ImaStork

As a Child Safety Seat Tech. I can tell you that all seats are made to the same national standards. The difference between the $45.00 seat and the $300.00 seat are the "extra" bells and whistles the manufacture ads. We tell our parents the "BEST" seat is one that fits their child, their car and they will use correctly 100% of the time. In order to find this seat. Take your child in place them in the seat, see how easy the straps are to adjust, see if the store will let you take the demo model out and try it in your car. Some bases are too wide for some seats. After you have purchaced a seat find a certified tech to help with the first installation. A lot of hospitals, police depts, fire depts have certified techs. The #1 problem we see with seat installation is it not being in tight enough. I hope this information helps.

I am a L&D nurse in a small Texas town of approx 15,000. I love it. I work in the county hospital. We have several home health agencies here in town as well as hospice. We also have several long term care facilities.Our hospital also has a clinic system you could work for. The town also has numerous general practice doctors as well as several specialist one could apply to work for. Because we are only 45 minutes from Ft. Worth our salaries stay competitive with the area.I agree with some of the other posts regarding traffic and drive time to work. Having always lived in the country, outside of any city or even a town. I would choose no where else. I kind of like being a name with my face and not just another number.

Don't decide to shower after being out drinking most of the night, then pass out in the shower hitting head causing laceration. Your Pit Bull will eat your face off, literally. We saw the guy with his wife after the fact in our L&D. He looked like the worst burn victim I had ever seen. Was now legally blind.

If you are in a good L&D you will not be "on your own" you will have a preceptor who will work with you and teach you. She will not turn you loose until she is satisfied you can do it. Also taking a good basic fetal monitoring course will help you not feel so lost when looking at strips. While you are in this learning time the best thing you can do for yourself is to jump in and follow as many patients as you can with varied problems: pre-eclampisa, diabetes, meconium....etc... the more you expose yourself too and the more you do the more comfortable you become. Just remember no one ever knows it all and you are never alone there are always others to seek opinions from,even the docs....

I am a 6 foot tall ob nurse and if you find a hospital that furnishes tall scrubs please let me know I would love to work there. My hospital furnishes our scrubs and there are no talls. I wear a size too large pants to get them a little longer. I don't feel so bad when I see some of our docs coming down the hall with their ankles showing as well. :imbar

At my hospital on the night shift in Women's Services you will do it yourself. We had the choice of another licensed personel or an aide we chose licensed. At my hospital an FTE is an FTE.

In my 25 year nursing career I have worked 21 of them either 11p to 7a or 7p to 7a as I am now doing. I feel working nights has made me a stronger nurse. More sure of myself. In labor and delivery I had to depend on my assesssment skills and hone my ability to convey information to sleepy doctors so that they would respond in the manner I needed them to. I like to think I am a very assertive nurse without being agressive. I also enjoyed the dinners we would have in the small hospital I worked the entire night shift, all depts would pitch in.

Now you have went and hurt my feelings. I have been a nurse in Texas for 25 years and could not imagine being a nurse anywhere else. There are good and bad places to work as well as good and bad doctors and co-workers. The pay is great in some places and lousy in others. I bet the same could be said for any other state.

I work at a small county hospital. All the nurses are NRP certified. The pedi docs have trained the charge nurses to view cords and suction for mec. We do not have in house anesthesia and our OB docs do not intubate babies. Sometimes we have to be able to view cords for unexpected mec. If we know we have mec before the delivery we have the pedi doc there. I like the idea of having all docs NRP certified. Anything that reduces my liability I am all for.

I agree even with Lupus, abnormal bleeding, pain and sudden unexplained weight loss are warning signs. Could be just warning you that you need to have a hysterectomy but could be something else. Contact your Gyn as soon as possible. Also being 35 has nothing to do with it. We have had women as young as 19 have hysterectomies if the problem is bad enough. Better to err on the side of caution go to the doctor.

Besides all the above mentioned interventions one of our docs has had us place a foley catheter in and fill the bladder this also aids in lifting the presenting part and holding it off the cord. This is done by one person while someone else is in the bed holding presenting part up with sterile glove and then we all run to the section room with the person in the bed getting a free ride.

Last night I think every child in our town conspired not to poop. I fielded 4 calls on constipated kids, two had just not gone in the last few hours. Parents decided at 2am this was something to be concerned about and we could tell them what to give or run out and buy to use. I told them to leave the kids alone as long as they were eating and drinking they would poop. Poor kids...

Maxium security Gatesville, Texas

At the rural county hospital where I work we have no housekeeping after midnight on weekends and 230a on weekdays so IT IS OUR JOB to clean delivery rooms and section suite if we want to have a clean area for our next delivery. Leaving it is not an option. I have also emptied trash in my patients rooms to keep the sanitary pads from overflowing into the floor. I can not call housekeeping if the hospital does not employee them.

When the hospital where I work first opened it had only one nurses station for the med/surg unit and behind the chart rack was a wall with hangers. The hospital gave each doc on staff a stethescope with his name engraved on it and they hung on those hangers. About a year after I went to work there one of the docs died. His stethescope was removed, I assumed it was given to his wife. One night ICU called the station and said a telemetry had suddenly started showing out of one of our empty rooms. We went to check, needless to say nothing was there. Sometime later that night one of nurses happened to look at the wall of stethescopes and there was the dead doc's stethescope hanging back on his hanger.... guess he needed to come make rounds. For the rest of the night none of us would go down the halls by ourselves.

I agree with the above statement even after 15 years I have still had a few patients I will get someone else to check after me. It is only when you think you know it all you become a danger to everyone.

I agree with the person who said the story sounds fishy. It sounds like she was a drop-in with no prenatal care. After having had 6 children, if she so wanted to deliver lady partslly she could have always opted for home birth. I would like to have a lot more information on this praticular case.

I work in a small county hospital on the night shift. Our policy is anything over 20 weeks comes to OB under that goes to ER. No patient is triaged by er before she comes up unless she came in via ambulance from mva, if they come in via ambulance complaining of labor they are brought directly to us. If they come in over 20 weeks complaing of any type ob symptom, ctx, bleeding, pain of any kinds, leaking fluid they are sent by admissions to us. Se if we get patients we should not get it is not er's fault it is admssions who did it. We have to go down and monitor MVA's patients until they are cleared by the er then we can bring them to the unit. The reason we do this is a matter of liability not laziness on the part of er. Likewise if we get someone up and check them out and find no ctx but a problem er should handle we call tell them we are coming and take them there. If all of us would realize part of the problem is patients coming for things they should have stayed home for but someone has to see them once they are here.

more things I have learned as a nurse.... The OB vacuum extractor will remove a 16 oz dr pepper bottle from a man's rectum as easy as it does a baby from a woman's lady parts. Don't bring your 13 year old to the er at 3am to have her tested for Mad Cow disease for the doc will have to explain the only clear test is to cut off said daughters head and send it to the state lab for confirmation. Don't flirt with your friends man at the bar she will proceed to lay you out in front of everyone, even though she just got out of the hospital the day before from having a c-section. Just because you hear a knock on your door and you have warrants for your arrest, don't assume it is the cops and swallow your whole stash of meth. The resulting tartative dyskensia makes for a great show for the nurses but freaks out your boyfriend.

As with the above posters. I use Leopold's to locate fetal back and as a reason to "lay hands" on my patient. While I am locating fetal postion I am talking to the patient. I can assess abdominal tenderness as well as contractions and ascertain fetal movement. Sometimes just taking those few minutes to touch, talk to and listen to the patient goes a long way to establishing the tone of the whole labor.

here are some ob things I have learned: Never get your Depo-Provera in Mexico. Never assume you are sterile just because you didn't get pregnant with your last 3 lovers. Never take your goldfish out of the bowl and play with it on your tummy because it my "accidently" swim up your lady parts. Never assume that cute little fish tattoo on your abdomen will stay cute when stretched by 9 months of pregnancy. Never stay with a man you can't get to leave the bar long enough to come to your baby's delivery, even if he makes frequent calls saying he will be there in just a minute. Never bring your husband and your current boyfriend to the same delivery.

here are some ob things I have learned: Never get your Depo-Provera in Mexico. Never assume you are sterile just because you didn't get pregnant with your last 3 lovers. Never take your goldfish out of the bowl and play with it on your tummy because it my "accidently" swim up your lady parts. Never assume that cute little fish tattoo on your abdomen will stay cute when stretched by 9 months of pregnancy. Never stay with a man you can't get to leave the bar long enough to come to your baby's delivery, even if he makes frequent calls saying he will be there in just a minute. Never bring your husband and your current boyfriend to the same delivery.

If nursing is what you feel "called" to be, and I do feel nursing is a calling. Then there is not another option. Do not go in with the expectation of failure. If you have what it takes you will not fail.

come to work at my hospital... we have the ban on fake nails, and the perfume. The smoking is pretty hard since u have to be 20 ft from the building. We all wear the same color scrubs on my l & d unit, they are furnished by the hospital, we can pick our own cover jacket. We also have to wear our picture ID where all can see it it has our name and title on it. Introducing ourselves to the patient is also one of the interventions on our nursing care plan. Each room has an erase board on it we put the name of the RN caring for the patient that day, the LVN if appliable and the Nursery staff who has her baby.

Since you are taking Michelle Murrary's course take her advice. You know when she says, "You don't want to take a single passanger car to a law suit, you want to take a bus." I would start calling my chain of command starting with charge nurse, house supervisor, unit director, director of nurses and document everyones name in the chart. You can also file Safe Harbor in my state and at least let it be known you thought conditions were unsafe even if everyone else went along. Also go to the AWOHHN site and get a copy of their standards of care and give to your unit director. Let her know she can be held liable if she does not make sure her unit is run according to the standards. It doesn't matter if you do one or one hundred deliveries a month. We all have to practice the same. If after all this things do not change, get out and don't look back.