Nursing Nightmares

They started in nursing school, of course. Sort of the equivalent of the "showing up naked at school" dream, but specific towards nursing.

During school, my Clinical Instructor from Hell featured heavily in my bad dreams. Getting yelled at for not doing procedures I'd never heard of. Or somehow ending up outside the hospital, trying to find my way back in because it was nearly end of shift and I'd been lost for the last 6 hours.

I hadn't had any nursing-related bad dreams since I finished school. But I had one the other night. This job must really be stressing me out. (Don't even get me started on how bad my psoriasis is getting... grrr)

In my dream, J (the assistant manager) came up to me as I was about to give end-of-shift report and said that I would need to stay another 4 hours, until 0330, because they were short staffed and they really needed me. I didn't stop to think that I could say no, so I just sucked it up and went to go see one of my patients. Then I was walking down a reeeeally long hallway (like in one of those creepy movies set in a hospital) and I have a lab req slip in my hand but it's blank, and I know I'm supposed to do a blood draw but I'm not sure what for, so I think about what my patient's in for and what they *might* need (I think I decided they needed an H&H) so I grab a purple-top tube and head on down to the room.

I draw from the AC (which I never do. Squicks me out) and the fluid that fills the tube is bright fucking blue. Like a darker shade of Windex blue. But I get enough to fill the tube and I figure the lab can decide what to do with it; blue blood is above my pay grade to figure out. As I'm walking back down the hall, I see that the tube is not actually full but only has about 1 mL in it. I curse the lab for being able to deal with 1mL of baby blood but 1mL of human blood is not enough to work with.

And then I wake up.


Anyone out there who's reading: Have you had any cracked-out nursing-related dreams?