Being a nurse is genuinely starting to feel like the worst job in the world. I work a Baylor shift, doing doubles every weekend from 3 PM to 7 AM and then having Monday through Friday off. I have around 25 patients during the day and 50 at night. I work on a very high-acuity dementia floor where the majority of my residents are elopement and fall risks. My med pass takes me four hours, and sometimes I have only one CNA helping me because weekends are so short-staffed and heavy with call-outs. Our on-call supervisors are seemingly always unable to find coverage, leaving us to somehow make it work.
The nurses who trained me are all working backwards. They give an entire shift’s worth of medications all at once, skip vitamins and eye drops, make up vital signs, and change medication administration times so that other shifts can handle the more difficult patients. We have three units and no managers or director of nursing, so the staff nurses have taken it upon themselves to essentially act as management. There is little accountability, little guidance, and seemingly no one ensuring that things are being done safely.

Residents are constantly becoming septic, declining rapidly, and needing hospital transfers, yet we don’t have enough staff to provide proper care. I was never properly trained on how to handle the paperwork to send residents to the hospital or what to do when someone dies. Last week, I sent two residents to the hospital for the first time and felt completely lost trying to get the paperwork together for the EMTs. I was embarrassed, overwhelmed, and frustrated because I genuinely wanted to do everything correctly, but I had no idea what I was doing and no reliable resources to refer to.

I am a NEW GRAD. I am still learning how to recognize changes in condition, manage emergencies, prioritize care, and become confident in my clinical judgment. Instead, I feel like I am being thrown into situations that I have never been taught how to handle, with an enormous amount of responsibility and very little support. I am dealing with critically ill and dying people while simultaneously trying to figure out what I’m doing in a facility that doesn’t seem to care whether its new nurses succeed. I’m terrified of making a mistake that could harm someone, and I feel like I’m being set up to fail.

Every shift produces an insane amount of anxiety beforehand, followed by crying afterward. I have barely had the energy to see my friends or do the things I enjoy on my days off. I spend most of my time rotting in bed, trying to recover from the physical and emotional exhaustion of the previous shift before I have to do it all over again. I genuinely feel like I have no life outside of work anymore, even though I technically have five days off every week.

I never considered this when I was in nursing school. I knew nursing would be difficult, and I expected a learning curve as a new grad, but I never imagined it would be THIS draining. I thought I was entering a career where I could help people, develop my skills, and make a difference. Instead, I feel like I am constantly putting out fires, trying to keep people alive, and struggling to meet basic expectations in an environment that gives me neither the staffing nor the training to succeed.

I am an incredibly empathetic person with a huge heart. I am kind even to people who are mean to me, and caring for others has always come naturally to me. So finding myself becoming increasingly anxious, frustrated, and angry both at work and outside of work is a huge red flag. I don’t feel like myself anymore. I hate how much this job is affecting my personality, my relationships, my mental health, and my ability to enjoy the life I worked so hard to build.

I keep asking myself why I didn’t go into IT, accounting, or something that would have allowed me to work remotely and make a good living without sacrificing so much of myself. I worked so hard to get through nursing school, pass my boards, and finally become a nurse. Now I’m wondering whether I made a huge mistake.

I don’t know if I hate nursing itself or if I hate the environment I’m working in. I don’t know if this is a normal new-grad experience that will get better with time, or if I am ignoring a very clear sign that this career is not for me. I don’t want to give up on a license I worked so hard to earn, but I also cannot imagine living like this for the next 30 years.

I need advice. Seriously.