First Week Round Up

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I have survived completed my first week as a trainee dental nurse!

Boy, am I knackered!!

It's hard enough going back to full time hours after two years of sporadic hours/days, but there's also the early starts (never been easy) and wrapping your head about something brand new.

On the up side, the days are going by fairly quickly and I'm not sat around being bored - there's no time to be bored!


Early Start

I knew exactly what was going to happen.  I'd go to bed early with the best of intentions, but be too excited (or nervous, sometimes it's hard to tell!) to fall asleep.  I'd eventually nod off around 11 or 12 only to jolt awake in the early hours, slightly panicked and mumbling "Do I have to get up now!?" only to grab the alarm clock and curse at the single digit of 3 or 4 in the early hours.  Roll over, bury self in the bed covers and try to get a few more hours of snooze.  7am will roll round, yet somehow I'll still stagger out of bed 'late', throw some tea and toast down my neck, scramble for clothes in spite of laying them out neatly the night before, they'll have moved during the night.  Hurry out the house, scrolling through a mental checklist of keys, shoes, textbook etc.

Thankfully, this has got easier as the week has progressed.  I may be out of practise with getting up before 8am, but once I'm in a routine it's not so hard.


Journey

Lucky for me, my new employer is not a million miles nor a dreadful journey away.  It should take, on a good day, about 15-20 minutes to drive there.

On a bad morning, you can hit every red light there is on route.  Or at least it'll feel like every red light on route!

Seems like the only hitches at the moment are the inclement weather.  I did invest in a windscreen cover; quite inexpensive but I felt it worth a try.  Turns out it works very well at keeping frost off my screen so that's one less window to scrape and it makes a big difference!  A little bit of de-icer on the rest of the car works wonders.  Doesn't stop my fingers freezing though.


Working Day

Hectic.  That sums up my first day.  Didn't get much less hectic as the week went by but at least I'm more familiar with the daily routine and helping out with tasks such as cleaning the surgery between patients, setting up at the start of the day and shutting it all down at the end.  Essentially all the basic cleaning duties.  The more complex work will come later as I build on the basic knowledge.


I will go into a bit more detail on things in my coming posts, hopefully give you more of an insight as to what a dental nurse gets up to on a daily basis and what they need to learn.

Which means I have to start with the absolute backbone of the dental surgery ...

First Day

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Wow.

I am knackered!

First day wasn't physically taxing or anything, but going from doing a few hours each day to a full 12 hours (starting from when I left the house at 7.30am and returning home at 7.30pm) is somewhat draining.

I've had so much happen over the past couple of weeks that I've not had much time to devote to the blog to even cover my interview.  Apologises for that!

Not that I'll be back on track any day soon - first week in the new job on full time hours for the first time in two years, plus sorting things out for a holiday I booked shortly before the interview came along ... well, the blog shall remain fruitless for the time being whilst I try to keep up with everything else that's going on at the moment.

But it goes without saying that I'm now quite pleased that this blog will now move into its second, long-awaited phase - of being the blog of a trainee dental nurse instead of someone job hunting for the position  :)