Odd-year blues

I'll be winding down this nursing thing in a few years.  I am looking forward to retirement but have a long way to go.  In the meantime, I still have to do all of my certifications in order to work in the ER.  Some are every two years, some every four.  There are also classes to attend in order to maintain my biannual license renewal. Add to that the annual hospital competencies, and that is a lot of stuff to repeat, same shit different….year.  Nothing much changes, yet another tick mark in the administrative Big Book of Checklists.

I just took the 2 day TNCC for about the 6th time, renewable every 4 years.  It will be the last time I have to take it before I retire.

Always stressful, I approached this recert with a true "I don't give a shit" attitude, and it served me well as I was relatively stress-free.  It helped that I knew two of the course instructors  quite well, and I was taking the course with a lot of first timers as well as a few PACU, OR and ICU nurses who were unfamiliar with a lot of the ER stuff.  Plus the kids from my own department had been ER nurses for less than 2 years.  They were a lot of fun and even insisted I join them for a drink after class.

This time around I was pulled for the clinical testing on day two by one of my fav people.  One on one with the instructor, you get a scenario, then have to go through the appropriate steps in the proper order.  Of course in an actual trauma, all these steps are accomplished simultaneously by a number of people, but it is the thought process that is important here.

She gave me the easiest scenario, since I got the pregnant trauma victim as I always do in the practice session and did it effortlessly.  The savvy instructor can tell nerves from lack of knowledge.  As I rattled off  all of the major testing points as my instructor cut off any in depth explanations (to prove I knew what I was doing), she impatiently waved me ahead to the next point with a "yep, you got it, next?",  and was out of there in under four minutes.

Since this is an odd year, I have yet to do PALS (or ENPC if I can find something before August), ACLS, and of course, BLS.  My other job back at the Bait Shoppe only requires that I have BLS because, you know, we can always just do CPR in an urgent care while we wait for EMS.  SMH.