L.O.E.N.

Yup... i learned the hard way that you never accept a cup full of meds on someone elses word and then give them to an unlabled nursing home patient. I gave a whole cup of blood pressure meds, ativan, and MS Contin to a little old lady who looked just like her roommate during a clinical in school.... they literally could have been sisters. Same clothes colors and everything. This was a bad one, I got put on a medication suspension in my last semester for my RN. It was infuriating, and dreadful at the same time. That little lady was nearly down to the point they might've had to inject her with a bit of ephedrine to bring her BP back up. She woke up the next day and told the staff that was the best she'd slept since she'd got there. Never give a drug you didn't pull from the pack/bottle/syringe and always check your MAR's thrice... :uhoh21:

If you're fairly confident in your fundamentals, you could look into home care. Home care agencies generally work 8-5 with the option to work nights if you want, or you can just be paid per visit and take as many patients as you feel comfortable with to fill up your day. Most visits at the home care places I've done clinicals at were about an hour... some a bit longer, some a bit less. If you did 5-6 patients on your schedual, that'd probably be a decent paycheck without having to bite the hospital schedual bullet.

Bah! That's what they said about ephedra.....

:yeahthat: Haha, I did that several times in bootcamp! The DI's generally liked to wake me back up with painful amounts of pushups and 8 count bodybuilders. I was ripped by the end of camp...:lol_hitti As for the sleep issue. Someone earlier said sleep is an easy habit to break. Once you've been forced or forced yourself into a particular routine, your body tends to adapt. A few of the things that helped me a LOT are: 1. Regular schedual! Bed same time, wake same time... after a few months your biological clock resets to this schedual. 2. Melatonin! I can't say enough about how well melatonin aides in falling asleep, staying asleep, getting DEEP REM sleep, and reseting your biological clock. The stuff is a miracle... 3.DETOX and proper diet!!! Feeling sluggish? Don't eat for for a couple meals or a day or two if you can, and drink LOTS (a gallon or more a day) of water. I also recommend adding a good multivitamin, 1-2g of Vit C tid, 250mg milk thistle tid, 400-800mg Vit E qd, and 400mg Lecithin tid to your fast and with your regular diet. Keep the fried stuff to an absolute minimum, eat more raw fruits/veggies, DON'T EAT RIGHT BEFORE BED. You undoubtedly know what your diet SHOULD look like, doing it is the trick. 4. Excercise!!!! First thing in the morning if at all possible! It the best time to burn off fat, flush the system, and wake up the rest of you. It doesn't need to be anything spectacular, walking for 20 minutes counts. You know the drill, again doing it is the trick. Good luck!:wakeneo:

Gotta get my CRNA. I will not be satisfied until I do... I like the ER/ICU stuff alot too, but I have 2 anesthesiologists helping me through the in and outs of the medical profession so I kinda take after them. Never know, I might wind up in med-school for anesthesia if I can't stay out of college.

I just treat needles like a loaded gun. Don't point it unless you intend to use it... and then safety it when you're done. I've never had a dirty needle stick, but I have stabbed myself accidently with insulin syringes when mixing a couple times. You just have to make sure to pay full attention and not let people distract you when you're using a needle. ....and lets all sing the "poo and wee" song! Who doesn't love poo and wee?! :lol_hitti It's not THAT bad, i mean, c'mon, you have to smell your own, why not share the love? it's just like a public bathroom in Walmart.... just bring a can of Vicks vaporub and stick a bit under your nose, then breathe through your mouth. It's an unavoidable part of practically ALL medicine (except radiography, maybe... like said earlier), docs included.... I'm aiming for anesthesia, which is relatively clean, but even there you get barf, mucus, and blood... if that makes you sqeemish, either get used to it real quick or seriously reconsider spending tens of thousands of dollars on school to join a profession FULL of grody bodily expulsions. :)

:lol_hitti

I'm 28 now and am still one of the youngest people in my class.... I can definently relate to the difference in "culture", if you will, between us younger guys and the majority of older female nurses. There even seems to be more 40+ male nurses present than 20 to 30 y.o. around where I'm at. Sometimes the way I communicate things to other nurses isn't the way they're used to... I think sometimes we younger guys just relate amongst ourselves in a very different way than the "professional" or the female way of communicating and it comes across as.... i dunno, rude maybe, for lack of any other way of putting it. I can't go in as one of the guys at work like I did when I was military or construction working... it kinda bites, but it's necessary... I do understand where you're coming from though. But it's easier to just let it ride and be friendly IMO.... friends are cool and definently make this profession easier... ... chameleon skillz, bro, chameleon skillz. :monkeydance:

yea, but 28.51 isn't going very far in SanFran.... considering that a 3 bedroom 1.5 or 2 bath house in a semi-decent neighborhood can easily run $300,000+. I'd venture a guess that corrections nurses and contract nurses willing to work strikes are pulling in the most as far as LPN pay is concerned. Why do they get the $$$? Because not many people want to work those jobs. If working around convicted murderers/rapists/sex offenders/etc. doesn't bother you, that's where I'd look... working strikes has to be a drag. Plus, it's kinda shafting the nurses, especially if they have a ligitimate reason for being P.O.'ed at that facility.

Since I have no frame of reference other than nursing in the US, I couldn't really say if it's better or worse than anywhere else. Although, I do have a friend who decided to move to Vancouver after getting his nursing degree and he says he likes the Canadian health care system more than the US's... Basic ward setting probably = Med/Surg in a hospital I would guess. You're probably looking at 7-10 patients with various ailments and that are stable enough to not need hourly monitoring. That's where most new grads are most comfortable. The pace won't cause you to have an aneurism and you usually aren't dealing with crashing patients (not always, but usually). The pay is decent and some of the women I'm in school with really like it. You do get to see a very wide range of patients and problems. Just not my bag... I like the higher acuity patients and smaller patient loads. Medicine for the elderly = Nursing home, i'd figure. Personally, I wouldn't ever work a nursing home, regardless of the pay (kinda depressing for me). Patient loads of 25-30 patients in various degrees of decline are common around here. You spend more time handing out drugs than anything else. I felt like a pharmacist, not a nurse, when I had/have clinicals there. The risk of making a med error is higher, IMO, just because of the sheer volume of drugs you're shoveling out every hour. Some people I've worked with love doing long term care/hospice work... and the pay is usually a bit higher, $1-$2 an hour more than the hospital here. It takes a different kind of nurse to really love long term care. They usually have more patience than I do. If I had to recommend one over the other, I'd say try a Med/Surg job first and talk to the nurses who work there. You'll find a lot of them have worked in the nursing homes for short stents... Now I actually have a question for you. How do you feel about European health care? I've been tossing around the idea of possibly trying to get a job in Holland, Spain, or the U.K. just to see if I like the EU more than here.... I know I agree with the EU politics generally more than the US's...

There's some tasks that are routine that you don't need approval for, but due to liability issues most things must have a doctors order. They usually will give standing orders for things that are expected to come up in a patients care. Emergency stuff is usually verbal orders. ...and as expected, there's always paperwork to go along with all the days' shinanigans. Most of it is point-and-click stuff on a facility computer, but not all of it. Transcribing orders and doing nurses notes always fills a good chunk of time. Texas eh? Well I did all my clinical work in Lubbock and El Paso... if you'd like to try the border life, El Paso is an interesting place for sure. Pleanty of GSW and stabbings, car wrecks and general meyhem when I was there, with the occasional mental freak out/involuntary commitment. They've got a nice surgical center too. University hospital in Lubbock is also excellent, as is Covenant. Both of them are very close to Texas Tech, but University gets all the really cool gizmos and they have the more intense/technical trauma cases. It depends on what you wanna see i suppose... Eastern Texas this time of year is miserable in my opinion. Extremely hot and humid... like being in a steamroom until the sun goes down. Everyone tries their hardest to stay inside with the AC on full blast. Although it may be hot, Corpus Christi is always nice...

I worked as an LPN last year. i enjoyed it. The only thing I heard about it was the "glass ceiling" effect LPN's get. I didn't see many working the higher intensity/technical jobs, if any... if that's your deal, work PRN and get your RN the next year. It goes by pretty quick. :)

....and then they find out you're making twice as much as they are. I'm so glad I'm not in construction anymore.

I like NICU....that's it. 80% of my OB clinicals I was housekeeping basically. I just figured that I know I'm not working OB/GYN stuff after school, so I just did it, kicked butt on the tests, and got it over with. ....but NICU was fun... had an SVT baby that had an order for adenosine that i wound up having to give. Talk about freak-you-out... you give it and hold your breath hoping the kids' heart would start back up. If that doesn't scare the crap out of ya, nothing will. The mother was right outside the window too.... i was sweating.

I've always wanted to screen out a t-shirt that said "Would you like and I.V. with that?" on the front and "thank you, drive thru" -ER Nurse, on the back. One of these days, I'll do it. :)