mustanggirl

I thought this would be a cute thread to start, bear with me this is one of my first entries and I've been on call for 24 hours. 1. You look at your patients as they enter the room and can predict if they have sleep apnea 2. You thank the lord for t...

Thank you so much for this blog. Unfortunately over the past few years I have had many experiences with being a patient. First when our daughter was born early and in the NICU (she's doing great now, thank you everyone for all her great care) and c...

My heart goes out to you guys that sounds like hell, I feel exhausted just reading your posts. I work in a non Union Magnet hospital and we have 4 CNAs during the workday into PMs to do transports and stock and help out with patients. We have two be...

We have strict protocols that there must be 2 RNs in the PACU whenever we have a patient. From my understanding this is ASPAN's written policy. Sometimes this means making anesthesia or the circulator stay with us until the other nurse gets there.

I've found that often once I get the catheter in, sometimes it helps to turn the IV fluid on wide open and float the catheter in the rest of the way with the fluid pressure once you have pulled the needle out.

The floor nurse calmly says, so "is this your only patient"after you have been put on hold for 30 minutes and held the patient already for an hour because they supposedly didn't have a bed but one miraculously opened up after shift change.:angryfire ...

I've only used Pyxis, which I did not mind too much at first, until we got the stupid fingerprint access. :angryfire It sounded great until we got it. It seems impossible to get into at times because for some reason it will not read my fingerprint w...

We have only had to hold patients overnight a few times a year and when we do administration is notified and they usually come by in the morning to see how we are doing. If it is an ICU patient we usually provide the staffing, but if it is a floor p...

Yes, as any job it has its ups and downs. It is one of the few degrees where you can find a job and have decent wages right out of school. Although radiology sounds interesting also, you could always work as an RN in radiology, although usually you...

Our CNAs do a lot of transporting and stocking. They also help settle a patient when they get to PACU, helping to put monitoring equipment on, call the floor to let them know the patient is in PACU and put orders in for labs and x-rays as instructed...

The majority of the times antiembolism stockings and venodynes (SCDs or sequential compression devices) are started preoperatively and patients are also given lovenox preoperatively (depending on their surgery). If they order them postoperatively an...

HOLEY SMOKES! God bless you floor nurses because you are so resilient. You need to pat yourself on the back for surviving that shift. These are the kinds of days I try to block out of my memory from when I worked on the floor, but heck they are th...

Viterbo College (now Viterbo University, as they now have masters programs) in LaCrosse, Wisconsin. I thought it was a wonderful school, with good preparation and lots of clinicals (we started clinicals our Sophomore year!). My best memory is probabl...

We start then in PACU, at first we thought it would be more of a pain thatn it has been. We give anesthesia ordered pain meds until the patients get comfortable or as long as we can safely give them and put the patient on the PCA as we send them to ...

Does everyone out there work at a hospital with more than one PACU for inpatients and how do you staff it? For example having a separate PACU for vascular/thoracic cases and another PACU for everything else. How do you do call in this situation. T...

LTC was a wonderful place to start out. A lot of times it is downplayed as a god place to work, but I disagree. Especially while going to nursing school, you name it you see it in long-term care so it was interesting to learn about the different di...

I had gone to an ASPAN seminar where the use of beta blockers was talked about as the latest measure that we would see it more. It has been being used for many surgery patients to prevent heart attacks during or after the operation.

We often give vistaril IM as needed, but usually we give it for severe pain along with IV narcotics. It seems to help. Usually zofran or dolasetron are given in the OR prophylactically, but if not given in OR we will give in PACU usually first with b...

thank you:)

1. does your pacu allow visitors? yes 2. if so, under what circumstances? i.e. peds cases only, special needs, ect. peds cases, pt's with special needs. we do allow family on occassion if we are holding a patient for extended period of time because w...

I worked as a CNA in a nursing schools, during summers and on some weekends, while going to nursing school. I found it tremendously helpful in nursing school, especially in pathophysiology since you see so many different people with different diagno...

Currently I work in PACU, and so far it has been my favorite place to work. As of anywhere it does have its down times where it gets really stressful, but overall the good times outweight the bad. I never realized how many new things I would learn ...

Facility:hospital, PACU

While it is true you won't be constantly lifting pts out of bed in PACU, there is a lot of lifting. You have to be able to respond to the confused pt and be able to quickly turn a patient to their side if they get nauseous. Unfortunaly this often h...

Crocs, they are sooo comfortable, it feels like I am wearing bedroom slippers all day. And I like that they are easily washed off when any body substance spills on them, which is why I like the Aspen model better.