my current job is a teacher assistant in preschool. I am currently doing prerequisites for bmcc nursing program.
I hate my job I hate working with kids changing diapers and being exhausted all week. the bad thing that my job pays 16.39 an hour so I need to know what entry hospital job can I get that starts at 16 an hour so i don't lose financially.
also please inform me of any hospitals that do tuition reimbursement!!!
I hate to break it to you OP, but all of the things you describe not liking about your current job/career is also involved in being a nurse and then some. There is no area of nursing that is EASY, especially the bedside.
Will you be able to handle working with people who are sick and in pain and sometimes unpleasant because of those reasons (who may also be combative, confused, etc)? What about changing an adult diaper and dealing with other bodily fluids? Because you will be dealing with all of that and more as a nurse.
I was working at my psych per diem job last night and my colostomy patient had a bag explosion. He was also highly agitated. This was just after I got on the floor. Poop galore. And this is psych, where you would think body fluids like that would be at a minimum.
I started stripping as soon as I hit my front door. Luckily the neighbors weren't watching at midnight (or if they did, well, they got a show).
OP - another poster said it well: what is it about changing diapers do you not like? None of us LIKE it; I don't think any of us jump for joy. But it's a fact of life when a code brown hits, and sometimes they hit a lot (depending on floor and patient). As a teacher, I hit them a lot less.
I feel ya. I work in outpatient Oncology and very rarely see colostomies. My patient's bag randomly burst in the room while I was accessing port last week. Stunk up the whole unit and the patient had no replacement bag so I had to have one couriered over from the main hospital.
When I worked in outpatient Urgent Care I asked a little old lady for a sample because she came in with urinary symptoms. I should have specified urine, as she gave me a poop sample. She couldn't get off the toilet and her hands were covered in poop but I didn't see that when I went to assist her up as I was focused on pulling her pants up. She smeared her poop hands all over my neck, hair, and face. We didn't carry diapers and she had some leftover poop in her pants. I asked her son if he had anything and he just laughed at me and went back in the room, told me it was my problem. I ended up fashioning a diaper out of a pad and chux. Ugh, I will never forget that incident.
My son is a special needs kid who probably will never be potty trained. He is in a special classroom. If you hate it this much, or think you would do it for more money, please find something else to do.
Nursing involves a ton more diaper changes and that is nothing. I have had to deal with cleaning off maggots on homeless people. I have had to literally insert my gloved finger to scoop out poop from an adult. I have seen a patient suddenly bleed out and die right in front of me and then had to help clean the room after the code was over, which looked like a murder scene from hell. Nurses are typically exhausted and burnt out.
How about speech therapy or physical therapy. Maybe respiratory therapy. All of these involve lots of school. If you still want to do nursing, I guess adult psych might be your best bet or some kind of RN case manager or something. You would still have to make it through school and all of what that involves.
There really isn't an entry level job in a hospital that pays what you're making now. Nursing assistants make less and do far more work. The only thing I can think of is registrar (not to be confused with "registry")... registrar is where you ask ER patients for their insurance info. I don't know what their salary is though.
I miss teaching; it was never the students that drove me out, rather the administration that finally did. I hope you didn't get that out of my post a few back. I miss the kiddos very much.
On that note ...
OP - NO PSYCH. Psych can often have lots of body fluids involved (depending on the floor and patient). There's a reason I work there (adult and Geri) per diem and not FT/PT, last night included. God bless you psych nurses.
I feel ya. I work in outpatient Oncology and very rarely see colostomies. My patient's bag randomly burst in the room while I was accessing port last week. Stunk up the whole unit and we the patient had no replacement bag so I had to have one couriered over from the main hospital.
When I worked in outpatient Urgent Care I asked a little old lady for a sample because she came in with urinary symptoms. I should have specified urine, as she gave me a poop sample. She couldn't get off the toilet and her hands were covered in poop but I didn't see that when I went to assist her up as I was focused on pulling her pants up. She smeared her poop hands all over my neck, hair, and face. We didn't carry diapers and she had some leftover poop in her pants. I asked her son if he had anything and he just laughed at me and went back in the room, told me it was my problem. I ended up fashioning a diaper out of a pad and chux. Ugh, I will never forget that incident.
any other positions besides front office? names of tuition reimbursement hospitals in NY?
OK, this is a message board, not a crystal ball. We have no idea of the types of jobs you might be interested in or where you might like to work. I've always found Google to work well.
My best story is a restrained patient who managed to get her hands in her never ending poo and wipe it all over her ET tube. She had acrylic nails to boot.
I spent much of my day cleaning out those dang nails and cleaning off her ET tube. It was nasty. Doctors wanted her extubated so my pain and sedation were minimal.
I take that back. Not my best. I can't decide if it's the flying GI bleed poo, or the pt that went asystole every time we turned to clean him. The family would have had a fit if he passed without them there. I had to change my scrubs that day.
You really might want to look into something besides nursing. Just getting through school will be tough for you. If you have a problem with diapers what are you going to do when you are exposed to TB, MRSA or Hepatitis?
I'm in my first semester of RN school and I have cleaned up plenty of pee and changed plenty of diapers. And much worse. The other day I had to clean and pack an open wound. It was a horribly smelling black hole the size of a plum in a women's back. Worse than any diaper.
And what about OB/Peds? You know how much blood and fecal matter is involved when a baby shows up? And that is part of RN school, too.
Just getting through the pre-reqs to RN school is a big pain in the "nalgas." Save yourself the trouble.
I was a high school English teacher for many years. Go get a teacher cert. It's a fun job.
Specializes in Psychiatry, Community, Nurse Manager, hospice.
As far as tuition reimbursement, I don't know where you live so I can't really say.
But as far as being sick of changing diapers there are lots of jobs where you don't have to do that. Psych tech, patient sitter, unit clerk are fantastic jobs for nursing students that do not involve diaper changing.
Yes, you will have to do it again in nursing school, but once out you can also take a no diaper changing nursing job, even right after school. I did.
Have you ever peeled under-cooked chicken off the bone? Undercooked to the point where it's still kind of slimy and stringy, pinkish-red but white in areas?
I was working as a nurse at a SNF once, and was lucky enough that our ADON also took care of the majority of the dressings since we were so busy on the floors. Well, I happened to be assisting in this one wound dressing and it was like nothing I've ever seen (or hope to see again). This poor lady was actually brought into (and pretty much dumped at) the facility like this. From pretty much her orifice to about T11/T12 was that under-cooked chicken look (Stage IV for the most part, unstageable in parts due to the rotted, pus-filled, putrefying flesh that meant that, even though this was a double room, it was treated as a single due to the odor). And, no matter what dressing we used, what treatment gels, it was almost impossible to keep clean and to heal because any time she had a bowel movement, it got into the wound (keep in mind where it was). So, not only did she require frequent dressing changes but she also required frequent cleaning of the wound to try to keep it as stool-free as possible.
She was in such agony, between the pressure wound and the rest of her contractures. Thank goodness for our hospice team who made sure we had whatever meds we needed to keep her as comfortable as possible, though I fear never 100% pain free. Until you've seen that level of agony in one of your fellow human beings, you haven't seen what agony is. And until you've smelled that smell (though CDiff or a GI bleed) of rotting flesh mixed with stool, you don't know what gross is.
I'm not going to judge you but I'm going to tell it to you straight. CNAs in a hospital where I am will be lucky to see $10/hr. LPNs cannot get hired into our systems but home health will hire you and pay $15-16 private duty with a lot of brief to change. Start rate for a new RN here is $24/hr and that's with loans to repay and a whole lot more stress from your other responsibilities on top of being up to your elbows in feces.
You may enjoy nursing if you can get over the body fluids, but I doubt it would be for the pay. Best of luck (and I honestly mean that, no sarcasm).
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Crystal-Wings, LVN
435 Posts
I hate to break it to you OP, but all of the things you describe not liking about your current job/career is also involved in being a nurse and then some. There is no area of nursing that is EASY, especially the bedside.
Will you be able to handle working with people who are sick and in pain and sometimes unpleasant because of those reasons (who may also be combative, confused, etc)? What about changing an adult diaper and dealing with other bodily fluids? Because you will be dealing with all of that and more as a nurse.