HRoark64

Hi everyone! I applied to two PMHNP programs last fall - one private, one state, and was accepted to both. I was excited about the private school option and accepted, but I'm having second thoughts now. I didn't get as many scholarships as I hoped and I'll have to do clinicals away from where I live (which was kind of the point of the private school, or so I thought...they're partnered with a massive hospital and usually hand feed everyone preceptors.) All in, private option will be $85k plus I'll forego a year of RN income since it's full time over 1y and I'll have to travel for clinicals. So $160k-ish. State option is $22k all in and local clinicals. Great school, just not the big name to go on a resume someday. I'm leaning toward the state university option since I doubt anyone is going to pay me 7x regular NP salary for the name on my degree. Any opinions or advice? Does the grad school matter enough in this field to justify the expense? Thanks in advance!

Hey! I'm about half a year late to this post but I'm interested to hear how your job hunt turned out. I'm currently in peds CVICU and heading to peri-op 101 next month. Love the current work but the inpatient schedule doesn't work with what I have going on in life at the moment. Also love watching our bedside OR teams operate - surgeon, RNFA, circulator and a scrub show up and work miracles for us. Hope to join them someday. For what it's worth, I've seen a lot of RNFA & circulator jobs posted on Nomad lately. It seems to have overtaken the critical care & ED postings now that we're in the warm months. Let us know what you found!

Andy, Looks like some solid advice in the previous replies. I have a different approach to pitch if you're interested. Look into Vanderbilt's direct entry MSN program. PMHNP is one of the track options in it. It's essentially an accelerated ADN/MSN program. You spend your first year knocking out the RN portion + NCLEX and your second year (maybe +1 semester on top of that) completing grad work. At the end of it you'll have your MSN in hand and you're eligible to sit for state boards. I know this isn't in your area but I found a few like it in other large metro markets when I was planning my second career. Not sure how flexible you are with location and finances, but this path definitely accelerates the time portion of the equation.

Has nothing to do with Trump. Broadcast stations, especially news types, have been shills for corporate interests for several decades.

As opposed to mainstream media outlets that advertise for pharmaceutical corporations, research funded by pharmaceutical corporations, and government bureaucrats that leave their taxpayer funded jobs to go work for pharm and healthcare lobbying shops? Straight shooters, no doubt.

Okay ? look up covid particle size for me. 0.06 to 0.1 last time I checked. N95 filters down to 0.3. Surgical mask doesn’t even come close. Yes, will stop some secretions. Hope you’re wearing at least six around town. Feel free to cite reputable studies on surgical masks and 6’ distancing btw

A pt in respiratory isolation is likely there for a reason, right? Some illness, injury, condition warranting isolation, unlike the average person walking around outside. Yes, if we all isolated to a box until the end of time we could defeat Covid with a perfect score. The idea is that the fix shouldn’t cause more fallout than the problem. Let’s revisit the long term effects of economic displacement, missed screenings, overdoses, and suicides in a year or so and see if isolation and shutting the country down was a good move. Masks work great for keeping secretions out of open surgical wounds and blood splatter/tissue/bone from ending up in the team’s nose or mouth. I don’t walk around with open wounds that welcome foreign invaders, nor do I regularly cut/saw/pry people open...and I think everyone outside of the OR is pretty similar. Soooo masks in the surgical suite are a good idea. 99.9______% of society doesn’t hang out there.

Without a doubt the lamest comment I've gotten on here. My kids exercise, eat well, get plenty of sun. They both had covid last year before vaccines were available...so did I. We all recovered just fine! I got my flying vehicle, fuel for it, pay, and benefits from the government, courtesy of taxpayers. Hindsight being 20/20, I now realize that invading Iraq was a reaction to Saddam attempting to sell his oil for Euros instead of US dollars. If you don't understand that, look up 'Kissinger petrodollar deal' and get back to me. Then there's Afghanistan - home of the most abundant poppy fields in the world. The Taliban (also a creation of our benevolent state during the Soviet occupation) banned poppy growth because they didn't want their country's main source of income to come from the base product of opioids. Enter: benevolent US govt in 2001 to fight the Taliban for 'harboring Osama.' Also a rue. What do we have now? Opioid epidemic in America and pharma flush with cash flow because their inputs were so cheap while I chased brown guys into caves so the farmers could do their thing. So no WMD's like our government said and the Taliban (AKA full time residents of Afghanistan) for all their flaws had nothing to do with 9/11 and everything to do with restricting the growth of a sought after commodity. The siren song of a scam is a pitch that can't be disproven. Did all the measures taken after 9/11 make us safer? No terrorist attacks = the measures worked...but continued attacks = we need more measures. Did the war on poverty work? Less poverty = it worked....more poverty = we need to intervene on a larger scale. Did the war on drugs work? Less drugs = it worked...more drugs = we need to intervene more. Get it yet? So when we get a 'third wave' which will be nothing more than modifying the test threshold again, the obvious move will be 'we need more ____.' This is the circular logic of totalitarian states. How about this - if lockdowns worked, why would we do them again? If they didn't work, why would we do them again? If masks worked, why are we still wearing them? If they didn't work, why are we still wearing them? Ah, and the dumba** tax comment. Even when I don't pay any, I still do...as do you. It's called money printing by the Federal Reserve that inflates the currency supply and deflates the buying power of your wages. They started in 2000 during the .com crash, again in 2008 for the housing crash, all in an effort to restore balance to markets. What's happened since then? Greater and greater wealth disparity - ref. the war on poverty they were supposed to win for you. The fix? Printing even more money!! Your benevolent govt hard at work for you with circular, irrefutable logic.

Don’t bother. Anything not cr**ped down their throats by a media conglomerate won’t count as science. Rumble, ***ute, Odysee, or any other decentralized platform definitely won’t cut the mustard.

As opposed to the concerning lack of long term safety in covid vaccines?

There it is...'the science.' Link it, please. And nothing funded by a pharmaceutical company. Generally unwise to let foxes guard the chicken coop.

It might, it might not. The one thing about them that's guaranteed to work is continued pharmaceutical corporation welfare on the backs of taxpayers for a virus that won't kill 99.7% of the population. Good nutrition, exercise, regular sunlight, vitamin supplementation when there's a shortfall...all easy exit ramps. The pandemic in this country is that the majority now believes in the benevolence of the state and waits on its marching orders.

Wrong on many counts...way to continue the red/blue dialectic that keeps any meaningful debate from happening. I haven't heard from a single conservative representative or senator lately telling me not to get the vaccine. Most of what I've heard is a lot of pushback against lockdown and mask policies that make zero sense and can't even pass anecdotal/common sense tests, let alone an actual study. BTW - don't take that to mean I'm on that side of the aisle. I spent six years in OIF/OEF observing America from the outside and seeing how the political systems we install to control other populations were perfected in our country first. Break up with two party tyranny as soon as you can. Tell me something...why do the states with the most draconian measures have the same or worse infection & mortality rates as the states without them? How about the countries that didn't enact such measures? Why hasn't the entire homeless population died from this yet?? They don't wear masks, social distance, or even bathe regularly. Weird. Not a forum for gun blathering either. A person who shoots someone without provocation/justification is called a 'criminal.' Gun legislation only keeps law abiding citizens from buying/possessing guns - criminals don't typically care about laws...hence their criminal nature. I expect nothing less of Democrats though, being the party of the Klan, to keep the gun control push alive and well since its original aim was to remove firearms from black communities in the civil rights era.

Post the fact checking plz. And the source of funding for said fact checkers. I love hearing the left’s mantra of ‘trust the science’ which is usually followed by ‘the science is settled’ which is the antithesis of science.

Last I checked the only pseudoscience being cherry picked was by the MSM. Imagine a virus so deadly that you have to be tested to know if you’re carrying it. Then telling people to stay indoors...because everyone lives in a HEPA filtered, negative pressure house, right? Ah, and masks. Where are all the biohazard receptacles to properly dispose of such infectious material? Then as soon as a new administration is in, the WHO admits that PCR testing with >30x amplification is useless and drops it to the low 20’s range and POOF...the vaccines are working!! Just remember the same people pushing solutions and the same media selling them to you also said Iraq had WMD’s and Afghans in caves wanted to kill you for how good you have it in America. Why would they lie??

Great content! Thank you for sharing.

None of them are infectious viruses like covid. They are all causes of a massive number of deaths annually and have been for some time. I'm tired of 'loss of life' being dragged into the vax conversation since we haven't been concerned with it thus far. My question was about thoughts of the risk/reward of a vaccine for which we lack long-term data - especially if it becomes a condition of employment or requirement for travel. I also listed several abject failures of our federal government's efforts to do right by us. Also worth considering is that the PCR test amplification was reduced to <30 cycles right around the time the vaccine was rolled out versus the 35+ it was when testing began. I'm not implying the numbers were inflated - I'm pointing out that if we modify an important variable at the same time as the vaccine is rolled out, it may make it difficult to discern whether reduced infections are coming from increased vaccinations or the new testing method.

https://www.CDC.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Comorbidities Half a million deaths annually from smoking - no mandated vaccine or prophylactic treatment 100k from alcohol https://www.CDC.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm 841k from overdoses since 1999 - all this requires is removing something from society, not creating a new treatment With all that out there, all the virtue signalers who suddenly care about the loss of human life go ahead and sit on your hands instead of typing snarky replies. Obese/hypertensive/generally unhealthy people don't deserve to die any more than someone who stockpiles gas cans and cardboard in their home deserves to see it go up in flames. They also aren't absolved of creating the conditions conducive to a single spark (or ailment) wiping everything out. PTSD - sssshhhhh. Some healthcare workers definitely have it now. I have it from six trips to the sandbox from my first career. Kids growing up in Chicago have it from daily gang violence. Lots of people have their trials and tribulations. Nobody's exempt from terrible experiences and the effects that follow. Just like we have more data on covid now than we did a year ago, a year from the first vaccines we will also have more data on the outcomes. Let's not break into camps just yet and instead stay ready to change our minds when new facts are available. Remember that we all have to live together...vaccinated or not.

Wow...lots of they and us speak. How do you assess patients with your head that far up your butt? Impressive. I find it interesting that the left - the primary anti-vax and pro-choice crowd - is now full force behind a vaccine and doesn't seem to acknowledge the right of anyone to refuse it. Serious mental gymnastics. Before you throw out the right wing extremist, know that I'm neither. If voting worked it would've been outlawed by now. Your willingness to marginalize the thoughts, opinions, and questions of others will be the downfall of our society.

Really interesting thread and pretty salient given the vaccine rollout at the hospitals I tech at while in school and vax/no vax conversations in class. I'm interested in everyone/anyone's thoughts on the risk/reward of the treatment. The latest article I can find says we've had about 30 million confirmed cases, so roughly 9% of the population caught it. 550k or so deaths comes out to a 1.8% mortality rate of the positive cases and 0.17% for the entire population. These numbers may change at some point given that the WHO recently said the excessively high PCR cycles used at first caused positive tests that may not have met a viral threshold. Does the entire population need a treatment when we only had about a 10% infection rate which may have been overstated by inaccurate testing in the first place? How about if/when the mortality rate is adjusted to reflect comorbidities that played a greater role in death than covid? Of course, the mortality rate could always end up being higher if the false positives due to inaccurate PCR testing are taken out of the total infection number. If anyone has updated info, please share. I'm not trying to understate the importance of public health or the utility of the first run with mRNA therapy that may be the foundation of very useful treatments in the future. It just doesn't seem like a lot of bang for the buck considering the lack of long term testing that's been done, the $ that's gone into it, and the risk in the first place. Lastly let's consider other massive efforts from the federal government: War on terror, war on drugs, war on poverty, bailout of banks instead of homeowners in 2008, 500% higher healthcare insurance premiums since the ACA passed, trans fat push in the 70's, criminal justice reform in the 90's, AMTRAK... And the incentives involved: https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/summary.php?ind=H04&amp;cycle=2020&amp;recipdetail=A&amp;sortorder=U WHO stuff - https://www.who.int/news/item/20-01-2021-who-information-notice-for-ivd-users-2020-05 Where I got my numbers - https://247wallst.com/healthcare-economy/2021/03/18/new-mexico-leads-america-in-covid-19-vaccinations/

Hey everyone. I'm starting an ABSN in Spring 2020. My prerequisites are about a year old so I'm starting to review them. What level of detail should I be aiming for in anatomy & physiology review? Big groups, main pieces, general functions...or down to every nook & cranny, level of interdependence, etc.? I'm fine with either, just don't want to waste time being able to point out every detail of every surface & structure or system if it isn't immediately useful in school. Thanks!

Hey there! Not a mom...but I can tell you from watching my wife shift from stay at home mom to full time student and part time employee that everyone adjusted just fine. Your nurturing ways probably set a high bar for everyone, but the truth is that they'll all head off on their own paths at some point and you'll be left with yours. Remember that eating, sleeping, and shelter are biological drives and staying clean/somewhat clothed is a strong societal norm...they'll adapt and figure it out. Can't speak much to your finances & marriage, but I don't think you would have undertaken this if you didn't think you'd come out of it in better shape all around. Let them grow and give them the chance to support you. Are you jumping in a BSN program mid-way or doing an ABSN? I start school in January...interested to hear about your experience. Good luck & please update.

I also set my sights on nursing for my second act after the Army. Every program I looked at required A&P 1 and 2, microbiology, psych, development psych, and statistics within the last five years. I would've jumped on a school that would include all of those in a couple semesters prior to the nursing curriculum, but that doesn't seem very accelerated...nearly another full B.S. I found a community college that offered them and paid cash to conserve my education benefits. I think they could be completed in a semester but that isn't feasible since A&P 1 is the prereq for 2, A&P 2 or biology is the prereq for microbiology, same with the psych classes. Let me know if you're near TN or interested in relocating. A lot of great, affordable options down here and jobs galore.