I saw a FB post from a fellow nursing student (not at my school) a little earlier. Let’s just say this person had a rough go of it. Their thoughts made me think a little bit about my own experiences, which are pretty similar to those of every other nursing student. Notice how I didn’t say student. Nursing school has very few other things that compare to it, educationally. Unless you talk to the guy that is so deep in a cow’s anus you can’t tell where the cow ends and he begins. Please don’t mistake what is to come as discounting others’ education… Folks around us are nice and want to encourage us but they dont really know nursing school. They may know school, but not what we go through. I know of very few other educational experiences where from the first couple of weeks you work for free in order to gain your education. On top of those experiences, which many times total more than 40 hours a week; there is homework, labs, simulations, and last minute changes that make me want to draw and quarter some people so I can help them get better and do it to them again. With other ventures there is very little room for subjective assessment. Your math problem is either right or wrong, that engineering project either stands up to forces or it doesn’t, your accounting is either correct or the SEC is coming to throw you in jail next to Bernie Madoff. Indeed there are many concrete things about nursing. Is this IV stick going to stay in place? Did I put that shot in the right place? Did I give the right medicine to the right person? Nursing is more than that though, and much of which cannot be concretely evaluated. Did I lighten someone’s burden by simply sitting and talking for a minute? When that family member needed a hug because their relative just died, did I do enough? Am I the “nice” nurse that says hello to everyone and smiles even though I really want to paint the walls with the poop that seems to get all over me? Also, with all of the book learning we as nursing students do, it changes when we get to where we work. For every nurse, there is a different way to do it. Maybe there needs to be a nursing sutra? I can do everything the right way in school and when I get to work I suddenly suck more than those Shark vacuums on late night infomercials. I digress, I guess the point is that our closest associates see that we have a hard time as students and try to encourage us and be proud of us. Don’t get me wrong here, it’s nice that people are nice- please don’t stop being nice, remember that I use needles for a living and will drain the life force out of you- but you just don’t understand. Part of it is that we don’t like to vent to people that aren’t nurses. Why? Because nurses help people, it’s what we do. If we don’t vent to you, don’t worry, we just know that what we will tell you will likely melt your face off faster than Charlie Sheen and we don’t want to bother you. Next time you ask your nursing student friend about school just know that you may not get the whole story. If your nursing student friend is visibly upset just understand that you may not get much or your face will melt, causing us to write a care plan for you and hating you for it.
Posted on: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 20:03:57 +0000
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