It was really strange setting up the room for the simulation lab I was going to be teaching. I put my ambu bag and O2 mask up on the oxygen flowmeter behind the hospital bed. I felt like I was setting up a room for a new patient. But this time I wasn’t getting a new patient, I wasn’t in the ICU. I didn’t have to run through my mind all the things my new patient would need because my patient was the manikin in the bed already. I had the familiar butterflies in my stomach though. I was going to teach my 1st lab today. I was going to have a bunch of new faces that had to listen to me explain the different ways to give someone oxygen. I started to get way ahead of myself. I wanted to show them everything, the 20 plus years of nursing experience in my brain to just hook up to their brains like a download from The Matrix. There is so much to know, then so much to become an expert on. I was excited in a way I had not been in ages.

The class came in as I had the bright idea to set up my camera to video myself. I had given talks occasionally before and found that I had a tendency to say “um” quite a lot so I wanted to make sure I could look back and troubleshoot my teaching. As I looked at the students coming in I really started feeling my heart race. I was running the show the next hour, there was just me to look at and listen to. I’m awful at names too so I was already trying to cover that up. All at once I wanted to just dump everything in my brain out. This was simple stuff, they would need to know just how often they’d be using all this equipment, that someday it would be something so simple and obvious but they looked like how I felt too. As I started I had so much to say all at once, I had to slow myself down. When I’m nervous, like giving book reports throughout my school career, I was always interrupted and told I was talking too fast. I already speak fast on a normal basis. I was trying to speak slower, be interesting and not say “um”.

I started with the nasal cannula, the clear tubing that people wear that goes over their ears and gives oxygen into the nose. As I handled it and showed it to them I was very aware that while a few of them were pretty new to nursing and might work in clinics or other places that don’t use these, there were definitely some for whom this was super basic. I got more anxious. I thought about the millions of times I’ve had to put these on a patient’s face or remind them not to keep pulling it off. I thought of the people who insisted it wasn’t working and there was no air so I’d dip it in a cup of water and show them the bubbles. I started joking with my class about the ways I’ve seen such a fairly simple device put on by the patient or their family or even by other nurses in completely wrong ways. How people will sit their bare bottom on it and stick it on their face before I could wipe it off. The ways people would chew on them or how sometimes you get panicky as a new nurse and you see that your patient’s oxygen sats are going down so you crank up the flow only to finally notice its not in their nose or the tubing is disconnected. As I started going through each piece of respiratory equipment, it was nice to simply explain why you use one over the other. I wasn’t having beeping going on with a patient suffocating and crashing. I was simply discussing oxygen masks. I started to relax, they were so polite and sweet, looking interested and laughing at my dorky jokes and when I reminisced about a few unrelated ICU nursing stories where me and my friends had some nutty situations. The hour was up before I knew it and I felt utterly exhausted but still excited. I was teaching!

Later on after work I got my phone out and watched my video. It was awful! I said “um” pretty much after every word. I also put the phone so it just focused on my double chin and from a particularly unflattering angle. I sniffled and had an annoying nervous laugh, I couldn’t watch the whole thing. I wanted to get myself a shock collar for every time I do something annoying. I immediately called my friend Alison and we had a great laugh. It was already funny thinking I was teaching since I was known for being pretty sarcastic and someone who regularly cursed like a sailor. I knew I had some homework for myself as well.