benefiting from the lack of experience.

Sometimes I don’t know how in the world I got here. Things were much easier before I had an RN on my name badge. Now I can’t hide behind the person in charge or default the questions to a higher authority. Most of the time I am the authority.

And most of the time I feel like a child lost in the grocery store screaming on the inside for her mother, but too embarrassed that she’s lost to say anything out loud. So I just stand there alone. Not knowing what to say.

Oh the days of childhood…sometimes I wonder when I turned into a grown up.

I have had more family members in the last two weeks ask me hard questions than I can count. How am I supposed to know if her brother is gonna make it through the next shift or if they should take their 18 year old daughter off of life support? How did I ever get in a position where I have any authority on the issue?!? And am I really qualified?

I had lunch today with my roommate, another new nurse, and a good friend of ours who’s still in nursing school. And as hard as we try to talk about things other than the hospital it never happens. We talk about our patients and the doctors and the cute new residents… and then we talk about the pain. The crap that we have to see and how much it hurts and the stuff that we are expected to know. All the answers we are supposed to have.

I am humbled everyday by my profession. And yes, that’s what it is. I’m a Professional Nurse. They used to warn us about that in nursing school. How it’s not just a future job, but how we are going to become healthcare professionals and it will feel like it happened overnight. They were right. I mean, nursing school was a long, hard fight for me. I never felt smart enough and I worked harder than most people to get through. But I still don’t feel worthy of my title.

I hope that I never do. I want more than anything to have experience and knowledge and confidence in my work. But I greatly fear the apathetic and bitter attitude that comes with seasoned nurses. The thoughtless comments that are uttered in front of patients and the reasoning that sometimes it’s just a waste of money to care for certain hopeless people.

I took care of a girls dying father last week (she was 20) and she apologized to me for having to handle her situation. Her dad’s heart was failing and the doctors had told her they couldn’t do anything else. She said, “I’m sorry that you have to deal with us, being a new nurse.” I literally wanted to grab her and say, “No, you don’t understand! You want new nurses. You want the ones that still cry on their ride home or will sit with you even when they don’t really have time, because they are hurting too. The ones who are going to help your father fight until the last moment. You want a nurse who still feels pain.”

I never want to have so much experience that I start to forget that there is a person in the hospital bed. A person who has a wife, a mother, a son, or maybe a fiancé… a best friend who isn’t sure what they are going to do without them. Sometimes those family members need the nurse more than the patient does. I hope I never outgrow feeling.