Senior Jitters?

Though it’s a great clinical rotation, the CICU makes me nervous. Just their 10-page daily flow sheet alone was a rude awakening to how much stuff I still don’t know and how little time I have left to learn it all. So as we edge towards another clinical weekend, I can already feel my anxiety starting to build… 

Part of the problem is I feel like we do a lot of stuffing and dumping every semester—we focus on and study what we need to know for that particular class and then that knowledge gets neatly tucked away in some obscure corner (hopefully of the mind and not of a bookshelf). For instance, I took maternity/OB last spring and at this particular moment it totally escapes me what the hell BUBBLEHEP stands for. Breasts, uterus….oh forget it. L&D is the last place I want to work anyway. I also often get frustrated if I don’t remember the brand name/generic/class/action/or indication for one of the gillions of meds I know we’ve already covered. It’s just a lot information. As it has been said before, nursing school is like trying to stuff 10 lbs of information into a 5 lb bag. Ten pounds of constantly changing information at that. Nursing is one of those fields where you truly never stop learning. There are always new meds, new equipment, new best practices… To all of those that have come before me—how the hell do you retain it all?!?

So as you can probably tell I’m becoming a bit unraveled. I know most of it is just the nerves, the stress, and the sleep deprivation weighing me down like the itis after Sunday dinner at Big Momma’s house, but it’s definitely times like this that I wish I wasn’t a nontraditional student. Those fresh-outta-high-school-no-kids-no-mortgage-no-car-note-don’t-gotta-work-cause-mom-and-dad-footing-the-bill students just don’t realize how good they’ve got it. What I wouldn’t give to be able to just focus on studying.

But that’s not my reality. So I gotta buckle down and push through…I’ve come too far to crap out now.