NICUMurse87

What about newborn nursery or PICU? Or even L&D? Nothing quite matches the NICU, but maybe transfers to one of those units can be a stopgap until you can get to where you really want to be.

I was a mental health tech in school, but I worked with the adolescents on a not infrequent basis, and tend to agree with hppy. When things are going good, it's great. But there are too many times when we'd have a breakthrough with a kid, just to have their parent come to visitation and reverse everything we'd spent the week working on in a half hour. If you really want to get a sense of how utterly terrible a human can be, listen to the stories some of these kids have about their parents. You need a very strong resolve to continually work in that environment, stronger than I had, for sure.

Personally, 3+ years as a mental health tech made me swear that I never wanted to be a psych nurse. Not that some of the patients aren't great, because they are. And not that some of my coworkers didn't become lifelong friends, because they did. But when everything goes wrong, it goes so wrong that you seriously consider giving it up and going back to retail. And anyone who's worked retail can attest to the fact that psych patients are often better behaved than customers.

We can put ourselves on-call and get paid a pittance to do so, but it has to be for an entire 12-hour shift and I have yet to see anyone not get immediately called in when they are on-call. I'm in a NICU however, and not L&D.

Your best bet is to get into a residency program, if you can find one. I spent almost 4 years as a mental health tech and was able to go right into a NICU residency after graduation. Those two specialties are about as far apart from one another as you can get, but the residency was basically NICU Nursing school, with tests and clinicals and whatnot, so I never felt like I was further behind than anyone else in the program.

I'll be honest, I haven't read the pages of posts, so I'm sorry if this has been said, but I doubt 99.9% of your patients would care what you look like, just that you do a good job. In the chance that it's you, yourself who can't get over your looks, then go into the NICU or newborn nursery, I assure you, the little babies don't care one lick what you look like. Also, I'm not sure what you consider an average hospital or clinic, but every hospital I've worked in has a huge range of people working there, from drop dead gorgeous to... shall we say not traditionally attractive, and everything in between. But that has never been a focal point of patient or coworkers (unless someone is looking to hook up, but... ew).

Wait, no clogs or sneakers? I would have had to go barefoot through school if that had been the case.

I think yall are blowing this out of proportion. HIPPA covers confidential information. Saying, "had a bad shift, could use some cheering up", while technically negative, will get nobody in trouble. Just don't be outrageous with what you post, no need to go completely dark.

We use the beanbag type developmental aids for boundaries, but we generally only put the babies on Z-flow or gel pillows, if anything.

I don't want to know how bad her home life must suck to make staying at work for 18 hours straight preferable to being at home, no matter how good the overtime is.

They notice that we are busy because they can see us be busy in a ward type setting. When all they can see is their room and you coming in every hour, they just assume that we sit on our butts for the other 55 minutes, because they can't see otherwise.

As a guy, I will admit we can be thick sometimes and not take a hint. If you'd rather have nothing to do with him, I'd say just that, "I'd rather not interact with you, I'm in a committed relationship and don't need more friends." It's not your job to make a guy feel better about himself, and if he gets aggressive or won't stop, then it's become harassment and I would get the school involved. But hopefully, he's just a normal, dumb guy who doesn't get subtlety and will leave you alone when you spell it out for him.

If I would have gone into nursing at 18 instead of wasting 4 years on psychology, I'd be a senior nurse practically, instead of a newbie. I wish I had followed that same advice.

I got a BA in Psychology from UTA a few years ago and finished with a 2.9 GPA, but I retook the science classes I bombed and was accepted into the AOBSN program outright (no wait listing). If you aren't accepted, consider signing on with a partner hospital as a CNA or PCT, it adds another "point" or whatever to your application. Tl;dr: Being a UTA alum and working with a partner hospital got me in the door, even with a pretty poor GPA.

A lot of people seem to be forgetting that this is PSYCH nursing, which is a whole different beast from Med/Surg nursing with different morays and a different way of doing things. Quotations are often vital in psych nursing because it needs to be known EXACTLY what was said when making a diagnosis or a plan of care. Unlike medical patients where they don't even need to be conscious oftentimes to make a diagnosis, there are many times where the only way to discover anything about a psych patient is by their words and actions, which need to be explicitly conveyed to other care providers. That's not to say that OP couldn't have stated it a different way, just that I can fully understand why they didn't.