Busy Busy!

All throughout nursing school people told me that the first year of nursing was extremely difficult. I wasn't exactly sure what they meant until now. I have been incredibly busy the past month and have at least one mental breakdown to show for it. The past 9 weeks, I've been in a critical care internship. Having been hired to a critical care floor (as opposed to general surgical or medical), my hospital has a program for anyone who is new to progressive care. It's basically ICU level classes and information relating to what we might run into in patient care. This class almost killed me, but not necessarily because it was hard. The information was actually a more in depth review of stuff I already learned in nursing school. Only it was two 8 hour days per week. On top of that, I worked two 12 hour days on the unit. In result, I was always working, although not working enough on the unit to feel like I was getting a full work week's worth of information about the unit. So I made a medication error. I hung a bag of IV medication and never unclamped the tubing, so that the patient got an infusion of normal saline instead of the medication. I felt awful because I normally don't allow myself much grace on things that I actually know how to do. It was really just negligence on my part. Now the patient was OK, everything turned out fine, and all my peers and coworkers told me that this is something that we all do at one point. It's important to understand that healthcare is done completely by human beings, and we all make mistakes. After that, however, I started not being able to sleep. I've never had issues sleeping before, but for a few weeks I was getting around 4 hours of sleep a night. Somewhere in a run where I was working basically 10 days straight, I found that I was unable to turn my car on. I sent it to the shop only to find out three days later that nothing was wrong with it. Instead, I had completely lost most function including being able to turn on the manual car I've owned for the past two years. When I realized that nothing was actually wrong with the car, it was just something wrong with me; I had my meltdown. I was tired, and completely mentally exhausted. I had made errors and failed to live up expectations of my job. but more importantly, I felt that I was letting myself down. I felt like I had thought that I could take the stress of starting a job as an RN and do it with grace. Instead, I was secretly out of control and couldn't take care of myself enough to handle a very stressful job. I'm doing much better now, just so you know. I've been making a point to sleep more, and I've joined a gym and started working out again. I guess I just needed to let it all out and realize that this is going to be a hard year for me. But by expressing those frustrations and allowing myself to not always be perfect, I can take it in stride. My class is finally over, and things are getting back to normal. I can only hope that things go a little more smoothly. At least until I get off of orientation.