Nice full lady-scaping and enema for a laboring mom
Oh man . . . you reminded me of my first time laboring with my 1st kid. 33 years ago. That happened to me! It was awful. The other funny thing was a normal lady partsl delivery stayed 3 days in the hospital.
I had my 2nd kid two years later in a different state and I might have been on the cusp of changes in L&D policies. No full shave or enema! And I only stayed barely 24 hours.
Such a difference . . . especially for the itchy time to regrow hair. I'm obviously not a fan.
Specializes in Psych (25 years), Medical (15 years).
One thing that hasn't changed in over 30 years of nursing is that I still like to have fun with my colleagues.
This photo was taken circa 1986. My coworker is wearing my glasses and "nurses cap" with my pin on it and I'm wearing her glasses and stocking hat, giving my lobotomy look:
I graduated in 2015. Not only did we learn how to calculate drip rates and set up IVs to gravity--we were checked off on these things too. This is despite the fact that all of our clinical sites were hospitals that used IV pumps. The instructors told us we would have plenty of practice with IV pumps at clinical (they were right!).
I will never forget my second semester instructor informing us that the roller clamp on the primary line is the "remote control" of the system, haha.
I filed this knowledge away in my memory bank. Never once used it in my first nursing job on a telemetry floor. But it sure came in handy last week at my new job in a pain management clinic, where IV pumps do not exist. (We just started performing procedures that require pre-procedure antibiotics and/or NS running at KVO).
My coworker did not know how to calculate the drip rate for the antibiotic, nor did she know how to hang the IVPB to gravity and make it "drip" at the correct rate--roller clamp was wide open and we could have bolused pt with Ancef--not a good plan especially since pt had never taken this med before.
Anyway, in that moment I was immensely thankful to my second semester instructor and her words of wisdom about drip rates and roller clamps!
Aside from the apothecary system and conversions (which also has largely gone by the wayside), probably one of the biggest mine fields for nursing students in past was volume/time IV drop rates. Saw grown women break down into tears after getting back test results with an "F" that meant failure of the course (ours was a half semester "Pass or Fail"). This of course meant your nursing education came to a halt as you couldn't go into Med/Surg II without passing med dose calc.
You can do it in either one or two steps but either way it requires no more math skills than low level algebra and probably is the most difficult as things get for "nursing math".
Math education in the USA has been declining for decades and that may be the sticking post (as Carmine Lupertazzi, Jr. would say). Everything one needs to know is written in the med order, the rest is simply setting things up and plugging in the numbers. You'd think with the advent and acceptance of calculators (my COB program forbade them, but that was decades ago)
You've got an order for 1000mL to be infused over 8 hours, the IV set is 15gtts/mL. Pick your method, set it up and go.
Things get (just) slightly more complicated when dealing with continuous infusion rates where you are infusing something that comes as mg or mcg in a solution measured in cubic centimeters.
This brings up another point; recall reading several years ago that the federal government (IIRC) did a study regarding nurses and the preparation of reconstituted meds. Several hospitals were included in the study and a large number if not majority of nurses made substantial if not serious errors in their calculations. Upshot was the recommendation that such meds be prepared by the pharmacy... Now that is just sad.
It took the work of Florence Nightingale and others to get nurses preparing the medications they would administer. Indeed the old school model taught that a professional nurse should never administer anything she (or he) did not prepare themselves.
Unit dosage, Pyxis and the rest are wonderful inventions and so forth; but one must never lose sight of the fact responsibility for medication administered still rests mostly on the one who gives. Computers, calculators, phones and the lot are all useful tools, but they can only give answers based upon what is input; garbage in still will get you garbage out. Worse over reliance upon devices can result in nurses losing (or not even developing) the knowledge/skills that comes from being intimately familiar with nursing math.
Am sure many remember the rash of infant deaths/adverse reactions not that long ago due to med errors involving heparin.
Specializes in critical care, ER,ICU, CVSURG, CCU.
Oh yea I remember all....... The one convient time I herd the clung of narc keys, my apt. In wash DC was only across a parking lot, less than a block from GWU hosp. cCU
Not for nothing the way that student nurse is drawing syringe photo one posted above looks rather awkward. Am guessing no end of vials ended up hitting the floor. Why is she only holding the vial (more like balancing) with two fingers instead of grasping?
A few subtle things about this picture. Notice neither nurse is wearing any jewelry other than a wrist watch and their school pins (for the graduate nurse/instructor). Also while the instructor's face is devoid of slap, the student wears discrete powder and lipstick. Both have hair up and off their uniform collar and away from their face.
All this was likely spelled out in the dress code that governed both the school and hospital.
Those inside the room were "dirty" and passed things out (linen or whatever) out to the "clean" staff outside the door. Things were reversed for supplies with clean handing into dirty.
Those old fashioned cloth isolation gowns with knitted cuffs were great for keeping warm when working in those big barns of old hospitals that had not so great central heating. You usually only could get away with this on evenings or nights when the head nurse and or supervisors weren't around.
Spidey's mom, ADN, BSN, RN
11,305 Posts
I had my 2nd kid two years later in a different state and I might have been on the cusp of changes in L&D policies. No full shave or enema! And I only stayed barely 24 hours.
Such a difference . . . especially for the itchy time to regrow hair.
I'm obviously not a fan.