Nursing School on Steroids – Part Six: Sick and Unpopular

Anyone who has been on prednisone for any length of time can tell you sleeping is an unobtainable luxury, and I couldn’t have done it without my counselor’s suggestion that I try an SSRI (anti-depressant). Now I was the type that thought one has to be depressed to take an anti-depressant, but I was told they are also very effective for pain and sleep issues. The drug took a couple of weeks to kick in, then I had one blissful week of extreme elation (nothing could upset me that week), but then things changed. At night I was actually sleepy, and could get a decent night’s rest, and my pain was less. But I didn’t like the side effects – dizziness, dry mouth, headaches, vegetables making me nauseous, blurred vision, decreased coordination and concentration, more irritability than I already had, and ringing in my ears. This was much like the drugs they advertise on TV, then rapidly list the horrific side effects (“may cause erections lasting over 9 hours, or death” – oh yeah, sign me up). But weighing the risks and benefits, I had to decide that having a good’s night sleep was more important – at least for now.

Setting aside my medical status, the main focus now for this 52-year-old nursing student was getting through nursing school. I was given special permission to attend the state nursing association meetings, but a couple of times they fell on my clinical days. Kittie, my clinical nursing instructor, didn’t share my enthusiasm for the student nurses’ association, and didn’t give me any accolades for being involved in it. As a matter of fact, there was only one other nursing instructor showing much of an interest in the organization, but she wasn’t very influential in the nursing politics at that time (she would later get her well-deserved position as the director of the school, but that would be too late for me).

Another nasty clinical instructor would be assisting Kittie with nursing clinicals. Let’s call her Cruella. She looked just like Cruella de Ville, only her whole head was white and she wore wire-rimmed glasses. But she had the same scowl all the time

Cruella and Kittie would assign us to different nurses working the medical-surgical unit for training, and it was the luck of the draw on what nurse a student would be training under. Some students were fortunate and had very helpful nurses; nurses they had developed a relationship with while working the previous summer as nursing assistants (and I was recovering from shoulder surgery instead). I was never that lucky. Remember the nurse who wouldn’t give me a paper bag when I had to be readmitted to the hospital with complications? (See January 11th post, Back in the Hospital). Yeah, I even had to shadow her one day. To say she offered me no help at all would be a supreme understatement. Kittie was also supposed to be rotating us to different areas of the hospital for different experiences. But whenever my turn came up to be rotated to the ER (where I knew I’d find an old friend who would help me learn the required skills), she would always find some reason not to let me go. Yep, Kittie held a grudge.

A clinical day missed because of a student nurses’ meeting had to be made up with a different instructor on another day. I thought this would be my big chance to get trained where Kittie was blocking me. But it didn’t work out that way and my treatment by her wasn’t any different. She criticized me for inadequate medication knowledge; criticism that only a handful of us received. While we were never given a formal pharmaceutical course, the “handful” was expected to have a pharmacist’s knowledge of medications. This expectation seemed to get overlooked with most of the other students.

One day Cruella and Kittie said that we would have to perform three particular skills under a nurse’s supervision, and the third time would have to be perfect or we would be out. I asked for clarification (being the oldest, most bold, and after all, the vice-president of the student nurses’ association). Cruella repeated that we would have to demonstrate our competence performing an IV push, IV piggyback and blood transfusion on unsuspecting hospital patients – without a skills lab – or we were out of the program.

If only I had not been rehabilitating from brain surgery, on steroids and anti-depressants and not had so much disdain for Cruella, I would have behaved a lot differently. I’m sure I would have thought this out calmly and intelligently and realized that this request was so unfair and unbelievable, no public college president would support such a threat. But hearing this and knowing what a difficult time I was having getting trained blunted the voice of reason and diplomacy. And the rage took over.

I honestly don’t remember what I said to Cruella and Kittie, but it got me in enough trouble that I was sent to my counselor to prepare for a hearing before the Director of Nursing. And that’s a story for next time.
Cheers!

TPP