An update on nursing school

In about thirty minutes I'll be hitting the road to head to my first "real" clinical experience as a nursing student.  We've spent our weekends up to this point either in the learning lab or at the nursing home.  Yesterday, we had orientation at the hospital.

Needless to say, I'm somewhat nervous. Nursing, at its core, is about caring for others.  I'm good at this core idea.  I have some practice.  So what makes me so nervous? Over the course of the summer I have tried to figure out what exactly about the clinical experience is causing such a visceral response and I think I've determined two factors.

First, I am completely inept when it comes to manipulating technology.  You all know this.  Our nursing instructor was reviewing the glucometer with us.  "It's simple.  It's easy" she kept repeating.  Um.  No.  Part of this ineptitude is that I need to actually see someone using it in real life on a real patient.  Then I need to practice it without the situation being a high-stakes one (the last thing I want to to do is make a patient/client feel worse).  But this is such a fast-paced program that we get introduced to the concept or technology, we may get a chance to practice on the dummies in the lab, but so far we haven't seen it done in real life.

Second, I don't feel comfortable in a nursing student role.  (Nursing diagnoses:  Ineffective role performance related to unfamiliarity with the hospital setting).  The question I have been asking myself is "what gives me the authority to just go ahead and __________?" (take vitals, listen to heart sounds, etc).  Piggy-backing on that is "my findings should definitely carry no weight when actually determining plans of care...I'm a nursing student for heaven's sake!"

So, we'll see how it goes today.  My mantra to get me through is "I can do anything for 8 hours!".   I also try to think about the worse possible case scenario...oh wait, I really don't want to think about that, because unlike in teaching, that scenario can be pretty bad.

Nursing at its core may be simple and intuitive.  But nursing school is certainly not.