The Monster: Med/Surg

Nurses General Nursing

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I'm a nursing student. Just started recently & I continue to hear about this monster...MED/SURG.

Everyone said AP was going to be INSANE. So far, it's my highest grade. It IS a lot, but it does

not seem to be as bad as everyone made it out to be.

So, I don't want to get comfortable..........why is med/surg scary? Everyone keeps stressing over it

terribly. I must be clueless.

Critical thinking..the one thing I dread. I enjoy things, such as math, that are objective. My lowest grade is in our Nursing Arts & Skills class. I'm hanging on with a B. Everything else- I have an A. Urgh.

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Specializes in Home Care.

Med/surg classes aren't that bad if you have a good understanding of A&P and like to learn pathophysiology of disease. Once you get that down the nursing interventions and care plans make sense.

Pharmacology was for me the toughest class because its all memorization.

Best advice: Get an NCLEX book and use it. Saunders is great because it comes with a cd with thousands of questions on it.

Get yourself in the habit of doing 100 NCLEX questions a week, read the rationales, bookmark the ones you miss and review the topic. Then go back and do some more NCLEX questions.

Write your own flashcards for the study material you find difficult, review them when you're sitting in traffic.

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Specializes in Critical Care.
This is the best advise anyone can give regarding medsurg ever. Listen to this writer, she's absolutely right. .

Exactly...now the only problem with this statement is that I'm a dude...lol...

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Specializes in Critical Care.
Critical thinking..the one thing I dread. I enjoy things, such as math, that are objective. My lowest grade is in our Nursing Arts & Skills class. I'm hanging on with a B. Everything else- I have an A. Urgh.

No one can teach you critical thinking....that just something you learn as you go, and most of it comes with experience to be honest...It's being able to look someone who has difficulty breathing with decided if it's a asthma attack or a CHF exacerbation and how to treat it right and save the day, or treat it wrong and kill them...

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Specializes in CCU, SICU, CVSICU, Precepting & Teaching.
i'm a nursing student. just started recently & i continue to hear about this monster...med/surg.

everyone said ap was going to be insane. so far, it's my highest grade. it is a lot, but it does

not seem to be as bad as everyone made it out to be.

so, i don't want to get comfortable..........why is med/surg scary? everyone keeps stressing over it

terribly. i must be clueless.

med/surg usually involves clinical and is often the first clinical for a nursing student. the very idea of clinical stresses many students. for others the difficulty is applying the knowledge they've learned in the classroom to the clinical situation. in some schools, instructors use this first clinical experience to weed out those students who perhaps shouldn't be in nursing because they lack something, whether that be critical thinking skills, compassion, a solid work ethic or integrity.

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[color=#483d8b]med surg is the basic building block of your nursing skills. master med/surg, and you can build upon that knowlege and experience to master increasingly complicated and specialized patients. fail to master the basics, and the rest of your career may suffer. for this reason it's vitally important that you master med/surg. it's a challenging place to work as your patient population is quite varied. you might have a patient with unstable angina one day, and a gi bleeder the next and gall bladder surgery the day after that. or you might have all three today with another few patients thrown in for good measure. critical thinking, time management and roller skates are essential.

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Specializes in Med/Surg, ICU, educator.

I have worked m/s for 9+ yrs, 7 as a nurse, rest as a CNA.....most days I love it, some days absolutely hate it. I wouldn't trade my experiences for the world. And I have had more than 1 instructor in my ASN, BSN and MSN all state that if you can master m/s, you can work anywhere. I truly believe it.

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Specializes in Pediatric Hem/Onc.

I think I'm a masochist.....but I'm looking forward to taking med surg :uhoh3: I know it's going to be hard, but patho is interesting to me. Critical thinking clicks with me, for whatever reason...so I'm excited about it. My clinical last term was boring - I felt like I was at work, as a PCA. I'm hoping med-surg will make me feel like I'm a student nurse.

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Specializes in CNA, MA.

I feel the same way about med surg some lady scared me the other day and I was like geez should I just quit now!!!?!?! THe way she was talking she told me she was weeks from graduating and she dropped out because of the "monster med surg" eek! Ia m very nervous now!! i am an a-b student and people say you are likely to drop a letter grade and I will not settle for no C cuz that would be failing!!!! I am just so freaked out by this idk what to expect I start med surg in April (little ways away but comes real fast)!!!

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Specializes in ER.

Nurses talking about MedSurg remind me of women discussing labor- we love telling the horror stories, myself included!

MedSurg is nursing. Unless you feel compelled to spend your career in neonatal care, I can't think of many nursing positions that wouldn't benefit from a strong MedSurg base. The last time we had an ER position available, I casualy mentioned it to a few of our most-excellent MS nurses, who replied that they didn't feel qualified. MS nurses, don't underestimate yourself!! I've heard people talk about 'only a MedSurg nurse", and I always have to comment. Then they say... but you're an ER nurse! That's right, and I wouldn't be a good ER nurse if I hadn't been a good MedSurg nurse.

The trick to MS is to not let all the details overwhelm you. I'm ADD, so I have to have a basic game plan for each shift. I carried one piece of paper which I folded in quarters. On the inside I divided it into sections w/ a box for each pt and their pertinent info. On the outside I listed the times meds were due for each. I left room for notes and the like. It fit easily into my pocket and unlike the page long report sheet for each pt, I didn't accidently leave it in a room or lose it. I know some nurses love their clipboard w/ a storage area, but simple works better for me. The ADD really helped me once I learned to control it and call it 'multi-tasking'.

Critical thinking, at it's best, is a life-long learning process. It's like the 'Self Actualization' of Maslow- few master it completely. The best way to start is to learn to love a pathophys. Once you begin to understand the logic behind a disease, you can recognize how seemingly unrelated occurances are all intertwined. You won't remember it all from school, but if you can get comfortable with the research and logic of it all you'll be better prepared to do quick research on the fly for MS. For example, my school didn't really go in-depth into autoimmune illness, it was considered 'rare' at that time. The first time I had a pt with lupus who had new onset pleural effusion and pericarditis I didn't really understand why. In school, we briefly covered dermatological and musculoskeletal aspects of lupus, but nothing else. A quick skimming of one of our reference books on the floor helped me understand, and also made the doc happy when I called about the recent UA that was positive for protein. If I hadn't looked, I would have assumed there was some infectious process going on when there wasn't.

It's been a while since I took my NCLEX, I took it not too long after it became computerized. The majority of the questions I received were along the lines of "you have four pts, with a,b,c, and d diagnosis. Who do you assess first?" Or "Your pt has x diagnosis, now presents w/ a,b,c,d complaints- which one you should you be the most concerned about?"

Medscape.com has a 'medical student' sign-up option, which is pretty cool. You get a lot of emails with case scenarios; they present the basics of the case, you try your hand at answering the questions, and then it takes you to the next page where it gives you the correct answers and the rationales. It's geared more towards medical diagnosis, but it's very useful in learning what to look for in disease processes.

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Specializes in Acute Care Cardiac, Education, Prof Practice.

In the end it is all nursing.

Tait

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MedSurg is the diseases, the processes, the outcomes, and so on.... you'll have a tremendous amount of memorization, and critical thinking.

But you can do this.... don't feel defeated already, give yourself a chance. We've done this, and so can you!

Good luck!

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Med/Surg and A&P are the backbone to all nursing. Without knowing the basics you'll never get to the advanced topics you need to specialize. Med/Surg will help you learn everything you need for the rest of your career. A&P while it is important, it sinks in more as you practice and learn disease process and how they affect the body. Don't let Med/Surg scare you. Just make sure to pick up what you can each and every day. If you don't learn something new each day, then you didn't do something right!

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