NurseLyla

Hi everyone. I am new to posting on this site but have been reading here for a while. I am a fairly new RN. I have been working as a hospital/ bedside/floor/clinical nurse for just over 3 years. I work in a hospital in a fairly small town in VA. I have been contemplating a move to a bigger city, perhaps to Jacksonville, Florida one day in the future and would eventually like to work in one of the well known hospitals such as the Mayo Clinic. My question is...have any of the posters here ever worked in one of the most well known prestigious hospitals in the US, such as the Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins, Cedars-Sinai, Cleveland Clinic, UCLA, etc? If so, are the working conditions there as abysmal as they are at most other hospitals? If so, does the pay make up for it? I am not asking for rates of pay or personal information of course, but I am curious as to how the nurses at those kinds of organizations are treated by their employers as compared to those of us in other smaller hospitals and if it is any better. Thanks.

When I was a brand new nurse I felt that I stayed sick both physically and mentally. Normally I would get a cold once a year but as a new nurse I had sneezing and sore throats every couple of months. I started out working nights and my sleep became so messed up and I was so tired all the time my eating and exercise habits that I had kept up so well before I was a nurse went down the toilet and I gained 30 pounds in a year! I had to relearn when to eat and how to squeeze in activity and I have after 3 years of it finally begun losing the weight I gained. I have lost 10 pounds of it so far. I remember dreaming about work a lot then too. I once dreamed that I had gone to work and by the end of my 12 hours I still hadn't so much as assessed a single patient or done a bit of my paperwork. I became a grouch with friends and family and I became a pessimist about life. I went through a depression because I hated the stress of my career. I felt that I had made a huge mistake by becoming a nurse. It was such a letdown from what I had hoped it would be while I was in nursing school. I completely changed as a person and didn't recognize myself. Being a brand new nurse was one of the hardest things I have ever gone through but it has gotten somewhat better with time. I have no doubt that it can make you sick.

Honestly, throughout your nursing career you will get to the point where it doesn't even phase you. You can get up in the middle of your dinner break, clean it up, and go back to eating when you are done without blinking an eye...which I often do at my job actually. My advice would be just to breathe through your mouth and don't stare at it too much. Just focus on the patient being clean for their skin integrity. They can't help it and often don't realize that it's happened. If they do realize it, they feel badly and are embarrassed. I make a point to try to make them feel as comfortable as I can and never let on that it bothers me in the least. No one wishes to be incontinent. It makes me realize how many of us take for granted such simple things as being able to go to the bathroom independently and privately. It also helps me to think about how I would want nurses and staff to behave if they were cleaning up me or a family member of mine and I behave accordingly. That's someone's precious family member. Good luck in nursing school.

I'm sorry about your bad experience but this is one thing I too have really noticed since I have been a nurse...you can do wonderful things for your patients and bust your behind all day long but if you do even one minor thing wrong (I'm not talking about a major life threatening error or even a serious error which does merit consequences from superiors) or forget to do something minor, you are treated as if you are a hopeless idiot. It is very frustrating.