I saved the e-mail my professor sent my first clinical group on the night before our very first clinical on the rehabilitation floor at our nearby hospital. It was about two and a half years ago, spring of my sophomore year of nursing school. We’d built up to that day with endless hours in the simulation labs, practicing taking blood pressures on one another and giving gel pads injections of normal saline. But that e-mail was preparing us for the the BIG day– the day we would have real patients, with real diagnoses, on a real hospital unit, needing real nursing care. With some simple directions for where to park and how to get to the hospital’s Dunkin Donuts, the e-mail was brief. Still, the professor managed to write one simple phrase three times in that e-mail: take a deep breath.
We tell that to people all the time. In nursing, we remind our patients to take a deep breath for all sorts of reasons. We say it while listening to lung sounds, calming anxieties, preparing for a procedure. Beyond the physiological explanation for why any of this gets done, though, there is something about this phrase that brings reassurance. There is comfort in the idea that taking even one moment to focus on something as simple as breathing can make a difficult situation seem more manageable.
It’s been over two years since I’ve needed any of the information conveyed in that e-mail. Working a sphygmomanometer is no longer a daunting task; the idea of giving a bed bath no longer gives me palpitations; and I can easily get you to not only that one hospital’s Dunkin Donuts but to every DD and Starbucks within a mile’s radius of any hospital I’ve spent hours in. In four years of nursing school, I’ve learned how to calculate IV drip rates, how to read EKG strips, how to apply a wet-to-dry dressing, and how to tell crackles from wheezes from rhonchi from stridor. The hundreds of hours I’ve spent in clinical rotations and on my senior preceptorship have taught me even more finer points: how to do 4:00am vitals on a sleeping toddler without waking him or his nervous parents, how to teach a nervous mother about caring for her brand new baby girl, how to track down an Arabic translator before the end of the day shift, how NOT to unclamp a G-tube before disconnecting it. Yet still– and especially now that I’m facing taking the NCLEX, finding a job, and potentially moving far from home– I think that the most important advice I’ve gotten so far has been simply, “take a deep breath”.
Newly a Nurse 
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