You Know You're an Old(er) Nurse If . . .

Nurses General Nursing

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You know you're an older nurse if:

1. You remember working with nurses who wore caps. :nurse:

2. You remember nurses (and doctors) sitting at the nurses station drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes while charting. :smokin:

3. You remember when charting was done (handwritten) in 3 different colors (black or blue for day shift, green for evening shifts, red for night shift).

4. You remember when IV fluids came only in glass bottles.

5. You remember when breast milk wasn't a biohazard. :redlight:

6. You remember when chest tube setups consisted of glass bottles, rubber stoppers, and tubing.

7. You remember when white polyester uniforms were the standard for nurses.

8. You remember when you'd have given your eye teeth for a comfortable pair of nursing shoes (we haven't always been able to wear athletic shoes).

9. You remember when the hospital's top nurse was the director of nursing and not the chief nursing officer.

10. You remember giving lots of IM shots for pre-ops and pain meds.

What else?

HollyVK (with patient care experience going back to 1972) :gandalf:

Specializes in LTC, med-surg, critial care.
You used metal foot cradles to prevent foot drop (do they still use those?)

TreeSawRN

My LTC facility still uses them frequently, our DON and assessment nurse have been around a loooong time (I've only been an LVN for a year and a half).

The assessment nurse showed me how to make a leg band to hold a foley catheter in place and they taught me how to do a HHH enema when a fleets won't work and the resident hasn't gone for six days...

Specializes in Critical Care.

Sharpening needles on a whet stone, testing for smoothness with a cotton ball, squirting acetone through them to "clean" them, packaging them in cotton, tape, and resterilizing.

Washing gloves, blowing them up, putting the blown up glove under water to check for leaks, drying, powdering, placing them in cloth and tape and resterilizing them.

Matching plungers and syringes by printed-on numbers, wrapping in cloth and resterilizing them.

Scultetous binders. wrapped from down to up for abdominal incisions, wrapped from high to low for fresh post partum.

Shaves and 3H enemas for women in labor.

V-pads, hand made and sterilized.

Atropine tablets, dissolved, then injected IM.

BIRD machines.

Minidrippers for cardiovascular meds. No pumps.

White nylon hose with seams.

Capes to go with the starched caps.

Only our last names on our name tags.

No men in our student nurse classes.

String of cups.

clinitest and acetest tablets.

Vital sign information given to the patients only by the doctors.

Medication information given to the patients only by the doctors.

Sugar in bedsores, covered by dressing in the hopes that the bacteria would like the sugar better than the patient's tissues.

8 hour shifts....that became 16+ hours when your replacement did not show up.

50+hemostats on incisions--no cautery.

Newspaper over rubber sheets for incontinent patients.

post op ether beds.

Follow the bouncing ball oscilloscope one lead ekg monitor.

Oxygenation of ventilator patients determined by hourly urine output--no pulse oximeters.

Pans of iced water to keep the Cardiac Output monitor injectate cold.

Refrigerated LR for gastric irrigation.

alcohol baths for hypothermia.

Bent glass straws, wooden wheelchairs, porcelain urinals and bedpans.

Valium was not a lock up drug.

There was no acetominophen.

This is fun. I may remember some more.

Call bells were really BELLS. You had to figure out which room it came from.

Specializes in OR & ER.

When you took pts to the OR on a surgical lift not a gurney.

ohhhhhhhh those memories... i read all the replies and the old times flew right back in. The glass IV bottles, metal bedpans, medicine cards, turp drips, reautoclaving doctors gowns, making our own sterile vaseline gauze, mercury themometers, Pitocin buccals, (they are little pills that go in the mouth at the gum line) to induce labor. We were so busy back then but those days WERE THE BEST. I don't know how we did it. holtgirl

Specializes in jack of all trades.
Checking urine specific gravity at the bedside by putting a drop of urine on a little hand-held device.

QUOTE]

How about putting the urine into a glass cylinder, then putting in a little glass bobber thingy and giving it a spin- it settled in the urine and you read the line. Hygrometer??

Lordy, forgot that one. Never used it but in nursing school. Wow We are getting old LMAO!!

1. Dorms, Patients shared a room with 6-12 other patients. And if able to get out of the bed on their own the Patient made their own beds! (Yes, I know it was at the Military hospital.:rotfl:

2.New Hypertensive Patients spent 3-7 days in the hospital to get them on the right RX and Dose. Same with Diabetics.

3. You stayed in the hospital a week after a lady partsl delivery and 2 weeks after a c-section.

What did they use for IV tubing before plastics?

I love these stories.

Specializes in ORTHOPAEDICS-CERTIFIED SINCE 89.

Not only glass straws but glass in and out catheters!

Betadine ungt. and sugar (Sugardine) in a jar to put in open wounds. The sugar was hypertonic and would "break up the bacteria"

Foil packages of pig placenta to put on burns. Yeeech I hated that stuff.

Dressing trays with metal cannister of ether to remove adhesive residue. I went into the supply room once where a tray had overturned and passed out cold right in the doorway. A visitor caught me and said

"what should I do with this nurse?"

Wearing OR scrubs in the newborn nursery but having to wear our starched white cap to show there were nurses in there.

When I was born way back in the last century my Aunt had my cousin in July.....She stayed in the hospital til her sister had my next cousin mid- August, and SHE stayed in the hospital til my Mama had ME at the end of August. And that was not unusual

I remember the time when nursing care plans were summarized on the Kardex. Treatments were given as scheduled, medications were passed on time, diets were delivered from the kitchen as ordered. Head nurses and their assistants coped with physicians' rounds and gave medicines. Staff nurses did patient care, and nurses' aides refilled water pitchers and emptied trash cans. The work got done, the nurses and aides all got time for meals and breaks, and nobody ever had to spend any time writing out a NANDA-approved nursing diagnosis.

Wish we could all experience that.:crying2:

You wanted to be like Dixie McCall RN

Cherry Ames, Student Nurse was your inspiration for becoming a nurse

You were taught under no circumstances do you put a diaper on a patient; it takes away their dignity.

you remember placing dirty mercury thermometers in a small alcohol boat to soak

you remember scouting around for the list of things some "busy resident or doctor" needs in a hurry:idea:

you remember to wear your fingernails short and only apply clear nail polish, white shoes and oh----no long ear rings, only small gold or pearl studs

you remember glass urinals and those heavy metal bedpans

pricking your finger when inserting those needle driven IV med boluses in a patient's heplock:angryfire

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