It’s been a while since my last post but I’ve been saving up and meticulously planning for a solid drop when the time felt right. I’ve been working perdiem in an emergency room as a nurse apprentice outside a city on the west coast while finishing my RN which I will soon complete and then begin the road to my nurse practitioner.

Each day I grow more and more impressed by the physicians, PA’s, and APRN’s who are multi-trick ponies. They walk into one room to do a ghetto pelvic exam (more on this later), only to get called out to review a fresh brain bleed seen on a CT, to run into another room to intubate and start a central line on an OD’d patient, then they 2% lidocaine a wrist of a 7 year old to manipulate the wrist bones back into place, take corn kernels out of ears, and call time of death of a patient who our team had been coding for 19 minutes, maxed out on pressors and the family had finally decided that it was time to stop.

Don’t get me wrong, our nursing team is phenomenal and I’ve found myself learning quickly, jumping into deep water how to line and lab, assess lungs, heart, skin, neuro, and predict if they need a blood glucose or bedside creatinine, ordering chest x-rays, fluids, flu, and urine specimens to have the physicians sign off later. There have been plenty of times a SIRS patient has come in with a blood pressure of 76/50 in a-fib where the MD orders diltiazem where I’m begging for another liter and reverse trendelenberging them and praying their blood pressure increases. I’ve swapped in for chest compressions on a coding patient. I’ve held a child getting a lumbar puncture, held an older woman’s hand getting a rectal exam, and taken 800mL out of an older gentlemen’s bladder because his couldn’t urinate because his prostate was enlarged.

In the past 3 months, I’ve learned so much and I’ve felt privileged to get to be apart of people’s lives. I’ve seen people on some of the most vulnerable days of their lives and I’ve empathized. I fall more and more in love with nursing daily despite the absolute chaos.

That being said, I’ve had plenty of patients be rude to me which is all apart of the job.

I have at least 3-4 people a day start a sentence, “I don’t mean to be rude, but, what happened to your hand?”

I try quickly to say, “I had cancer. I’m fine now.” And return my focus to patient care. I can’t say I’m surprised but I’m also amazed. I’m amazed how bold people are and how curious they are. I usually drown out the rest of whatever they say because it usually along the lines of, “wow, you’re amazing, inspirational, great you’re still in nursing” etc.

I don’t mean to sound rude or unthankful for the kind words but my well being and ego isn’t my priority at work. I couldn’t care less about myself and my coping when there’s a septic patient with an increasing fever. It mainly amazes me that these people are here because they believe they are experiencing the worst day of their life-in some cases they are. Yet they still can focus their energy on the one handed nursing staff.

Maybe they need a distraction from whatever is going on in their life. Maybe they have no filter. Maybe they are bored. Maybe they truly are curious. or maybe they are asking so they can tell me about someone they know who is also an amputee. At the end of the day, I am an emergency room nurse apprentice, soon to be RN, and the focus is not myself.