I was just looking at some of my old posts and stuff I’ve written here, and wondered exactly when it was that my blog and I began to lose touch with each other. In so few words, that can be blamed on nursing school, and now to the fact that being a nurse isn’t as easy as I thought it would be.
I wish I could just sit down and write about lighter things and stop this nonsense every so often about why I haven’t given any blog love in the past couple of years, but I’m currently consumed with trying to find a place for myself in a new career that is sitting on the other side of a chasm hundreds of miles wide from everything I’ve ever known.
I never expected it to be a walk in the park, but I also never expected myself to feel like giving up so early on.
I suppose my eyes were only half mast for the past couple of years, because I never saw the entire picture. I was never the only person standing opposite them. I had someone there to support me, to teach me what to teach them. I was never the person to sit down with them and listen to their fears. I was never the first person they saw after learning that they’ve got cancer. I was never the only hand they could reach for during a rough time in their life. I was never the last person they’d look at before they left this world. I was never the person to get yelled and screamed at because their dinner wasn’t hot enough, or the room was too warm. I was never the person to get threatened when I couldn’t order their pain medication myself. I’ve been all of those things now, and so much more to so many people, and it’s scary.
I was also quite ignorant about what it could really be like. I ended up getting a job in the inner city of one of our country’s most dangerous cities. No training or advice I’d received over the years could have prepared me for what I was thrown into when I began my job. I still don’t feel prepared every day I walk into that place, but every single day I walk out of there, I know that I learned something, and that’s all I can ask.
I started this post a few months ago, when I was having a really rough time adjusting to my new job, and while I am still within that “getting to know you” phase of the relationship between having a license to perform as a nurse and actually being a nurse, I do think that I’ve come a long way. I don’t think the road I’m travelling truly ever ends, but I’ll stay on it as long as I can.
It’s hard. Challenging. Frustrating. Emotional. I’ve probably experienced every single emotion in just a couple of months, and at first I couldn’t deal with it. It was overwhelming to the point that I was ready to quit, almost did on a few occasions. But I managed to take every single one of those emotions and wrap them neatly inside my head, and only use one at a time. I’m descending slowly to a comfortable level.
I say all these things, and haven’t said the long stream of thoughts still running through my mind, because when it comes down to it, I really do like my job. There are good days and bad. There are good patients and bad. But in the end, it’s the good that remains with me, and I hope it always does.
