Hello. I like your posts, from what little I've seen of them - you remind me of my Fundamentals professor (that's a high compliment!)
Would you mind kindly taking a look at my post in the student assistance forum? I would greatly appreciate your input.
Thank you!

I agree withe Absolutely13. Thanks for all the advice!

I just wanted to say thanks for your dedicated commitment to students. I'm a fan of yours!

I meant becoming like a high school science teacher or something. I don't know, I've always wanted to be an OBGYN nurse but I am too frightened to make a mistake with the drugs on accident, I'm not GREAT at math

No, I'm not saying you won't have to do dosages. You will. It won't be as complicated as the problems that nursing instructors sometimes give students. Many times you will be working with the same medications all the time, so you will be accustomed to working with them.

Nursing school is a trip through a whole bunch of areas of nursing to give you a little experience at each. Once you get a job you will be focusing in one area of practice and specializing.

You probably won't be hired as a teacher of nursing without some years of practical experience working as a nurse somewhere.

So, if I were to be an RN you really don't have to do the dosages? Its already pre-packaged or calculated? I would assume than nursing school makes you do the dosages if it wasn't already calculated? I have taken pre-reqs and I liked the pre-reqs and I do well in them, I'm just overly nervous and get anxiety. Especially hearing from people on here that 1. nursing school takes over your life for 2 years straight or 4 if you go for BSN and 2. I have heard probably 99% of people say that they HATE being a nurse and its not worth the stress. So I'm wondering is it worth it? I've always wanted to be an OB-GYN nurse... I may not be smart enough though, I'm not super smart but I'd say average. Well see where it takes me. I thought about teaching but nursing I can move anywhere in the world with job security and good pay. But, my boyfriends mom is now a case manager shes been a nurse for 20 years and she tells me to do teaching. I guess its my decision in the end but I definitely like to hear inputs on my career choices.

RT would probably get pretty boring after awhile because you are performing the same procedures day in and day out. There are only so many types of sonograms you can do, so many types of x-rays. If you are worried about math, why are you considering radiology? There is a lot more math involved with radiology. They have to determine safe radiation dosages and safe lengths from the radiation sources! Radiation is a subject within the field of physics! And calculus is the math of physics! Check the math pre-requisites for these radiation programs first.

The only math I ever had to do, and I was a med/surg nurse and worked on stepdown (telemetry) units a lot, was those dose desired divided by dose on hand problems. Schools make the problems more complicated and difficult because they want to make sure you know how to do them. On the job the hospitals make things as easy as possible to avoid errors. They can't afford (literally) to have nurses making mistakes with drugs. So, the pharmacies send the dosages already calculated and pre-packaged as much as possible. They advise their physicians to order medications so nurses don't have to calculate doses. Medicare has been tracking drug errors for some years. Drug errors must be written up and must be reported to Medicare. Medicare has known for some time that drug errors have increased hospital stays and costs. They and JCAHO (the accreditation body for hospitals) have pushed hospitals for years to do stuff to reduce drug errors. Cutting down on the drug calculations that nurses have to do has been at the top of the list. So, don't get hung up on this math business. I flubbed up so bad in my second quarter of calculus years ago that when I had some time a few years ago I was determined to go back and retake it. I started out by taking the whole math sequence from pre-algebra all the way up to trig. Take a pre-algebra class. That's the level of math you need to be able to do for drug calculations: fractions. percentages and ratios. If you can work problems with those, you can do drug calculations. These drug calculation problems are just word problems. But they are really not that difficult and they are always working with the same terms. They are just buried in words. They also make more sense when you can actually look at an actual pill or a vial of medicine. When I re-took Algebra I and the instructor was introducing us to word problems, the instructor keep saying, "draw a picture". Sometimes looking at what you are trying to make sense of (pills or mLs of of IV fluid) makes more sense when you get of sense of how much there really is of them in terms of the real world.

I never worked as hard in my life as I did as a nurse. Nurses are managers and supervisors of care. You will be making sure that everything a doctor ordered for your patients is getting done. It won't just be giving nursing care. It will also be making sure the tests, diet, other patient care services and sometimes other stuff that doesn't even involve nursing is getting done. You have to be a good organizer.

I have an accredited program near my house, at my community college, sonogrophy and rad tech. Its a two year program and I've finished almost all of my pre-reqs so I'd be going part time for two years. I'm cautious about going into them because everyone keeps telling me "Oh nursing is better" and my guidance counselor told me I should go into nursing because of the better advancement and how young I am. I guess I can't let people tell me what to do, but guidance counselors and people in the field tend to know more about careers. Would you recommend nursing to someone else being that you were a nurse? I think the thing I am most scared of is making a dosage miscalculation while I'm on the floor like an actual RN, yikes.

Yes. But programs are limited and they take even less numbers of students than nursing schools do. They have an even worse problem finding instructors. My niece has had to wait a year and a half just to complete her last two classes and she was accepted in the program and had already started classes. Go on the National website for the radiology technicians to find accredited schools for all the different disciplines (sonography, CT, radiology)

I'm sorry for asking so many questions, but your really helping me. I am only 21 years old, do you think there is a career in sonography as like nursing there is? Meaning, in nursing you can switch fields but do management and etc, I'm not sure about sonography though