this particular floor gets really chaotic. With the med passing alone it is chaotic. Unfortunately everyone is getting sick around this time of the year with cold, sore throats and fever. I had 20+ patients to give meds to, about 10 accuchecks for 2 different times of the shift, scheduled meds plus pain medications which at least 10 patients asked for. Im new so obviously I was late on all my meds, I was under alot of pressure, feeling very overwhelmed. I finally finished my medications, temperatures had to be rechecked. Now im late for report for the next shift, the oncoming nurse had a cocky attitude from the beginning when I gave report. I asked a few questions which he didnt seem like he wanted to answer. I went to the charge nurse and spoke with her to go over my check list on my tasks. I come to find out that wound treatment also had to be done on my shift and it hadnt been done. However the charge nurse told me she had asked someone to help and no one had. I felt even worse at this point and I told the oncoming nurse about that not getting done and he got soooo mad at me!!!!! I was speechless and infuriated at how he treated me. Ive been thinking over and over what I have gotten myself into. I had been enjoying my job up until this point that now I'm alone and still trying to figure out my routine and being all over the place is not helping. Im feeling very incompetent, feeling like maybe this was all a mistake. I need some advice! Everyone at this place has been supportive with me being new, but this particular nurse was beyond mean.

Thanks for the pointers! Yes I tend to forget sometimes about the Iv sites and what solution is being administered and when my instructor asks me I think to myself DARNIT!!! I was just in there and forgot and my instructor is so strict about things like this and I feel so stupid to forget things like that. My self esteem right now is pretty wounded b/c I've had such a bad week that any criticism I get hurts thats how bad its gotten. My previous semesters in particular 2nd semester I was doing everything with confidence and it wasnt so bad as this semester. It's been a year since we were back in the hospital so that does affect our skills and our routine of doing things. Im just frustrated and hope I can find my way through this challenging tunnel.

I am in my last semester of an ADN program. At this point we are doing advanced med-surg and we have clinicals twice a week. However, I always tend to make mistakes and just one mistake starts to make me nervous and i continue to make mistakes. We started off with 1 patient at the beginning of the semester and have accumulated to 2 now. I start off my morning around by 730 with getting report from my nurse, I do my assesments and vitals and try to document them in time to get my 900 meds passed out. However, something always happens that holds me back with either the patient having pain or something additional and i get my meds passed out almost late. A nurse told me I need to get faster at doing my assessments-I tend to lose where my focus is on my patient so I have to go back and forth to asses my patient and our instructor encourages us to do baths and linen changes which we'll only do if time permits. I dont know really how to pick up speed...I've never worked in a hospital before as a PCT so things take me longer to do. I dont want to use as an excuse but I still havent found my pattern of how to do things. It's almost mid semester and im so worried that I'll never get things to click where I'll get things done quickly and in a timely manner where I wont make mistakes. I've even had some patients tell me that I see scared when I enter the room. I am a shy timid person and yes I am still not comfortable with caring for a patient, I always doubt myself....Does anyone have any advice??!!!

kringe38-I feel the same way too whenever I make a mistake I feel really stupid b/c either I already knew it beforehand and forgot or I just overlooked it . I tend to dwell on the issue so much that it brings my self esteem down more, but I need to learn to let it go and just learn from it. When I make a mistake in front of my instructor it makes me get all :uhoh21: paranoid, resulting in more stupidities, ugh I dont want to allow that kind of feeling take over me b/c it makes me doubt myself. We just need to believe in ourselves more

kringe38-I feel the same way too whenever I make a mistake I feel really stupid b/c either I already knew it beforehand and forgot or I just overlooked it . I tend to dwell on the issue so much that it brings my self esteem down more, but I need to learn to let it go and just learn from it. When I make a mistake in front of my instructor it makes me get all :uhoh21: parnoid, resulting in more stupidities, ugh I dont want to allow that kind of feeling take over me b/c it makes me feel doubtful of myself. We just need to believe in ourselves more.

Alex2010-omg did you ever report that nurse???!! What she did was just inhumane!!! I could just never imagine doing that to someone. People like that definitely do not need to be in the medical field.

Thx ham it up-I am glad for the support I'm getting from everyone on here, it keeps me at ease and lets me know I'm not the only one feeling this way. It's so much easier to explain it to people who are going thru the same things I'm going through or have gone through because telling my family or friends who aren't in nursing isn't the same because they dont understand. I have my midterm's clinical evaluation tomorrow so we'll see how that goes. If my instructor brings it up about the hospital incident, i will explain to her that i was never informed about the contact isolation. Regardless, I will not let these last few weeks remaining in the semester to go by without a fight, I will keep my head up because I have worked hard to get here and won't let those kinds of errors discourage me from what I want to do, I will use it to help me become a better nurse

Thanks to everyone that has posted their comments, now I dont feel as bad as I did a few minutes ago since tonight did not go as good as I thought it would. I had clinicals tonight and I had the same pts today that I had yesterday, one of them was discharged and I was given a new patient. The patient I had both yesterday and today, no one told me he was on contact isolation. There were never any signs on his door, it was never on the kardex, but I still wore gloves when I was with him. Getting to the part where I felt stupid was when my instructor came with me to give my evening meds and there happend to be an isolation cart there, that wasn't even there yesterday nor today until later on, so she asked me if my pt was on isolation and I said no-I didnt think he was . Now at this point I'm thinking o crap, now I'm in trouble. So she asks and the pct said the pt was on contact isolation and that they didnt have a sign to post, said she was getting to it. That was strike 1 because she said I was supossed to know he was on contact isolation, which I didnt. Well then when we go in I had to do an IVP and she walks out b/c I kept getting resistance when I was trying to flush, she went to go talk to the nurse. Here's where I totally mess up: I needed another flush and didnt have one on hand and didnt think about how I was gowned up and just walked out of the room like that to go get a NS flush. So my instructor saw me and began yelling at me b/c I broke asepsis , I didn't even know what to say...I just felt so small. It was a stupid error on my part. The past 2 weeks have not been going good for me in clinicals....

Thanks! I really am trying hard to stay positive, I'm a person that sometimes takes criticism to heart but I know that in this field criticism can either make u stronger and become better or break you and I'm trying to just take the positive criticism to improve myself and let the bad things brush past by me.

I am a 2nd semester nursing student and this is my 2nd time taking med-surg. I still am having problems cracking down the answers on the exams but I feel like i understand the material alot better than last semester and I'm not doing as good as I want to be doing on the exams but theyre are passing grades. My instructor though, consistently tells our class on a weekly basis "nursing isnt for everybody", I don't know if she says that to us because we are re-taking med-surg or she doesnt think we are trying hard enough. She also said that when she sees us at clinicals she's not impressed with what she sees in our performance. Then yesterday a nurse at the hospital we do our clinicals at asked us what semester we are in and we told her 2nd semester. So she said she felt like we are not as advanced as we should be, she goes on further stating that we dont know how to make beds right. In our program we are required to take the cna class to have experience in that, and I took that course almost 2 years ago. I've never worked as a cna/pct, so those skills on bedmaking are kinda iffy, I can say that I do attempt to do my best on making my patients beds. But putting all this negativity together makes me feel like I'm being told I'm just not good enough to be a nurse. I feel like I've improved alot in clinicals since last semester because before I was always too nervous to go in the patients room, now its not as bad and I do my assessments right away. I do tend to have questions alot tho like when a patient tells me he is having chest pain and feeling nauseous, that to me is alarming, so I'll do vitals and I'll tell my nurse and she'll just say "o well he's been in pain since he got here, and everything makes him nauseous." So besides from what I do, what more can I do if I'm being told pretty much there's nothing to do-so I'll go in and re-position my patient and see if that helps any. I kinda feel unsure of myself alot of the time, but aside from everything I'm trying to hold my head up high and try to learn as much as I can, I really want to pass this semester, not because I just got "by" but because I know what I'm doing. Does anyone have any advice or similar stories to tell that they've had on any kind of negativity from people?

Thanks everyone for the positive support! I do believe that for the 2nd time, I will do alot better!

It all depends on your study habits and organizational skills. If you feel like you will need to focus more on school and you can financially do it without work I'd say just focus on school. I was working last semester while in the nursing program and it was really tough, I was working part-time, about 20 hours per week I was so stressed out all the time. This semester, I'm not working and I'm not as stressed out as last semester. Its doable to work and go to school, you just have to really be on top of everything. But in your case since your an LPN, thats also an advantage to you because you have the experience to rely on, and in my opinion it will help when you're studying because you're familiar with the prioritizing and planning on patient care, etc.

@cgravier-I really did unexpectedly. It was just one of those days I guess. @jmere311-Im more of a visual learner, memorizing the steps doesnt help me, thats why I was going in to practice so much and I can do the skills, my problem was that when she handed me the paper with the list of what I had to do for some reason didnt make sense to me, I was so confused and I didnt feel like I could ask her anything since it was a "test" pretty much. But for the re-do I'm ready to do it.

I had a horrible experience this past week with really screwing up on passing my skills practical exam. For the first 7 weeks of the semester we are given some skills: the 1st set was monitoring iv site, hanging iv bags, piggybacks, flushing saline locks, ivp; the 2nd set was trach care, trach suction, foley irrigation; the 3rd set was flushing NG, feeding thru NG through continuous and through bolus. So then last week we were going to be given 3 random skills and we had to do them within 30min. I had been practicing this whole time for the practical so I was ready. Well I had a lecture exam the same day I had my practical exam so that morning I woke up completely jittery and nervous as heck . Honestly I dont know if it was just b/c I was worried about my lecture exam or just both exams or what but in clinicals I'm not like that and I havent gotten that nervous in such a long time. Anyway I was originally the last student scheduled to get checked off and since a student didnt show up I was pushed to be one of the first few to go and I for some reason panicked and thought I was going to forget everything. So when it was my turn and she hands me the sheet, the 3 skills I had to do were listed and there was a little scenario and for some reason when I read everything it just looked like a foreign language to me. None of it made sense.... I panicked even more and still went ahead and gathered my supplies I was going to need and I did the things I thought I had to do. While I'm doing the skills, my heart had to be beating close to 140bpm, I could literally see myself shaking. My instructor never said anything but watched as I did my skills. When I finished, I had to do my documentation and as I re-read everything, it took me about 2 times for me to read it again and understand what I actually had to have done and realized that I had done everything wrong except for the trach care. I felt so embarrassed and was soo upset I wanted to cry . I couldnt believe how I had screwed it all up. I'm still feeling so disappointed and nervous because I know I did not pass the skills. We are given a chance to re-mediate and perform the skills again but I just believe this should never have happened. I'm so embarrassed to see my teacher next week because I feel so stupid . Has something similar ever happened to anyone? How would you handle such a situation?

Everyone's posts has made me feel better and more positive about what I have to do. I know that when you really want something no matter what, nothing can stand in the way and if you have to work to pay the bills while going to school it is possible, you just have to have that drive in you that won't let you give up Thanks everyone for the feedback! :)