Year 2: New Grad Nurse
We call it the 5th semester of nursing school. As I mentioned already, nursing school is hard. And when it's over you think we'd be relieved. And we were... kind of. During our last semester they had some of the last year's graduates come and talk about their first year of nursing. One of them said "When you finish school you feel like you've studied and learned so much, and then when you start working and realize you know nothing." And I thought that sounded depressing, but it was very true. And then comes the nurse licensing examination, the NCLEX. It's a computer run exam with anywhere from 75 to 130 questions. The test adapts to the answers you get right and wrong to see how much you really know. If the test stops at number 75 then you either did very well or very bad. And you have no idea till the next day. Mine stopped at 75 questions. I was terrified. I remember thinking "I didn't even know some of those words!" But somehow I passed. The next morning the state website showed my nursing license as active. Phew.
I had already started working at the hospital. There are just certain things you can't do as a "new grad" until you pass the NCLEX. I made it through the week of general orientation to the hospital, and then started my preceptorship. I was matched with a nurse who was very good at her job, but was not a good teacher. Most people on the unit were "afraid" of her. Not in the actual fear sense, but they all hated giving her report because she'd question everything you said you did all day and make you feel like an idiot. She had been a nurse for over 30 years and her way was the only way. She talked down to me every day and told me I did everything wrong, even if it was exactly the way I was taught in school. She even went to the manager and told her she didn't think I was cut out for being a nurse and they called me in for a surprise meeting where they both talked about how they weren't sure I was nurse material. I left every day feeling less confident than the day before. She was one of the only nurses left who worked 8 hour shifts, so about two months in I switched to a couple other nurses who worked 12 hour shifts to get used to a full day. Thankfully these girls were wonderful, compassionate, and I was able to learn and grow so much under them. The minimum orientation for a new grad is 12 weeks on the MedSurg unit, but I kept working with them until about 19 weeks. Then I finally felt ready to work on my own. Thankfully we have great teams throughout the hospital and you're never truly on your own as there is always someone to ask for help. Even after orientation you're considered a "new nurse" for the first year. And I definitely felt the change somewhere around the one year mark. I was about a year in the first time I had that "nurse's intuition." I kept calling the doctor in to assess a patient that I had a bad feeling about, and he kept blowing me off. By the next day when I came back he had been moved to ICU and then transferred to another hospital. That's when I realized what nurse's intuition felt like.
Up next
Year 3: EPIC
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