10 Weeks of Orientation

So I'm a new nurse with one day left to my orientation! To give a little background, I was hired by Ministry St. Joseph's Hospital back in March, where I've done my clinicals since October. After graduation, I took a Kaplan Review Course and then had 2 weeks all to myself in which I shamelessly played in the dirt: aka flower beds and vegetable garden. I ignored my NCLEX studying because my brain was fried. Then on one magical Monday, which was June 9th 2014, I started my career as a Nurse Technician/Graduate Nurse and now a Registered Nurse!!! I'm going to share 10 things I learned while on my orientation and maybe even a fear as they turn me loose, on my own to care for patients as a real as they can get RN!!!

1) In my first 3 weeks of orientation, I was cramming for my boards. I realized very quickly that was a stupid idea and should've taken my boards before I started work. I also should've been studying all along, but I'm a procrastinator by design and I don't work that way.  After 203 agonizing questions on July 2nd, one day later I was presented with my newly printed Nursing License!!! YAY!!!

2) Classroom Orientation days are horrifically boring!!! I'm thankful there were only 5 of them.  Some of the presenters were as exciting as watching mold grow on bread. I'm not even exaggerating. The only emotion I saw out of one of them was when she talked about how she used to drywall houses before becoming a nurse. Honey, you missed your calling, go back to drywall...in better news, those days are long gone!!!!! Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition!!!

3) I FINALLY got my very first IV start!!! I had a whopping 4 attempts during clinical and they were all failures. I did get one in the first few weeks of orientation and that was rewarding. Then I spent a morning in OPS (out-patient surgery) to try some starts. I got a few but I felt like a black sheep of IV's since I had a streak where I missed 3 and the anesthesia tech I was with failed as well. I then got 2 after that. I'm still not very comfortable with IV's but maybe one day I'll figure it out.

4) Hyperbaric Chamber is as much fun as watching a goldfish in a bowl. Because that's what you are basically doing. Watching patients in glass tubes.  I had done this for clinical and it wasn't  much better the 2nd time. Basically what you need to know is don't send your patients down with any metal or lotions on. They will get burned and it may blow up the hospital.

5) In the same sense, I had to shadow for 4 hours in Telemetry. BORING! All I needed to know was what happened in the first 10 minutes. Thank God I had coffee, cuz those were some of the most boring hours of my job!

6) All of my shadow days were squished to the end of my orientation. That meant I didn't have much time on the floor in the last 3 weeks of my orientation. I did request and my preceptors agreed that I needed one more week. Well it was 3 more shifts, but it definitely helped.

7) The phone is scary! I'm not a phone person by any means. I have to talk myself into using one to make a call to someone that's not in the list of like 10 people I talk to regularly.  So when it came time to hold the phone at work, I was scared. It's not so bad anymore but I still don't like talking to the crabby doctors.

8) Orientation lasted my entire summer which meant that the first time in 20 years, I was unable to go to Hayward for vacation. I was okay with it, I guess, seeing as I had already took a trip to New Jersey in January and Household Reunion in April. Sometimes you have to pick your priorities and I guess it was nice to not have family drama for a week on the lake!

9) I learned this time how much I DO NOT miss being in school and even though I did have plans to complete my BSN soon, I have NO desire to do that anytime soon. Too expensive/stressful/boring/etc. I want to just work!

10) At the end I was released to a shift on my own on a Sunday evening. And guess what? I SURVIVED!!!

So now I guess I can go out there and conquer the world as a Nurse!