older, yes. wiser, no.

My orientation group as a lot of shiny minty new graduate RNs, some of whom literally just took their boards last week, and are so fresh off the S.S. Clueless, they're still dropping hints about their test-taking acumen and Total Bad Assness since they "passed in only seventy five questions" (the minimum number required to either pass! or fail! the exam. Yeah, I don't have a PhD in statistics, either, and I just chalk the computer based test scoring yet another highly mystifying and anxiety-provoking aspect of being inducted into the gang of thugs and mercenaries who will be your coworkers.)

(I'm totally convinced, by the way, that passing your nursing boards has nothing to do with answering any of the test questions correctly or incorrectly. My belief rather, is that somewhere deep in the American heartland, there resides a drunk monkey who chooses your licensing destiny based on some Pavlovian alcohol-based reward system dreamed up by the creators of evil, dark magicky things like Press-Gainey scores, Alka-Seltzer tablets, and the presidential nominee bid of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.)

Any way, I'm not feeling so bad ass myself at the moment. Case in point:

Someone today asked me if I was a "trauma junkie." (A phrase, note, I hate with all the witty and urbane disdain of a Frasier joke).

I was like, "Huh? Uh... no. I'm, uh... a cardiac nurse."

I don't understand these people who get off on codes and bloody bits of human hamburger scraped off the road. I mean, okay, the blood and guts I can deal with just fine--I don't like it sometimes, but it doesn't bother me.

But, I hate codes. They're scary. And this is why: not only is your patient dead, but there's a chance s/he might stay dead. Which means not so much fun for you, the patient's family, and presumptively, the patient.

I know you're wondering, "Then why are you working at a level one trauma facility, in a Trauma ICU?"

Well, first of all, I'm not really working there yet, because in order to actually work there, you must be subjected to orientation, which not only wastes a lot of paper, time, and brain cells, but also is probably the only work-related thing I'll ever get paid for (at least in this profession) whilst I sit on my ass for an entire eight hours, five days a week.

Any way, at first glance, my decision to do TICU is really bizarre. I mean, dude: I really like cardiac, and I really, really hate ortho and neuro (read: the bread and butter of trauma patients).

I'd much rather be in a CVICU being hazed for a year on post-op day two scut while I wait until one of the Cardiac Bitch Goddesses decides I can handle recovering a fresh open heart by myself, or can take an IABP.

So, I don't know what I'm doing, exactly. But, I figured this would be an interesting experience, and if I hate it, I can always go back to CV Land and torture myself needlessly there. That's the great thing about nursing: If you don't like one specialty in nursing, you can always invest more time and energy in hating another.

However, deep down inside, I'm afraid to admit that the reason I took the job is that I'm crazy. On the verge of burn-out, most people would choose instead to do something lower stress, like being a school nurse, or shoving punji sticks underneath one's finger nail beds. Instead, I decided to tackle my fear of Superbad Emergencies (like codes) by placing myself directly in the line of fire, so to speak (all of which, note, creates more stress and panic, not less).

See? Crazy.

Crazier still, I have gone so far as to rationalize my craziness:

My hamfisted theory goes like this: by placing myself in a unit where shit hits the fan on a fairly regularly basis, I will sharpen my skills from butter knife bad to special ginsu telecommercial, limited-time only pure awesomeness. Thus, the benefit to the patient (or patients, generally, I should say) is that I will get better at codes, and therefore, my patients will have better outcomes. Or, should I say, since there is usually a dozen people involved in a code--I will feel like I contributed to a better outcome for my patients, rather than standing there numbly in abject terror and getting in the way of more useful people whose primary instinct is not to run far, far away and change one's identity so as to be less likely to be found if ever a wrongful death lawsuit is filed against the hospital (which is how I feel now about those kinds of situations, frankly).

Or, you know, we could just stick to the original, simpler and therefore more elegant theory, which is that I am crazy, and therefore richly deserve the punishment of total work scariness I am about to undergo.