Work update

I returned to work yesterday after a night of poor sleep worrying about returning. Why do I do this to myself, it is always okay?

Today, I finally got assessed to give infusional chemotherapy and should have boluses assessed next week. Hurray. I have been menaing to do this for ages but either I am busy of the clinical educators are busy or absent. For those of you who may be interested in my clinical skills I placed my first male catheter a couple of months ago and am now able to access port-a-caths.

Work in general is going well. I am feeling much more settled and confident. I have been asked to undertake a preceptor training course and will hopefully be overseeing student nurses soon. Student nurses as so well looked after in oncology & haematology here. Not only are they supervised by a ward nurse that shift but another ward nurse is taken off the ward to oversee additional learning and debriefing them on a daily basis.

The ward operates a self-rostering system and to date I have always been given pretty much what I asked for. Always a bummer when you have rubbish shifts as you have no-one to blame but yourself. Anyway, I started out doing 5 x 8 hour shifts per week but I was finding only having 2 days off a week tiresome. So, I am now experimenting with working 2 x 8 hour and 2 x 12 hour shifts so I get 3 days off a week. The 12 hour shifts run from 07:00 - 19:30 which means I generally get hom in time for bath-time, book reading and cuddles.