There are some things that you really won’t learn in nursing school. Here’s a quick list of 8 things that you’ll only experience in the real nursing practice:
- People will actually pee on you. It could be a tipped-over urinal, or quickly getting a man to the bedside commode that leans on you for support and therefore pees on your leg. Or even frantically walking a woman with stress incontinence to the bathroom, but a minute too late. It took me about two shifts to realize I need to keep an extra set of nursing scrubs in my locker at all times and replenish it PRN.
- The highs are really high and the lows are really low. One day, you can be with a patient who hasn’t spoken in three weeks because they had a stroke in their speech center. Suddenly he says your name for the first time. And the next day you could be removing the endotracheal tube on a young brain dead father. Highs are so high you want to cry; lows are so low you need a few days to recover.
- Even the nurses that seem to know everything don’t. When you’re in nursing school, you think the experienced nurses know everything. Nope! There are so many nitty-gritty details about, well, everything that it’s impossible to know it all in this ever-evolving field.
- Everything is constantly changing, and it will never stop. With medicine constantly advancing and reimbursement dependent on so many things, hospitals have to be innovative, yet budget-conscious. This means things change quickly for the staff on the frontlines, sometimes faster than you can keep up with.
- You will have a lot of “am I really seeing this right in front of me right now?” moments. The first time I thought that, I was watching child birth for the first time. The second time was when I broke a frail old lady’s ribs by performing CPR for the first time. And the next time was when I had my entire hand in a man’s chest cavity. The fourth time was when I was watching a neurosurgeon drill into a patient’s brain. They make reality seem so unreal that you feel like you need to step outside of yourself for a moment to really absorb what you’re doing.
- You will also have a lot of “why did I choose to do this as my career?” moments. The first time was when I was inserting a catheter. The next was when I was wiping a morbidly obese woman and she told me to “get all up in there.” The third time was when my coworkers and I were cleaning up a patient that pooped so much he created a poop slide, slid out of his bed, and on to the floor.
- The good IV starters aren’t always good nurses. I don’t know why, but when I was in school I just equated those that were really good IV starters as really good nurses. This is not an absolute truth.
- You think about death a lot more than you want to. A normal day consists of people dying, which is quite unnerving sometimes. You can’t help but picture yourself in your dying patient’s (and the family member’s) shoes. Sometimes, it’s hard to not think about. However, I’d rather be keenly aware of the fragility of life than blissfully ignorant and take those around me for granted.