cmyersRN

Re: Patients and their crazy requestsI have to be honest here don't shoot me...but I have PIH and was 7 months pregnant and there wouldn't be a parking spot for blocks except for the numerous handicapped spots near my classes.... So I did contemplate asking my OB/GYN for a handicap tag for that!! I didn't do it and decided the walking would be beneficial to making my labor that much smoother...but man sometimes I wondered if I would make it carrying my books, my weight, and the baby too!! That's not so crazy though. When I was eight months pregnant (and the size of a whale) I would almost die with relief if I went to a grocery store or mall that had one of those Expecting/New Mother parking spots near the front. It's one thing to be pregnant and carrying 25 extra lbs of baby weight while tromping through a parking lot, but quite another to be a healthy 20-something male with not an oz of fat on him. :wink2:

My craziest request in the last few months came from the mother of a 23yo male who had been admitted to our floor following a lap appy. She was one of those OCD mothers who demanded a private room for him and then proceeded to live there until his discharge and was constantly on his call light demanding anything and everything. He stayed for four days!! She felt he wasn't strong enough to go home yet. The day of discharge she asked his surgeon if he would arrange for her son to get a handicap sticker/tag for his car so he wouldn't have to walk so far to class at his college. PLEASE!!! A lap appy does not make you disabled!! His MD was very polite her when telling her no, but then came into the nurses' station to beat his head against the wall.

At my hospital we utilize color-coded hospital bracelets for a few different things. Standard patient bracelet is blue and the allergy bracelet is red. If they are DNR they get a purple bracelet that has DNR printed on it. If they are a high fall risk they have a yellow bracelet with FALL RISK printed on it and they also wear green hospital gowns as opposed to our regular hospital gowns so they are easily identifiable to staff. Our facility has made a big push to lessen the risk of lymphadema due to standard hospital procedures, so for example a woman who has had mastectomy with a node removed will have a pink bracelet that has LIMB ALERT printed on it to signify that no injections, IVs, blood pressures, etc can be performed on that arm.

In the LTC facility that I work at, if we have call-ins and no replacement can be found and the DON has to cover anything, she usually covers charge nurse so that nurse can go cover one of the wings. This is rare, but I've seen her do it before. Fortunately, we have RNs who work primarily as resident care coordinators (they do admissions/discharges/care planning, etc) and if someone calls in, they get pulled to the floor first. However, we have had situations where nurses have been mandated and then the DON covers charge nurse duties because there is no one else to do it.

I work as an LPN in a 100 bed facility. We have four wings with 25 residents to a wing. For Day and PM shift there will be four wing nurses and a charge nurse and usually (hopefully) three aides to each wing, if no one has called out. On nights, there is two nurses, and one has to be an RN (charge has to be an RN) and three aides per two halls. However, we don't have med aides, so each wing nurse is responsible for the med passes, admissions to that wing, wound treatments or temporary problems, charting, etc, etc. There's not enough hours in a shift and right now our DON is making us leave right at the end of shift because we had too much overtime last quarter, so lately, a lot of weekly charting hasn't been getting done on time. It's been a mess. But our staffing issues seem puny compared to yours.

Hmmmm......Evelyn, Eleanor, Helen......and Marion seems to be really common right now.....we have several Dorothys too, but two go by Dottie. Richard and Kenneth are our most common male names.........the most original, never seen before name we have right now is Captolia.

I'm currently an LPN in a LTC facility. Right now, anything that is not a narcotic is sent back to the pharmacy if it needs to be wasted (resident deceased, discharge or med discontinued or changed, etc) and we flush the narcotics. Two nurses have to sign off on a form that the narcotic is being wasted and both have to present when it's flushed, etc. However, our county passed legislation this year on narcotic and prescription drug wasting and started a new program to discourage this practice of flushing meds. Soon, we will be storing wasted narcs in a special container that is locked in a cabinet in the DON's office, to which only the DON has a key. Once a month, the container will be taken to the county waste management facility, where the pills, liquids, creams, etc, are dissolved into 55 gallon barrels of solvent. Then these barrels will be taken to a special hazardous incinerator in St. Louis to be disposed of properly. This program is available to the public as well as health care facilities; so people who do not want to flush or throw away old or expired meds can bring them on specific days to the waste management facility. The staff that will be overseeing this process are specially trained and are actually deputized by the county for this purpose. I think it's going to be a great boon for this issue, especially considering how close my community is to the Mississippi and other rivers. I'm really proud we've taken this step.

I'm an LPN at a LTC facility. In the medex Warfarin is on a separate page just as Accuchecks and insulins are on their own page separate from the rest of the medications. The next INR draw date is on the warfarin page with the med order. On PM shift, wing nurses do NOT give warfarin until our charge nurse double-checks each and every warfarin order against the resident's last PT/INR results. The charge has a binder specifically for residents on warfarin with copies of their orders and lab results. After verifying the orders, the charge will come down the halls with the lists of residents who get warfarin, how many mg, whether it's held, etc. Then we can give the med. This is usually the first thing the charge does after getting report when coming on shift. Maybe something like this would be helpful.:wink2:

Hahaha.....this reminds me of a CNA that works at the LTC facility I work at. I was doing med pass and my cart was just outside the tubroom in the hallway where one of the CNAs was putting a resident on the toilet with the stand lift. After she got her on the toilet, the CNA says, "Okay, time for you to pee-pee and poo-poo!" There was silence for about 10 seconds and then the little old lady responded, "Do I look like I'm in kindergarten?!" It was so funny. And it taught that aide a lesson, she doesn't baby-talk the residents like she used to. WIRN2B

Thought of a couple more......:typing ...when you realize that you are compulsively staring at everyone's arms and hands and mentally deciding if they have "good" veins. ...when your four-year-old starts repeating back the characteristics of various ECG rhythms WITH you because you've listened to that cardiac lecture so many times in car on the way to daycare. (True story) WIRN2B

...when you are at the doctor's office getting swabbed for influenza (I work in LTC) and you're asking for procedure tips as the nurse is sticking the "probe" down the back of your nose. ...you can't sleep the night before your "poke a peer" day in skills because of excitement, not fear. ...when recovering from above stated influenza and a fellow nursing student asks how you are doing; you state "Oh....better, but I think I'm still suffering from some impaired gas exchange." ...you and your fellow nursing students get asked to cease and desist at a Pizza Hut because you're grossing out the fellow diners who are overhearing your loud and animated conversation about various bodily fluids. WIRN2B

Hi, I'm in an ADN program and will graduate with my RN in December. I just got my LPN license this month and moved into a LPN role in the nursing home I was working at as a CNA. I get paid $15.50/hr with a $1.15 PM/weekend differential. This seems to be pretty good for a new LPN in midwestern Wisconsin. I would make more, however, if I were working for one the county facilities, but I enjoy the facility that I work at.:wink2: WIRN2B

I am too, under the impression that the Wisconsin technical college system has a "state-wide" curriculum, so most requirements for entry should be the same. I double-checked the website of my school (Western Technical College, La Crosse, WI) and it states that LPN and RN students are required to have successful completion of a Department of Health and Family Services approved Nursing Assistant course. That said, in my situation, I completed my CNA course in May 2006 and entered into core classes and clinicals for the ADN in Fall 2006 without having taken the state certification. I did however, decide to get a part-time job as a CNA later on and took the state certification in April 2007. But not being certified did not affect my enrollment into the nursing classes. I hope that clears any confusion up.

Let's see, I have one year left of my ADN program and I've averaged around $1300-1400 in tuition per semester depending on how many credits the class is for (some of our nursing theory classes are 2 credits and Microbiology or any Anatomy/Physiology classes are 4 credits). But then I spend usually between $250-400 in books per semester as well. So total comes to somewhere between $1500 and $1800. I go to a technical college in southwest Wisconsin.

I'm a RN student at a technical college in Wisconsin and I know that successfully passing the CNA course is required for entry into both the LPN and RN tracks. We however, are not required to get the certification through the state unless we want to.