So. I’ve got quite a few updates 🙂 I’m leaving my old department.  I got a new job.  I can’t leave my old job completely, so I’m sticking around with a per diem position.  I guess that isn’t a lot of change. But it is to me! It was hard to decide to leave my current department, but I felt like with all the changes in management, work wasn’t the same for me anymore. I didn’t feel respected or listened to in the same way I was before. Nor did I feel like any of the managers were people I truly respected. I didn’t feel like I had a choice in anything. Quite frankly, I felt like a pawn that the managers would use whenever they needed me, instead of the semi-superstar of a nurse my old manager made me feel like. When work suddenly became burdensome, I knew I had to leave. Except! Except I had developed such good rapport with some of my favorite units. It was hard to think about leaving them a little while ago, and it’s just as hard today. They’re my work family and they’ve been a constant in an ever changing work environment…

Fifteen months in being a float nurse in a Level 1 Trauma Center. Fifteen months floating to 8 different units. INCLUDING the emergency department. Fifteen months of adapting to different unit cultures. Fifteen months of adjusting to different nurse personalities. Fifteen months of figuring out where they keep the darn leads, dale ace connectors, tube feeding bags, and other random supplies that I really wish would be uniformed on every unit. I could so easily stay on my very favorite unit (which I have debated about almost every week for about a year), but I wanted to show loyalty to the people who gave me a chance to even be in this position. I didn’t want to leave a department that invested in me and gave me a chance when everyone else was saying, “I’m sorry, there were a large group of very qualified people in your group, but unfortunately, we could not hire them all.” Fifteen months later, I’m kind of glad I didn’t give up on being a float nurse. I’ve had a more colorful start to my career than most new grad nurses and definitely a much more vivid clinical experience. I feel more prepared to handle…

I’m a month shy of my first year as a full fledged RN. I can’t believe it’s gone by so fast! Even though I still feel like there’s still so much for me to do, I’m really happy with how my career is turning out so far. Excitement doesn’t even begin to explain how I feel about the next few years that are in store for me. I really, really love my job. Don’t get me wrong, the days are tough. And by tough I mean there are moments where I totally question whether or not I should still be doing bedside nursing. I question whether I deserve to put up with certain things, like being disrespected or undermined by healthcare team members or family members. But you know what? It only takes one thank you to turn a horrible day into a really good day. It only takes my co-workers to acknowledge and commend me to make all the bad go away in one go. The other thing I like about being a nurse is that whenever I work, I feel most like myself. Like, the person my patients and my co-workers see, is 100% the true blue me.…

It’s been a week since I’ve had my first code at work. It’s been a week of replaying the scene in my head… of walking in and seeing my unresponsive patient… of seeing his eyes wide open and face turning blue… of desperately feeling for a pulse in his wrist and then his neck… and then his groin because that’s the strongest pulse you could feel and I desperately was hoping that what I was thinking wasn’t actually happening… of seeing his shallow and rapid breaths diminish right in front of me and seeing his face turn more blue than when  I first saw him… of trying to reposition 200 pounds of dead weight because he was in the most awkward position I’ve seen… of feeling the crack of every compression that we needed so that we could maintain his circulation… of throwing my stethoscope around my neck to the corner of the room because they were swaying and hitting my body with every compression I was trying to do… of being in a room full of people, trying to be team leader of my first code… but failing because the anxiety of the whole situation was clutching and tightening my throat with…