The Intensive Art

After reading this I must tell people that I think it’s day shifts that are horrible, not night shifts! Day shifts are rough on my body, which strongly believes that getting up at 4:30am is WRONG. Somebody mentioned that working night shifts makes them feel like they have the flu. Yes, day shifts do that to me for sure! It takes me many days to get over the pure exhaustion of working day shifts.

More than anything, I feel that when working the day shift, nurses are expected to work at inhuman rates. On night shifts, the workload feels manageable. There’s less chaos and disorganization. On night shifts, I don’t feel like I’m “just trying to keep them alive until the next shift.” Instead, I feel like I am being a nurse and working with my patients.

Oh yes, and not having to set my alarm clock is priceless!

In my city they pay a shift differential to evenings and night shifts. I seriously believe that day shifts deserved that extra $2 and hour. Afterall, they work twice as hard! I guess I’m just realizing now that I don’t value a fast-paced environment as much as I thought I would. Oops!

So! This week has been pretty bleh (for lack of a better word). Monday we had our senior seminar in the morning. I am really starting to love this class. It is an open environment in which we (eight of us plus our instructor) have the opportunity to discuss nursing on a high theoretical level. Conversation isn’t fully structured and is instead allowed to ebb and flow in whichever way it needs. Monday afternoons is our leadership course. We had to sit through three hours of resume writing and interviewing skills. While this is actually important, it certainly didn’t lend itself to being very interesting.

After all these classes I had to meet with my leadership project group to advance are project ever so slightly. I created an annotated bibliography, while others created a group evaluation tool etc. Now, we need to invent a case study. Sometimes, I feel like these projects are valuable, while at other times it just seems like busy work until we graduate (66 days!).

Today was clinical. It was a good day, but my patients weren’t following the expected (read: easy) paths. A post-op that was too dizzy to stand, others who’s pain wasn’t well controlled, and another who was (and this is my favorite term) “pleasantly confused.” It was a typical day shift–busy busy busy. My precpter was so busy with other projects and emergencies on the unit that she didn’t really have time to watch me closely. I suppose the fact that she trusts me to take care of the patients and go off and do other “stuff” is a positive sign. She doesn’t feel as though she needs to watch me closely. Hurray! Fortunately, whenever I DID have a question, she was more than welcoming–which was quite the feat! I don’t think a single moment went by in which she was doing less than four things at once.

Tomorrow I am there again. Wash, rinse, and repeat!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006 at 23:50 and is filed under Nurses, Nursing, Nursing school. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.