considering RN as career move, fears/concerns/questions

billyboblewis · Apr 7, 2011

I dont think you would enjoy being a nurse. I dont think you would feel comfortable with your co workers and many of them would not feel comfortable with you. I think you should set different sights for your career. You have been to your own admission a career student and that is totally different than being a career nurse.

I do believe that you would have very little trouble getting a job as a psych nurse because of your background and if you are willing to take the job and everything that comes with being a new nurse go for it! Just decide if this is really what you want to do before you go wandering off for a nursing education. Good luck!

elljayo · Apr 8, 2011

"career" student... if working my way full-time through thirty years of education, two economic recessions, having two careers decimated by same, and going back to work my way back through another minor degree to try to leverage what education I already have so I can be employable again, constitutes being a career student, I guess that's me. I always kind of thought the term applied to people who went to school all their lives to *avoid* working, I must have been really confused! THANKS for straightening me out.

glencovediva · Apr 8, 2011

How do you expect to be a nurse if you're so squeemish?? When you're a nursing student, your going to have to do: Bed baths, injections. You're going to learn ostomy care, trach care, empty bedpans etc,etc. The list goes on and on. Sometimes the smells and sites are horrendous. Most hospitals want to hire BSNs because they want to achieve Magnet status, so I don't advise wasting your money on an Associate's degree. I think you should stay in your own field and take certifications to advance yourself. Pursuing nursing at this point in your life would be setting yourself up for failure. The "icky" part of nursing never bothered me, I have a strong stomach. I was never in fear of blood.You as a nurse may have to attend to a bloody patient. What are you going to do? Faint?Good Luck!!

elljayo · Apr 8, 2011

i expect to get over my squeamishness, and am looking for helpful information on how other people have faced this issue, as i have no question others have. whether or not i'll be able to do it, is another question. continuing education or qualifications in my field is not an option for reasons more complicated that would probably interest you. thank you for sharing your experiences.

KateMLS · Apr 11, 2011

My experience has been that almost every nurse has something that just makes his or her skin crawl. But you express hersitation about virtually everything that is involved in the day-to-day care of sick people. No matter what your background you will have to learn to deal with these things and to keep your feelings about doing so off your face and out of you body language. And, you'll have to do it without making comments while you're doing it. My gut feeling is that you are floundering around trying to find a way to make something work for you and have latched onto nursing as a panacea for all that hasn't come together in your career life thus far. It might work, I don't know. I would strongly suggest you consult a career counselor at a community college. You seem to assume 20 year old science classes will count now, they probably will not. You need a real picture of what is expected prior to getting into a program and what will be expected once you are in. You dismiss the very real situation new grads have been and continue to experience relative to new grad positions. You assume because you are working in a facility, they will hire you as a new grad and hire you into the area you want to be in--maybe, maybe not. Frankly, being stubborn and dismissing people trying to give you good and honest information does not bode well for success in nursing.

elljayo · Apr 11, 2011

you read an awful lot into a lot less definite language than i actually used. i find that rather interesting. lot of fear-based negative people drawn to the internet, ever think about that?

KateMLS · Apr 11, 2011

Sorry you find me negative. But I read all the posts and you have been consistently defensive and dismissive. That's far more negative than suggesting you get some career counseling advice. Perhaps you doth protest too much.

Streamline2010 · Apr 12, 2011

hi there. what a great, active board, informative!!! i feel lucky to have found you guys! i've done a lot of lurking and reading relevant posts and finally decided to ask my own specific questions. first, some background.
first - i am applying to a 2 year rn program at a community college in my area. i have already got an aa, a ba, and an ma (more on that later) including chem and biology, so i expect to be be able to take microbiology, anat and phy 1 & 2, and get right into clinicals. i work part-time already, i just want to get this done asap. a fast bsn is not possible due to expense.
chem and general biology can be old credits at many schools b/c the rn really doesn't use more than a smattering of those concepts. if the school has a 3-year or 6-year or whatever "freshness date" then you might have to repeat. having a&p i & ii and micro is prereq to being accepted into some rn degrees that i looked at. you might need to have those all done before starting nursing i. i recommend that, even if the school doesn't, because nursing i is enough by itself, lol.
second - i have mixed reasons for pursuing an rn. initially, it's been for employability, pure and simple. i have an ma in psych and wanted to get licensed as a therapist, and i love counseling work, but it's a catch-22 - i have to work to get licensed, and i can't get a job with a license. i got lucky and got a direct care mental health position (bottom rung position) at a very big psych hospital in my area, but it's been made plain to me that they don't hire mas (at my appropriate professional level) and no hospital in massachusetts ever will (long story, it's a big turf war between msws, mas, mds and phds in my state).
people already gave ya their 2 cents on employability. you might check into job prospects for lpn and pay rates, too. where i am, lpn starting pay averages $15 but it's $18 and $22 in pittsburgh area and lpn is one year straight through, and focuses on tasks of patient care. depending on the need for lpns, you may find the lpn curriculum is less stressful and you step right into a decent job after, and your employer pays for continuing ed. putting your life on hold for one year vs. stringing out part-time school for 2 years might look attractive to you. total cost for lpn in pa is $10k to $11k. when i looked at doing rn associate degree as a part time student (i have degrees and all of the non-nurse classes completed) just the nursing courses cost about $10k total. going lpn would be a shorter time commitment to complete, and would give the opportunity to "try" nursing without tying up 2 years of your life. i just tossed that out as something to consider. here, we have a lot of displaced workers from all kinds of backgrounds going into lpn, and they like it. many prefer to stay lpn because they don't want to deal with the extra training and theory and "nursing process" training that rn requires.
but if i get an rn i have options to move within the hospital into, say, psychiatric nursing, at double the pay rate, not to mention it opens up many other doors. not only that, but it makes me much more employable elsewhere - and my husband is only 4 years from retirement. its more of an advantage than getting licensed in mental health at the master's level.
third - the more i look at rn, the more i realize the following:
-- i love diagnosis, and i am good at it.
now hear this and never forget: nurses do not diagnose. they solve problems. doctors and physician's assistants get to diagnose. that's what my instructors have told me, that i don't want nursing, because my interests do not align with rn duties. if you are interested in the disease process, then become a pa or a md or something. read http://www.enotes.com/nursing-encyclopedia/nursing-diagnosis one thing that it says is:
it is important to distinguish nursing diagnoses from medical diagnoses. the two are similar because they are both designed to plan care for a patient. however, nursing diagnoses focus on human response to stimuli, while medical diagnoses focus on the disease process.
nurses do not treat disease. they facilitate healing by treating all kinds of effects that the pathological conditions have on the patient. it's a totally different focus than using science to cure disease, and it's why i am deciding that rn school may not be something i want to continue, after spending all that time and effort to get into it. rns get schooled in how to serve, is how i see it. they serve the patient, and are expected to put up with all kinds of crap along the way. my school is big into holism, and in spite of being a secular institution has a bunch of instructors who are churchy and and catholic and want to convert us all to be good obedient servants who mother all of our patients, and those gals are all the mamma type who sacrifices herself to help everyone else. and i am more of a science type who is technology oriented and i am clearly in the camp of "nursing is a profession, and a job." not "nursing is a calling." yup, it takes a special kind of person to be a nurse. you have to the the pliable type who will take all kinds of abuse.
-- i love working with people - comforting them, giving them hope, helping them heal.
try doing that when they are demanding to be waited on hand and foot and have the rn provide services for them that they would not get in a 5 star hotel. sure, you'll meet some delightful people. but in nursing school, they'll give you the medicaid frequent fliers and the nasty ones that the floor nurses have tired of dealing with.
-- i love fixing things, detecting clues, solving mysteries.
then become a md, do, or pa, 'cause they get to do that job.
-- i am a science nerd, which is is why i am still fresh on biology and chemistry literally 20 years after i took the classes - i am confident i know enough i can come up to speed quickly. i enjoy learning about medications and intimate details about how the body works on every level. i am literally excited about taking these classes. i spend half my time researching this stuff on the internet anyway to better understand my own health questions and issues.
then look at some other profession or become a med lab tech or go into teaching or something. i am starting to suspect that the training that rns get is not all that high-level, and that once you catch onto the basics, it's a lot of ssdd. at least, that's how i am feeling. i was overwhelmed with all the new material at first, because i came from technology and not life science. and it all seemed so hard and so much detail. but once i started getting it down pat, i started to instantly feel like the thrill was gone. like it is going to be lather, rinse, repeat, again and again. it doesn't feel challenging to me, just annoying, all the sameness and no innovation. i am more interested in the disease process, because that's where the science is. nursing is more using people skills, taking patient's crap, because you are assisting patients with healing, you are not the healer. the doctor is the healer. i hate clinicals anymore, just because i am sick of all the orchestrated chaos at the units that i've worked at. i'd love to go back to working in a quiet setting with scientists and engineers and techs and such. joe and jane q. public are really not all that bright or interesting to me, compared to the brainy people i am used to in my tech career. too many of them have self-inflicted health problems and they come dragging into the hospital time and time again wanting "us" to fix them, when the truth is, they don't do anything their healthcare providers taught them, and they have a history of non-compliance that stretches back years. sorry, i am running out of service with a smile, and fantasizing about giving some stupid person a boot back out the door one of these days.
-- so - i might actually like rn work even without the psych stuff. i just think i really do not want to work with geriatrics or peds. that's my only really insight.
fourth - and here's the all too common rub. i don't know if i can handle plebotomy, gore, compound fractures, body fluids (especially feces and vomit). i just don't know. i used to get faint at the sight of blood, but i also sat and comforted a guy who had broken his leg playing raquetball while his friend went for help. of course, his bones weren't sticking out either. i'm terrified of doing my clinicals. i don't even care so much about afterward because i know there are a million jobs for rns and a million ways of doing them - and with my extra education i'm hoping i can take full advantage. but what if i can't make it through my clinicals?
here's my experience at the highly regarded diploma program with a decent nclex pass rate: prior to clinicals, my training in say, taking bp or pulses honestly consisted of one 1-hour sim lab, during which i got to take one bp using a cuff, on the sim mannequin, and one bp on a classmate, with the instructor listening in on a double steth. i got to try taking some classmates pulses for oh, say, 15 minutes, then i was told to "go practice finding all these pulses on family members and friends, outside of sim lab. for injections, i got to do one sq and one im on the sim mannequins, and was told to read the book and study the charts that say what needle gauge to use and what injection sites to use or not use. etc, etc, a quick pass through the sim lab and viola we are trained. next, we got turned loose in clinicals, and told to bathe p't, change linens / make bed, take all vital signs, assess patient's environment for safety, assess patient's needs, etc. hey, i expected the instructor to demonstrate, or look over my shoulder, or be at my elbow, or have the whole group of students in there. but we were turned loose to try to do what was assigned.

my point? if all schools are doing the kind of minimal teaching that i am seeing at my school (and i presume this is a cost-cutting move on the part of the school), your main problem with clinicals will be the stress burnout from trying to train yourself what to do, please the patient so that he or she gives your "skills" a high rating afterward, and complete the clinical assignment satisfactorily. cleaning up a little feces or vomit blood might be a godsend, because at least you'll kind of instinctively know how to do that well, instead of frantically trying to recall what you were taught in that 10 minutes worth of sim lab the school calls adequate training.
is there hope for me? do i have a choice where i do my clinicals? if i have to spend a year in an er somewhere, will i build up a tolerance for horrific wounds, pus, puke, and other terrifying substances?
you don't get to choose anything in rn school. you are told, and you obey. obedience is a big trait they look for. block curriculum is like a unit of ltc, a unit of psych, a unit of med/surg, unit of mother-baby, etc. and it's all laid out in a succession predetermined by the school. i think it's pretty much a rarity to get any er experience as rn student. if you do, you're lucky, because it improves your marketability.
did any of you start out this way? how did you get past it/over it/through it??? i don't think job shadowing someone for one day is going to help because if this is a problem one day is not going to help me get over it. i'm looking for strategies for coping with the problem - i really want to do this.
if you made it this far thanks for reading my post and i appreciate your response(s)!!!

i'm also an adult career changer with a few college degrees and years of experience in technology-related fields. i thought that nursing was a career change that i would enjoy, but it's a far cry from the great working environments that i've been fortunate to have in my previous career. i cannot overstate how different nursing school is from what i had imagined it to be. perhaps it's because i am in a diploma school and not a college program. but, really, i don't think so. i think the nature and focus of the nurse job is quite different from what i'd envisioned. i'm not real happy with the types of jobs i've seen at the hospital. rns there aren't treated with much respect by anyone, including the patients. i think you should job shadow, and instead of focus on the "gore," look at the other working conditions and the "corporate culture" of that facility, and the types of people who are successful rns there, and what personality traits and lifestyles they come from. see if you fit into that, because your tolerance for the types of people who are employees and patients is a huge part of the rn job.