Expert No More

Lots of people are asking me how the new job is going. I tell them fine because I don't really want to get into how frustrated I am with the new job. I use to work on the floor, which in non-hospital terms means where most people are up, walking around, getting stronger after surgery and getting ready to go home. Out patients rarely had invasive devices or monitoring systems that we had to use. Most of the time if the patient felt ok he or she was ok. The focus was on healing after surgery. In my eyes, for the most part, these were people who were becoming healthy.

Now I work in the ICU. The patients are fresh from the OR. They are drugged so they can't tell me if they feel ok. I have to go instead by what the numbers of the monitoring systems that we have implanted for the surgery is telling me. All of the sudden there are all these numbers and meaning that never mattered to me before. PAOP, CVP, CI, the list goes on. Maybe at one time in school I knew what these meant but that was a long time ago. This is a whole different kind of nursing where your interpretation of data is mostly numbers. Is the patient dry and need more volume in their circulatory system? Are they wet and need medication to help them pee more fluid out? Is the oxygen that is being carried by the blood being absorbed by the tissue well? These are all things that take consent monitoring. Knowing when to send certain tests and then interpreting them and coming up with a plan of care from that is the new way of taking care of people.

I'm slowly getting the flow of when we need to thing and why. It's just been very frustrating to have to start new and confused when I knew my last job so well. I use to be the person who people would come to if they had questions. Now I'm the one standing in the hallway with the lost look on her face. I have come to realize I will not feel comfortable at this new job for a long time. Everything I need to know will most likely not be taught to me on orientation. I'm hoping that I will learn enough that in two weeks from now when I'm off orientation I won't feel completely lost.