Where do I begin… I’m sat here while flo’s on night shift trying my sixth attempt at writing this, I have always wanted to work in health and social care for as long as I can remember and I have had a great career so far. I have seen some things that are indescribable and also been so elated to ultimately ‘Save a Life’ but most recently, well in fact the past sixth months, have been really hard and it’s got to the point that I have started to shut myself away from work and even flo. The days are starting to blur into one and I don’t want to get out of bed, I lie awake at 3am going over everything and I just don’t know what to do. One of my patients ‘Timmy’ who was let’s say, a bit of a ‘Gangster’ in his day has frontoemporal dementia, he’s physically still fit for his age (late 70’s). When we initially met, I knew he was going to be a challenge. If I can recall his first words were ‘Ey Up w***er’ I like to think of myself as a man’s man and so my approach was more to give ...

Can you believe that I have now been qualified a full two years? I can’t! It has been almost two years to the day since I donned the scary title of ‘Staff Nurse’, with all its responsibilities and rewards and I can honestly say that I wouldn’t want to be anything else. I’ve had so many adventures (not to mention the near-miss disasters) in that time and my life has taken such a positive direction. I’d like to say I planned it that way, but I think it’s more default than design! Carla reminded me last week that I will need to revalidate next year and I nearly choked on my Gregg’s sausage roll. I’m pretty good at keeping my portfolio up to date (thanks to the RCN website and Matt’s OCD) so I’m not worrying about it. I’m more worried about the time flying past and not doing everything that I want to do! I had a proper heart to heart with Carla about career progression and what my aspirations are – I honestly couldn’t hope for a better mentor and she said the best thing I could ...

‘Weird’ is the word of the week. I’m wondering when I can step out of this soap opera of a life and just have a normal one? I mentioned it to my Mum when we went for Sunday dinner– I was probably feeling a bit sorry for myself and figured a little sympathy would go down a treat, but then I remembered too late that sympathy is not something that my Mother has ever heard of. The lecture about life and how we influence our own trials and tribulations lasted well into pudding, with her assessment being that I always failed to understand how irritating I could be and didn’t understand my ‘personal impact’. It turns out she’s been doing an online course in psychology to keep her up to date with the modern world. Unfortunately, she’s been doing it with Jeremy Kyle on in the background and I think she’s got her theories a bit mixed up.  Matt managed to keep a straight face through it all, although I heard a muffled snort at one point and I’m sure I saw him wiping gravy from his...

I’ve had a right old week of it – in a good way of course!  I actually started the week trying to be sensible. It’s a bit weird really, I usually do things based on gut instinct but I thought I’d try to be a bit grown up and keep all my options open.  I’ve been seriously considering the future of my nursing career (like a grown-up) and had already arranged a lengthy call with Recruitment Panda who, to be honest, have been my rock while I’ve been going through my mid- career crisis.  Trying to be sensible and not wanting to have all my eggs in one basket, I also arranged another call with a different recruitment agency that we met at the job fair as well, mainly to convince my mother that the blisters on her feet weren’t for nothing! I won’t lie. The call with the other agency was a bit scary. The woman with the deep raspy voice fired questions at me so quickly that I almost expected a buzzer to go off and for her to announce how many questions I’d got ri...