danh3190

What was your previous career? Industrial Chemist What is your current position? Bedside RN in cardiac unit of large hospital How has your overall experience been as a nurse? Much more worthwhile than chemistry but much more physically demanding Do you have any regrets? I miss the chemist salary and benefits.

I've gained weight because I'm too tired to exercise after work and most of my meals are junk food out of machine. I don't do much with my life because all I can do on my day off is sleep. My house is a mess because all I can do on my day off is sleep. I find it harder to get hours at my part-time job because of the variable nursing schedule. On the plus side I know that I'm doing something worthwhile with my life. I enjoy being with most of my patients. When I leave work I don't have to take it home with me like in my old job. My experience as a nurse makes me a better paramedic. I get to go to work in scrubs that are as comfortable as pajamas. Haven't bought any clothes other than T shirts and Jeans in years.

I applied to most of the ERs in the area and several ICUs when I graduated at 55 y/o 4 years ago. I had a number of interviews but couldn't get hired. I have tons of prehospital experience but no luck. I may just be a lousy interviewee or it could be that they don't like paramedics. One doctor I mentioned all this to said that the ERs want young dynamic people.

I never had any problems when I did my OB clinical. Unfortunately we had a pretty good size clincal group so only got to be at one vag birth and one C-section. The family was very nice for both of them.

What is a Dedicated Education Unit?

I think the alphabet soup is kind of funny on the floor although I think it certainly makes sense behind the name of an author or speaker on an article or program. I don't think the person being taken off the bedpan cares whether you have an MSN or your various certifications.

Yeah, I've had days when I discharged all 5 of my patients and got 5 new ones too, but that's not common. Today I discharged 1 and admitted none. Usually somewhere in between. We're cardiology with a lot of general med-surg patients too.

As you get to know the physicians personally a lot of the intimidation will disappear, at least it did for me. The intelligent ones realize that we make their job a lot easier and are happy to hear from us and cut us some slack when we say something stupid. Granted there are few jerks out there who will always give you a hard time and you just have to grit your teeth and call them when necessary but they're a small minority, at least on my floor. I like talking to them when they round. They can give me a quick summary in a few sentences that it would take me 1/2 hour to glean out of reading progress notes.

I think the OP raises some valid points. If distractions and noise are a problem for you, you definitely shouldn't work on my floor. I was just wondering though whether the people with these problems might not be able to find some niche in the nursing world where they could function effectively.

I certainly don't have much experience in nursing (3 years) and none in management, but I've been noticing that a lot of what stresses me out is stuff that we don't need nurses for, toileting etc. I was wondering what would happen if we hired a lot more good techs and decreased the numbers of nurses on the floor.

Paramedics in PA have been able to do IOs for some years now. Maybe about 5 years ago we got IO drills that allow us to put them in adults. Before that we had to put them in by hand and that pretty much limited us to kids with their softer bones. I've only done one IO, on an adult trauma patient. Very easy to do though it took a little psychological effort to get me to drill into someone's bone. In our protocol we administer some lidocaine first if the person in conscious because as I understand it, although the insertion of the IO isn't very painful, infusion through the IO is supposed to be very painful. As I said, my patient was unconscious so no first hand experience with that.

I do usually worry about making a mistake (or more precisely about missing some problem a patient is having). I also worry about whether my managers are happy with me and losing my job (being laid off once will tend to cause that type of worry). For some odd reason I've never worried about losing my license, probably because it's so rare. I think it's about people's individual psychology. A lot of people never seem to worry about anything even though they probably should be. Others like me are always worried about something even though everything's usually fine.

Me too!

I crush the meds separately. And I prioritize them, e.g. cardiac and BP meds before vitamins, and give them in that order. If a couple of the meds are very small so they can be given in one bite, I mix them. Sometimes the patient stops taking meds part way through and at least the most important meds get in. On my floor we usually don't have to crush anyone's meds and if so usually only one patient. I like the idea of using pudding. I may try that next time.

EMS in our service area used to have a protocol that allowed us to not always collar and board patients in the field, but then they made protocols uniform statewide and we lost the protocol. I wish there was a way to not board unnecessarily in the field because of the problems that can occur with boards, the least of which is discomfort. (Lots of dyspnea and you haven't lived until your boarded patient starts vomitting.)

I work one or two part-time casual shifts each week on my local ambulance to keep my paramedic skills up. Entirely different from being a nurse even if some of the particular skills are the same.

I've been "fired" twice. Once the family was entirely unreasonable so it doesn't bother me at all. The second time I was fired after I'd gone into my patient's room the first time. Family or pt told the UD that they'd had me a previous admission and didn't want me again. No idea why. That kind of bothers me since I try to do my best for the patients and wonder what I did to bother this one. It also bothers me since I'm concerned it'll come up to bite me at a performance review and there's no way I can discuss it intelligently since I don't know what happened.

A couple aides, preferably bigger people, to trade off doing compressions. Somebody to bag the patient. Somebody to initiate an IV and give Meds. Somebody to watch the monitor and do the electricity. Somebody to run the code (the MD or nurse practitioner). The person running the code would be a good recorder. Enough people is essential, too many people is bad. Extra people can stand down the hall and be available if requested but need to stay out of the way. I never understand why people insist on cramming into a code room when there isn't anything for them to do. Maybe after 30 years of EMS, I just don't enjoy the adrenaline rush anymore.

NurseLoveJoy pretty much sums it up for me too.

We have lots of filter needles on our floor. Not too many glass vials though.

I'd probably think that you were weird and scary for wanting to take pics with diseased organs, but I don't think I'd be upset as long as I wasn't identifiable. Now if you were selling the pics (e.g. an MD taking pics and selling to textbooks or using them in journals) and I wasn't cut in on the profits I'd be upset.

We're only downsized by hours. e.g., we don't need you now, call back in 4 hours. So can't do anything with your day except roll over in bed and go back to sleep.

Write up a disrespectful coworker. They'd have to be pretty disrespectful, like peeing on my shoes, before I did that. I did have a problem with an aide a while back and did not write her up. She's usually good so something must have been going on with her that day. I think the other aides may have pulled her aside and talked to her because she's been good ever since and the other aides were doing their best to be nice to me. Unless a coworker is dangerous, I'll cut them slack in the hope that they do the same for me when I need it.

I usually hang it cold as we store it in the refrigerator till needed. Never heard that there was a problem and never had a problem. Our infusion rate is usually 100 mL/hr which is less than 2 mL/min. Since it is traveling up the arm to the vena cava I'd be willing to bet that the med is body temperature by the time it hits the heart, much less the brain. By the end of the 2 hour infusion the med itself is probably near room temp.

Sounds like you hate your working conditions so losing your job wouldn't be that bad a thing. Only thing is to find a way that you can resign rather than be fired. Also make sure that any references they write are neutral, e.g. time of employment, resigned.