Just need to vent...

I have a million things I should be doing, but I want to write this out while it's on my mind. Adam is sick, again (we were both sick last week with fevers, chills, just flu like stuff, ugh). It's like deja vu from last week. I just hope none of the rest of us get it....

Last night at work I gave chemo for the first time to a patient. While many of you know I'm a cancer nurse, you probably think that I've done this a lot. But because one has be be chemotherapy certified in order to give chemo, I hadn't. I got chemo certified in April. The reason I had to wait this long is because one cannot give chemo if pregnant, and our boss likes us to work at least 6 months on our floor before letting us get chemo certified anyway. ANYWAY. The charge nurse from 3-7p (who I just love, Jodi, the reason I decided to get a job on this floor after my senior preceptorship with her) had me "give up" 2 of my 5 patients at 7p so that I could concentrate on giving the chemo, and boy, I'm grateful for that--it was SO nice to only have 3 and to concentrate on the chemo patient. Now, like an instructor once told me in nursing school, "Any monkey can hand out medications and hang IVs. It's a nurse who is knowledgeable in what she is actually doing that makes the difference." So hearing that in the back of my head, I think my fellow nurses on my floor thought I was a nutcase for being so uptight about this first administration of chemo (I kind of pictured them like the taunting monkeys in the background...). There are a lot of checks and double checks when we give it, to make sure we don't kill someone (which is a good thing). With chemo, there really isn't any antidote, so if a mistake is made, it can be fatal. Scary. So the first few times we hang chemo, another "more experienced" nurse will come with us to watch us do it. Lacy, another great nurse on our floor, came with me. While all the others were kind of making fun of me, telling me to "breathe" and stuff before giving these different chemos, it made me feel good when Lacy told me while I was giving it, that another nurse (who's now a "travel" nurse...affectionately we called her "Sarge") told her that it's good to be scared when we give chemo...that when we aren't scared to give chemo (or we see someone else who's not scared to give it) that that's when mistakes happen. A good thought I suppose. Everything went fine with the 2 chemo drugs I gave my patient. Lucky for me he'd had this same chemo regimen a year or two before, so it wasn't like the first time he was receiving it--that's when most bad reactions happen if they're going to happen. But I learned a lot in a short amount of time about chemo; even though I've sat through hours and hours of chemo classes, actually giving chemo is different, all the side effects and possible adverse effects swirl through one's head (or at least mine for sure!). I'm glad to keep learning about cancer and its' treatments. It's such an awful thing and I'm glad when I see patients come back to visit us who are improving. Hopefully that'll be the case with this patient last night.