I’ll try to keep this short because I’m very tired and I need to get to bed early, say by 9:30.

Despite going to bed at 9 pm last night it was not restful. I had just finished my prep sheet for my first patient the next day and I was in a state of panic. How do I measure input and output for a three year old? How do you get a UA dip each time she pees? How I will know when she needs to pee? How do I get into their omnicell? What counts as hypotension for a kid on chemo? What does chemo look like? And these are in addition to all my normal anxieties about new clinical, such as will I get a good nurse? Will she like me? Will I be bored? Will I get to do anything good? And what if I screw it up? What if I get sick tomorrow? What if I’m late? How early do I need to leave? How will I meet my clinical instructor? Like I said, I’ll stop there to keep it short.

So I slept from about 10 pm to midnight, then woke up every 45 minutes until 5 am. As usual breakfast (oatmeal, banana, OJ) did not taste good that early. I felt like throwing up and had diarrhea – my usual anxiety woes. They usually dissipate by the time I get to my clinical/first rehearsal/performance, but they make the getting there part fairly awful.
I was nearly late and had trouble with my badge access to parking.

Luckily my nurse Anna was in no hurry and set me up for a great day. She worked with me at my pace and let me do all the things I wanted, without pushing or assuming I knew a lot. Of course I fumbled and felt flustered and slow throughout the day, but she was a great cheerleader and teacher. I even dropped an open port of tubing on the floor TWICE in one hour and she showed no disappointment in me. I worked with all three of her patients including the one who I prepped to care for, a 3 year old girl with a stage 4 neuroblastoma. She was a cute little girl who liked The Little Mermaid and wanted to play with the empty syringes and bags after we changed her fluids.

I felt like I mostly shadowed today, which is what I wanted. They had set me up to believe I would be doing total patient care, and indeed I heard some horror stories from other students who were at the hospital last weekend. Nothing like that for me. It’s a top of the line hospital with the cheeriest staff ever.

My biggest complaints with my rotations so far have been 1) It’s too slow and 2) I don’t get to do enough procedures. Well today was anything but slow with NO downtime and I worked with more IV meds/tubes today than I have in all my schooling combined.
I don’t know how I feel about peds. I don’t have any spark of “Oh yes! Working with kids is the best/my calling/all I ever dreamed of. ” But I don’t dread it or have any trouble getting over the fact that we have to do things to the kids that hurt. I’m dead neutral. I wonder how I’ll feel in four weeks.