YOU FAIL!

It has not been a stellar week here in Nursing Student Land.

A little background: without trying to sound like an arrogant prick, I've developed, in the last year and a half of school, a reputation as "The Smart One". School has always come relatively easy for me, and nursing school has not been an exception. I have also worked pretty damn hard to learn as much as possible and develop my skills and knowledge base, because I want to be a good nurse. Would you want the nurse who skated through school taking care of you? Me neither. So I've pushed myself.

Clinicals have been stressful, but I've always gotten through them with relative ease and honestly surprised myself a little with how comfortable I've gotten. But. Now, in the final semester of school, clinicals are all business and intense and we are expected to be getting to the point of professional nurses in this 8-week rotation. And guess who made some significant fuck-ups this week?

Yesterday I went home early, after getting an hour of sleep, doing half-assed assessments, and informing my instructor I was not up to the task. I knew I wouldn't make any med errors simply because she was watching me and would stop me if I was about to do so, but I also knew I wasn't learning anything and she offered me the opportunity to make up the time instead of sleepwalking through the day. I was ultra-professional about it and cried. I cry over literally nothing when I'm trying to function on an hour of sleep.

Today, after ten hours of sleep, I felt great. I got my assessments and meds in on time, helped get one of my patients who was being discharged ready to leave, had a successful IV start, etc. My instructor explained to me the charting that had to be done for a discharge and I nodded and took notes. Then completely forgot to do it. I went home feeling pretty confident about my performance and the day I'd had, until checking my email and finding a note from my instructor. She had reviewed my charting after I left and wrote to tell me that since I hadn't completed the discharge charting that she had specifically told me to do, and had additionally missed some of the "safety" charting (hourly rounds completed, bed in low position, etc.), I would need to go back and do it, and I'd be getting an unsatisfactory grade for this week's clinical in documentation. Can't really argue with that.

So after swearing at myself a little, I went back to the hospital tonight to make the required entries. This misstep bothers me a lot, both on the personal-disappointment-in-myself level as well as just being embarrassing. In the grand scheme of things, it's not a huge deal. No one was in danger because of my charting inadequacies. But it still needed to be done, and it should have been done, and it was simple carelessness that it wasn't done. And it's not the part about getting in trouble that bothers me the most, but the fact that my ego, and my confidence, takes a huge hit when I fuck up. Which probably isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it blows nonetheless.

I'm not going to fail clinicals because of this, and I'm not in danger of failing clinicals generally. There are working RNs who work like this all the time. But I don't want to have another week like this, and I have to figure out how I'm going to organize myself to make sure I'm not missing assessments and charting and feeling like a flailing idiot. And I think the best way to start that, at this moment, is with a big glass of wine.