So, today went well…err. Well, no.
It doesn’t help that I’m always nervous around Charge nurses / sisters; I kind of feel like my confident appearance might be taken for overconfidence or even arrogance; and I suddenly become a bundle of nerves. And it doesn’t help that I happen to think that the particular nurse I was working with today is cute. That doesn’t help either.
So yeah, today I’m working with the Sister, and the Charge Nurse (who in this case runs the ward) is the other person working at my end. It’s going okay, I’ve got 3 patients, and I’m starting to feel pretty comfortable. And I’m doing the drug round – and I have to give some Clexane. Fine, I’ve given it hundreds of times, only this chap is on more than the maximum prefilled syringe; so we need to squirt it from the two prefilled syringes to another syringe. Of course, this is all well and good; I’ve done *this* plenty of times too.
So we go to the treatment room, and I’m thinking ‘small syringe – probably 2 ml, and a little sub-cutaneous needle; there’s a sharps bin by the bed; etc…
And she says “So, how are we going to do this”, and I say what I’m thinking, but suddenly am struck with ‘I’ve not seen any subcut needles; where are they?’ – so I have to ask, “ooh, have we got any”* – and instantly we’re into the terratory of me not feeling comfortable in what we’re doing, because I’ve done something dumb. Thing is, I’m fine by myself, I’ll just go “daft mare” and carry on, but having done it in front of the sister – and looked (in my head at least) like some kind of daft idiot. I then proceeded to dig myself a bigger hole. I’ve not given anything else sub-cut for a long time, so I mentioned this… except I have. Fucking insulin. I’ve given *that* plenty of times. Geeze.
Anyway, basically by the time I came to draw it up I was completely berating myself inside my head – and although I did it, and didn’t do anything *terrible* I just made a general hash of it and felt fucking stupid.
To round it off, when she came back from break I wanted to discuss one of my patients with her, and had just been asked to help move someone and managed to come off as being extremely rude to her (at least, in my head it felt that way) – because when she said for me to go on my break I was concentrating on not forgetting the crap urine output one of my patients had, and the messy jumbled sentance about me moving another patient before going on my break just… well. It didn’t come out the way I intended. Not aided by me still berating myself for my whole drawing up incident.
I’m kind of used to being left to it and just watched. People stopped asking me ‘how are you going to do this’ a long time ago – they just watched, or whatever. But as soon as they do I think it’s some kind of trick question – and I over think it and gaaah. Sometimes I need to chill out.
Anyway, early shift tomorrow…. Cup of Hot Chockie and bed.
* which is dumb, because I knew we had them. But I was nervous, okay?
