Finally on the floor.
Last week was my first week on the floor. I'm in what's called the "RN Internship" program, which means I get to travel to different areas of the hospital every couple weeks. Last week and this week I'm on the Oncology floor. It felt very awkward at first because one of my patients was in the room April usually stayed in. After half an hour though I was over it and able to just be myself.
The patients are very different from the ones I cared for on the cardiac care unit I precepted at. At CCU the patients are usually sedated or on ventilators or both, so you can talk for education but you rarely expect much of a response. It becomes easy to focus more on the equipment rather than the patient. I hated that, though I admit it made the job of working with such critical patients a little easier. I didn't want to think of the 580 lb man on the ventilator in a coma on continuous dialysis (that clotted off every couple of hours) with renal and liver failure as a nice guy with 3 kids under 14 and a loving wife at home. But it's better because in the end it makes the job more worthwhile to realize what you're really helping, a life, and everyone connected to it.
With Oncology the patients are living with a chronic disease, most of them have lived with it for a long time and are frequent patients. Either they are on chemo or they are on pain management waiting for the doctor to let them go home again. They know exactly what pain meds work for them, how often they take it, and what sort of system to use to make sure they get their unscheduled pain medications as soon as they're available. Most of them are able to talk to you, and will for as long as you're in the room. They're bored, can't blame them, and they want to make friends with the people caring for them, since they're sure to see them again. I think of one lady in particular I had both shifts with sickle cell anemia. She's had the condition her entire life, and often spends less than 3 weeks outside of the hospital at a time. She's very sweet and will do her best to get you to come in on your break just to hang out for a few minutes. Nightshift is hard because we have 6-7 patients a night and sadly it's hard to spend more than 5 minutes with them before having to move on to the next thing.
The charting is what kills me. Spend 5 minutes with the patient, spend 15 minutes charting about it. And at our hospital it's a half paper - half computer system. The computers can be really slow sometimes and to give you an idea of how old it is, the charting system is a DOS program. I hope they follow the lead of NOVA hospitals and to go a paperless system, with a system that is a little bit faster.
Thursday I took NCLEX, the nurse licensing exam. It's a computer adaptive test, meaning it finds where you're weak and keeps asking you questions about it til you get them right. There can be anywhere from 75-265 questions, til you prove minimum competency. I had somewhere between 140-150. I was told I couldn't get my results til Monday and I was freaking out a little because I was sure I had failed. So when Julina, who took the test with me, called me Saturday afternoon and told me she passed I literally ran to the computer. I passed :0) So things finally came together, and it turned into this :0)
The patients are very different from the ones I cared for on the cardiac care unit I precepted at. At CCU the patients are usually sedated or on ventilators or both, so you can talk for education but you rarely expect much of a response. It becomes easy to focus more on the equipment rather than the patient. I hated that, though I admit it made the job of working with such critical patients a little easier. I didn't want to think of the 580 lb man on the ventilator in a coma on continuous dialysis (that clotted off every couple of hours) with renal and liver failure as a nice guy with 3 kids under 14 and a loving wife at home. But it's better because in the end it makes the job more worthwhile to realize what you're really helping, a life, and everyone connected to it.
With Oncology the patients are living with a chronic disease, most of them have lived with it for a long time and are frequent patients. Either they are on chemo or they are on pain management waiting for the doctor to let them go home again. They know exactly what pain meds work for them, how often they take it, and what sort of system to use to make sure they get their unscheduled pain medications as soon as they're available. Most of them are able to talk to you, and will for as long as you're in the room. They're bored, can't blame them, and they want to make friends with the people caring for them, since they're sure to see them again. I think of one lady in particular I had both shifts with sickle cell anemia. She's had the condition her entire life, and often spends less than 3 weeks outside of the hospital at a time. She's very sweet and will do her best to get you to come in on your break just to hang out for a few minutes. Nightshift is hard because we have 6-7 patients a night and sadly it's hard to spend more than 5 minutes with them before having to move on to the next thing.
The charting is what kills me. Spend 5 minutes with the patient, spend 15 minutes charting about it. And at our hospital it's a half paper - half computer system. The computers can be really slow sometimes and to give you an idea of how old it is, the charting system is a DOS program. I hope they follow the lead of NOVA hospitals and to go a paperless system, with a system that is a little bit faster.
Thursday I took NCLEX, the nurse licensing exam. It's a computer adaptive test, meaning it finds where you're weak and keeps asking you questions about it til you get them right. There can be anywhere from 75-265 questions, til you prove minimum competency. I had somewhere between 140-150. I was told I couldn't get my results til Monday and I was freaking out a little because I was sure I had failed. So when Julina, who took the test with me, called me Saturday afternoon and told me she passed I literally ran to the computer. I passed :0) So things finally came together, and it turned into this :0)