Cry baby

I hit a wall this afternoon and wondered what the heck I'm doing. I feel like I'm totally in this washing machine that I can't get out of. I stayed up late studying..watching skills video that made me laugh. (Demonstrations on how to brush and comb someone's hair and clean their dentures) It felt insane to watch a step by step procedure that any monkey can do (i.e. "use careful brush strokes first horizontally and then vertically, spritzing and arranging....) Like an episode of Twilight Zone where I landed on a planet where no one knew how to brush their teeth or comb their hair and the only person who could was Nurse Betty who was holding classes at the Y for $59.99 on how to brush your dentures. In the video, Nurse Betty was providing oral care to her comatose patient. It was all so Marcus Welby. I thought to myself, I don't remember once...not once, that a nurse did this for my Dad during his 3 month stay in the hospital, not even while he was in the ICU. In fact, the first thing he did when he "came out of it" was sit up in bed and brush his own teeth. I remember writing a column about what a freaking miracle it was to see my Dad escape from the the throes of death and brush his chops; Monday - he gets last rites...by Friday, he is brushing his teeth. As we sat around crying with relief at the sight of him brushing his teeth, his nurses stood around looking at us like we were crazy. Were we the only ones who knew a miracle when we saw it?

My aunt (who is more like a sister to me) called last night and wanted my advice about Grandpa, who is dying in the hospital ....I shut down. I was outlining chapter 15 in Health Assessment about the peripheral vascular system and all these memories flooded back about Dad and those long days in the hospital...like PTSD and overwhelmed me. Can I do this again? Will I be a good nurse? Or is this a big act and someone will walk up to me and say, "you can't do this...you won't do this...or we don't do things like that anymore - we just CYA on the medical charts"

Sometimes, I wonder if I have just gone down a rabbit hole that I don't belong in. The really hard part of being a nursing student in an accelerated program, is that so much is last minute - repetitive or too much and the difficult days of school haven't even started yet. I want to be nurse. I don't want to write a paper APA style. APA? I thought I left all that behind in 1985. We had a three hour lecture on APA. I want to do what most nurses don't have the time or patience to do...take care of sick people. Wash their hair, brush their damn dentures and teeth (even when they are in coma), give them good ADL care, even help them manage their toileting (something no one wanted to do for my Dad). Tell me now, if I won't have time to do that. Tell me my patient will be my patient and not the chart. I don't want to work with people who don't want to be there, who resent sick people and their families, who hate their colleagues who do care about the little things like pain mangement, and comfort care. I already did the medical - legal thing. I don't want to be a claims person again. I took a quiz on the law and almost feel asleep. I know this stuff is important. I know you aren't supposed to slap your patient, restrain him against his will or talk about him to other people. I only got an 80% on that stupid computer quiz that took over one hour. How does this validate what kind of nurse I will be? I want to take care of sick people. What a cry baby.