I took the summer off from blogging. Not because I am "too cool" - thanks Kristin - but because I was (am?) too busy and too overwhelmed by my new life as a nurse. Every time I started to write something here it turned into some rambling business and I just couldn't finish it.

Suddenly it's fall. It snuck up on me - it was 95 degrees on Tuesday and by Wednesday it was cloudy and chilly. I had a pumpkin spice latte in my hand on Thursday morning. At this rate it will probably snow next week.

Just kidding. I have no illusions, Chicago will probably be a sauna again by next weekend. But this is the first fall in a long time that I haven't gone back to school, and in my mind September is still for settling back in to a routine, creating new schedules, getting organized. Back to blogging and actually doing responsible things like balancing the checkbook and grocery shopping regularly.

It's hard to write about work here. I think I scare people when they ask me about it, because I always say it's overwhelming and seriously, how am I expecting them to respond to that? They just kind of nod and say ohhh. (Which is what I do at work a lot actually). But work IS overwhelming, I can't come up with a better word for it. Neonatal ICU is an incredibly odd world, where the patients are smaller than the IV pumps and ventilators that are keeping them alive. We took a 700 gram baby to MRI the other day, which required 5 people to push the isolette, the vent, the IV poles, and the nitric oxide. I had my hands in the isolette bagging the baby during the whole trip, which was entirely surreal and made me feel more like I was acting in an episode of ER than participating in my very own career.

I think I've learned more in the past 6 weeks I've been working than in all of nursing school. But the difference is, I figured out how to be good at school, and the real world is not a multiple choice test. This sounds stupid obvious when I write it down, but in my actual life it's been jarring to transition out of school mentality and into the oh shit one of my patients is screaming his head off because he needs to eat and the other one is dropping his heart rate and oxygen saturations and clearly i cannot handle both things at one time I am only one nurse and a BRAND NEW ONE ANYWAYS.

But I really love it. I do. I have a great preceptor, and my only complaint is that she is SO thorough in teaching me things that we are always behind and I feel like I can't catch up because we spent half the morning discussing our patient's disease process and meds. But I know as much as I possibly can at this point about all the patients we've had, and every time I remember more and more. I have my other new grads who started with me - all TEN of us - to commiserate with, along with my nursing school friends who are experiencing the exact same stresses and overwhelmingness as I am. Actually I went out to dinner last night with 3 of my nursing school girls and despite having so much to catch up on, we were all basically asleep at the table. It made me happy to know I'm not the only one who is being ruined by 12 hour shifts.

I could continue to ramble on and on....and on...about work and how much I hate getting up at 5:30am and how caffeine-dependent I am, but it's a Friday night and I am supposed to be somewhere at ten. So I have to take a nap now in order to handle than kind of late night activity.

This is my new life.