raianne

I wore a suit to the interviews for my first two jobs in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, but the most recent job I interviewed for was in Texas. It was 100 degrees and there was no way I was wearing a jacket of any kind. I wore a black pencil skirt (knee length, interviews are not the time for short skirts or cleavage) and a short sleeved blouse, and I got the job! I think that as long as you're dressed like a conservative business person, you're good, jacket or no jacket. One piece of advice...wear cute shoes but make sure they're comfortable. I wore super cute but uncomfortable heels for one job interview and they decided to give me a walking tour of the hospital during the interview. My feet hurt for days!

I'm sorry that happened to you. It makes me wonder if that could have happened to me...the very first job I had was on an understaffed med/surg floor, and one day I was so incredibly busy that one of the housekeepers took pity on me and, along with the transporter, helped one of my patients (who could walk on their own) onto a stretcher to go off the floor for a test. I had no part of it, in fact, I was at the other end of the hall but I remember looking down and seeing them and thinking, "oh, what a nice thing to do, she doesn't have to do that." and I thanked her for it later. It's a shame that you got fired, but now you can find a better job! I suggest a step-down unit. 1:3 nurse to patient ratios are AMAZING when you're used to 1:6, and yes, the patients are sicker, but I still find that most days I feel like a good nurse as opposed to a harried pill dispenser.

I absolutely hated my first job as a new grad. Looking back, I can see that it was actually probably a good unit for me to learn on...floor with tele, lots of post-op patients, a very busy "get 'em in, fix 'em up, get 'em out" type of floor. I worked rotating days and nights. 5-6 patients on days, 6-7 patients on nights. I was stressed beyond belief, but I did it. After 11 months on that floor, I got married and moved from PA to WV. Got a job on a cardiac stepdown unit. Nurse to patient ratio? 1:3. Maybe 4, sometimes, if we are short a nurse, which has happened once in 8 months. I love it. I love it so much. And I work straight nights. I went from being the most stressed out person ever and crying while driving home every day to coming home (most days) feeling like I actually am being the best nurse I can be. I never felt that way at my old job. Here's my problem. My husband has a job offer in Texas. We may have to move there. I am terrified that I will get a new job and hate it. Since my two job experiences have been so vastly different, I have a hard time imagining any middle ground. I would like to have a job that I love as much as this one. Also, both of the hospitals I have worked at so far have been large and well-known...and if we move to Texas, we would be living in a small town that has a small hospital, which I've never experienced before. I'm just worried. Any advice?

Very good post. I am a nurse because I was a patient. I was diagnosed with Non Hodgkins Lymphoma when I was 27. I had never been in the hospital before. I realized, over the course of my hospitalization and subsequent outpatient chemo, how much work nurses do. Doctors wrote the orders, and made the big decisions, but it was a nurse who was holding my hair back when I was throwing up during my first chemo, a nurse who dealt with my body's initial reaction to Rituximab (it was not a fun time), and it was nurses who accessed my port and hung the drugs that saved my life. I also never forget that patients can hear what you say when you're not in their room. I still vividly remember lying in bed in the middle of the night after they had just done a portable chest x-ray on me, and hearing my nurse (a gruff business-like guy in his late 50s or early 60s) talking to the x-ray tech outside my room. They were talking about how young I was (another thing you get very used to hearing when you have cancer in your 20s) and my nurse said that I was "a very special young lady." That memory still makes me smile.

They're/their/there

"i have no experience with death. none. i am 31 years old, and in my life, no one close to me has died." those words could have come straight from me. i am 31, and i have lost a great aunt, a great grandma, and my grandfather. that's it. all of them were old, and sick, and it was very far from a shock when they died. so i had no experience dealing with death either. about three weeks ago, i experienced my first patient death. she was middle-aged, had a completely routine (for my floor) surgery, and was recovering well. no complications, nothing. i took care of her for three days. first two days, completely fine. on the last day, during the afternoon, she wasn't her normal self. she kept complaining that she just didn't "feel right". she couldn't give any concrete reason, but it worried me. i called the doctors to let them know...her vitals were normal, labs were normal (including troponin), assessment was normal, but something just wasn't right. the doctors came in to see her. at 7pm, they decided to put her back on a heart monitor and ordered some labs. i drew the labs, hooked her up to the heart monitor, talked with her, and went out to give updates to the next nurse. the next nurse took my updates and went in to see the patient. i had had an absolutely horrible day, and hadn't been able to sit and chart at all, so at 7:30 i sat down to chart. at 7:45, her monitor alarm started going off. v-tach. everyone ran into her room. she was unresponsive. they started cpr and called a code. i have only been a nurse for 8 months, so the more seasoned nurses immediately took over...i just ran and got whatever supplies they were shouting for. (also, this was only the second code i had ever been in. the first one was for low blood pressure and the guy was fine and talking the whole time.) they worked on her for an hour. brought her back twice, got an icu bed for her, and she crashed again in front of the elevators on the way to the icu and died. it was the most horrible thing ever. i felt like it was my fault. completely my fault. we both knew she wasn't her usual self, and i kept feeling like there was something else i should have done. i had another very needy patient that day, and i felt like if i had paid more attention to this woman, i could have caught whatever was wrong with her. i helped to do post-mortem care, because i felt like it was the least i could do. then i talked to the doctor who had just been in the room. he said that they thought it was a pulmonary embolism and that i did everything right and that we did a really good job calling the code as quickly as we did, which should have made me feel better, but it didn't. there was another nurse there who did an amazing job during the code, and he sat and talked to me afterwards about how sometimes there's just nothing you can do, but i still felt like it was my fault. i slept for two hours that night and then my brain woke me up replaying everything that happened. the next night, i couldn't fall asleep, and i started to get scared, because 2 hours of sleep in 48 hours is not ok. i called my fiance and he read to me till i fell asleep. i had a rough time sleeping for about a week. i still cry when i talk about it. i don't know how to get past the feeling that it was my fault. i think that i would have an easier time with a patient's death if it was an expected one. i have taken care of my share of cmo patients, where death would have been a release from suffering. i think that the reason that my first death was so hard to deal with was the unexpectedness of it, and the fact that i feel like i could have done something to prevent it. i don't really have advice for you on how to deal with it, i just hope that your first experience is far less traumatic than mine was.

I love nights. Less stress (usually), less people running around in the halls, and I'm (again, usually) able to do my job without feeling like I'm being pulled in 20 different directions at once. There are always rough nights, just like there are rough days, but in general, I prefer nights. I don't have kids, so I don't have to worry about anyone's schedule. I like to work 3 12s in a row, so I'm usually pretty useless the first day I have off, but after that I bounce back pretty quick. I used to work as a lab tech 5 days a week on nights, and that sucked the life out of me. So far, I'm doing better with 12 hour shifts. I'm not sure why. I try to stay up late (12-1ish) and wake up late (10) on my days off, and that helps me stay in the night shift swing of things while still getting to live life like a normal person. Also, I try not to eat a real meal on nights. I have greek yogurt and fruit around 2am, but I've found that if I eat more than that, it messes with my stomach. I just eat a big breakfast when I get home, and a big dinner when I wake up before I go in to work. Some people hate nights and some thrive on it...I guess it just depends on the person!

On the off chance that I do get to eat something, it's in our break room...and doctors do sit in there and eat sometimes. As far as actually having time to go to the cafeteria and eat something, forget it. There are days that go by in which I have no time to even get into the break room and grab a snack, let alone sit down for a real lunch. It's not uncommon for me to go my entire shift without eating or drinking anything.

I have read many of the same posts about new grads not being able to find a job and I think that it depends on where you live. I'm in Pittsburgh, got my accelerated BSN at Pitt, and pretty much everyone in my class (20 of us) got jobs within a month or so of graduating. Some people had jobs before we graduated. I've worked on my current floor for 8 months, and I'm getting married and moving to WV in July. I was super nervous about finding a job there since I haven't had a year of experience yet...but it turns out that didn't matter at all and I got the first job that I interviewed for, on a cardiac stepdown unit! I also agree with the advice to network. My fiance has a friend who works at the hospital I'll be working at in WV, and she was able to tell me what floors are good to work on, and which ones I should avoid, which was a huge help. One thing that worries me is that after my fiance gets his PhD, we'll be moving to wherever he can get a job, which is looking like Texas or California, and I've heard that the nursing job market in Cali is horrible...I'm just hoping that I'll have enough experience to make me marketable when that time comes.

So I work on a surgical oncology floor. We generally don't get medicine patients unless all the medicine floors are full. Last night we get a call that we're getting a patient...we're confused, because our floor was pretty empty, but so were all the other floors. This woman and her friend show up, SUPER LOUD at 3am, rowdy, laughing, talking, waking the other patients up. We find out that they were on a medicine floor but they weren't in a private room, and they made a big deal about it (although come to think of it, I do feel bad for whoever their roommate was) and complained that they wanted a private room so the AOD put them on our floor. Really? I mean, I know they do customer satisfaction surveys now, but that seems a little ridiculous to me. And then to make things even more awesome, her nurse thought that the patient was pretending to take her pain meds but slipping them to her friend...AFTER they had been in her mouth and she acted like she swallowed them. What can you do about that, (without offending an already loud and entitled-acting patient) short of "lift up your tongue, say AHHH, let me make sure you swallowed your pills"? Sigh. My floor can be busy and hectic but our patients are generally a great bunch of people and it makes me happy that I don't have to deal with patients like this on a daily basis.

yes, but i'm still relatively new. i graduated in august and started on my floor (med/surg oncology) in october. i'm 31...i was a lab tech for six years and then i went through an absn program. i have never had a job that is so completely physically and mentally overwhelming. i know part of it is probably because i'm new, and so i have to learn all the little tricks and idiosyncrasies of nursing and of my floor, but it's still hard!!! i wake myself up in the middle of the night (or day, depending on the shift) thinking about work. time flies by when i'm there. i feel like there's just not ever enough time to get everything done. and i'm there for 12 hours!! [color=#333333] [color=#333333]i do like most of the people i work with. they are awesome, and helpful, and nice. i love the patients. i had another nurse tell me that a family of a patient i had taken care of was asking about me and when they found out that i was working that night they were super happy because "that nurse that we like" was going to take care of their mom. i like that. i like getting people all cleaned up and tucked in and taken care of and happy. i like the fact that the majority of the patients i've had tell me thank you for taking such good care of them, i just like the people. and it's funny, because i thought that i had had enough of customer service jobs forever, but it turns out that's what i'm good at. not that that's all that nursing is, but people-handling experience sure helps with nursing. i do not like the stupid staffing rules. they don't make sense to me. why would you send a nurse home and make everyone have six or seven patients when you could have had an amazing day with everyone having four or five? is saving a little money that important? i do not like my floor. i had a resident tell me that the load that we as nurses carry on our floor is harder than other floors that she's been on. the turnover on my floor is huge...a nurse told me the other night that 18 nurses have quit since 2010. 18! so that's it. i simultaneously love and hate my job. it's harder than anything i've ever done in my life, but it also makes me feel more proud of what i do than anything i've ever done.

A man tells his little boy as they walk by my med cart, "Know what that is? That's where they keep big needles to stick bad little boys." I didn't say anything because I was super busy and didn't feel like arguing with him, but I really wanted to say "Seriously, what is wrong with you?? You just lied to your child and made him associate nurses with punishment! I hope your kid never ends up in the hospital because you're going to be the one who has to calm your hysterical child down every time a nurse comes in the room." Why would anyone tell their kid something like that?

I just graduated from an ABSN program in August and I would say that 90% of my class has jobs. Some had jobs before we graduated. It helps that we went to a university that is affiliated with the largest healthcare provider in the region, so I'm sure that we got preference over grads from other places. Also, many people in my class worked as PCTs during school, just to get their foot in the door. I guess my advice to people trying to find jobs would be to try to get hired in some position in the hospital during or before school. I've talked to transporters who were going to school for physical therapy, aides who were in nursing school, etc. Just get into the system.

Here's my story. I graduated in August from an ABSN program, and began trying to find a job. I absolutely LOVED the floor that I did my transitions on, and my preceptor was amazing. I've read mostly negative stories about preceptors on this site, so I want to add a quick good one to balance them out. My preceptor was nice to me, helpful, supportive, and responsible. She let me learn without hovering over me, yet she was always there when I needed her. When I left, she got me flowers and a card and told me that I was going to be a wonderful nurse and that she was proud to have me as a peer. Understandably, I really wanted to work on her floor. It's an oncology floor, and I am going to work in oncology. That's the reason I became a nurse. Also, I already work at that hospital as a medical lab tech. Sadly, there were no openings. I began applying to other floors in the hospital, and had one interview, but didn't get the job. I decided to branch out. I began applying to other hospitals within my hospital system. I got an interview on a cardiac step-down unit at another hospital. I went in for the interview, and it was going well, but when they asked me what my future goals are, I told them, "to work in oncology." After my interview with the unit director, I went back down and talked with the nurse recruiter. She told me that she could tell that I want to work in oncology, and that it really shone through in my interview. At this point I was super depressed, because I thought that I blew my interview by being honest. Then she said that there's no reason I shouldn't be able to have a job in that field, and that she is friends with the unit director of an oncology floor and she was going to shoot her a quick e-mail, and that I should go home and send the unit director my resume. So I did. The next night, I got a call from HR to schedule an interview! I went in, interviewed with the unit director (who seems awesome) on a surgical oncology floor, waited two weeks while they did my background check and credit check and whatever else they do...and I got a call last week that I got the job!!! I would like to say thank you to all the nurse recruiters out there. My nurse recruiter did not have to go out of her way for me like that...the job that I got was at a completely different hospital than the one she was working for...but she did, and because she did, I get to work in the area that I feel I am meant to work in. She is awesome and I have a job!!!! (as long as I pass the NCLEX...I take it October 6th and start my job October 10th!)

I'm currently 1/3 of the way through a one year ABSN program (fall, spring, summer), and so far we have not lost any of the people in our group. It's incredibly demanding and challenging and tons of work, but I love it...and I'm managing to work two to three days a week as well. (I would not recommend that part. I'm only working out of necessity, if I didn't have to work so that I could afford to pay rent and eat, I would not be working during this program.) Tell your daughter good luck!

I think it depends on the patient and the kind of chemo. Mine came back exactly the way it used to be, thick, curly, amazingly wonderful (seriously...you never know how awesome hair is till you don't have any...although baldness certainly cut back on my getting-ready time) but an older woman at work never quite got all of hers back.

So I am one month into my accelerated BSN program. My patient in clinical today was an end stage cancer patient with a rectolady partsl fistula. I haven't ever dealt with a patient like this before, my first two patients were hysterectomy patients who were healthy and up and walking, and I knew they were getting better. This patient is dying. I was in the room today when the doctor came and told this patient's family that she needed hospice. They were holding out hope that she would get well enough for a clinical trial, but her cancer had never responded to treatment and none of her doctors had ever come right out and told them that she wasn't going to get better. This doctor told them that, and everyone was crying and it was so sad. I did not cry in the patient's room or in front of the family or doctor, and I'm kind of proud of myself for that. I did go to the bathroom afterwards and have a moment of crying, but I got myself together quickly. This woman knows her name but she's not oriented to place or time. When we move her just a little bit to clean underneath her, even though she is heavily medicated for pain, she screams and cries and begs us to stop hurting her and prays to die. It's really hard to ignore the pleas of someone who's begging you to stop hurting them, and the only way that I am able to is that I know we are doing it to help her. My questions are: How do you not think about this stuff after you go home? Is there a way to leave it at work, to mentally distance yourself from what you're doing, and is that a good thing to do? Is it something I will learn in time?

You'll be fine...I was nervous finding the femoral pulse on a guy for the first time...but you get used to it!

I'd read some posts earlier about people freaking out because they had to bathe their classmates...and now I have a story to share! I just finished the first week of my accelerated program. I loved it!!! There are 6 guys and 19 girls in my class. Today we had already practiced finding pulses and doing cardiac and pulmonary auscultation on our lab partners. The instructors made us rotate around the lab, and everyone had to find the apex beat and the femoral pulse on everyone else. Talk about getting used to touching people. At first everyone was a little hesitant, but by the end of it, we were so used to it that we could usually find the pulses on the very first try. All the guys had their shirts off, we were in sports bras and bathing suit tops...and nobody cared!! (Well, I guess I speak for myself...anyway, it didn't seem like anyone cared.) The point that my professor kept trying to make was that we need to separate bodies in the clinical sense from bodies in the sexual sense. Breasts are just tissue. If you need to move that tissue to feel the apex beat, then you move the tissue. Everyone has a body, everyone is different, and we need to get used to it. I wasn't sure how I'd feel about practicing on each other, after reading previous posts, but it really wasn't that bad. It makes sense to practice on each other, so that we actually know what we're looking for on a real person. We're going to have to deal with some pretty nasty stuff as nurses, and I think that stepping out of our comfort zones as we learn is a good thing.

There was a lady in the ER a few years ago who was listed as being allergic to "hot showers"!!

I have a story...it's not a nursing ghost story, because I'm just a student and haven't seen anything scary yet...and I don't know that it's as much of a ghost story as it is a supernatural story, but I want to tell it. Yesterday I was going to get white shoes for clinicals. My mom came with me. As we were driving past this one kind of scary section of town, we stopped at a traffic light, and my mom said, "Did I ever tell you about the guy we saw here the night pap-pap (her dad) died?" I said no, and she got kind of teary eyed and started to tell me the story. My grandpa (pap-pap) died five years ago. He had pneumonia and then he went into a coma and died. The hospital called my mom and all her brothers at in the early morning when he went into the coma, and told them to come to the hospital to say their goodbyes. My mom and dad were in the car, driving through this bad part of town at three in the morning on their way to the hospital, and they stopped at the traffic light. A sketchy looking beat-up car pulled up next to them, and the guy in it rolled his window down. My mom said she was whispering to my dad, "No, don't open the window, just drive away, don't do it" because she thought the guy was going to shoot them or carjack them or something. My dad, however, isn't really a timid guy (he's big and he used to be a steelworker and when kids used to get into "my dad is tougher than your dad" arguments, I was always secretly sure that my dad was the toughest) so he rolled down the window. The guy was younger, and scruffy looking, but my mom couldn't tell me what he really looked like, you know, eyes, skin, hair. She said she couldn't remember. He asked my dad where the closest Walmart was. My dad gave him directions, and the man said thank you. Then he said, "I sense that you are heavy-hearted in this car tonight." (Which, really??? What kind of thing is that for a scruffy guy looking for a Walmart at 3AM to say?? This is when my mom and I both started crying as she was telling the story) My dad said "Yeah, her dad is in the hospital and we're on our way to see him." The man said, "I just wanted to tell you that he's going to be in a better place, and everything's going to be ok." and he drove away. My mom said as soon as he said that, she felt this overwhelming sense of peace, and my dad did too, and they looked at each other and were like "what just happened here?" That's all. I don't know if that guy was an angel, if there are angels, or just a person who happened to be in the right place at the right time and knew exactly what to say, but either way, I think that it's a cool story.

I took A&P II and Microbiology together while also working full-time. However, I already have my bachelor's degree in Environmental Science, and I thought that they were easy classes. I think it depends on where you're taking them and how strong your science and math background is.

When I was being taken back to my room after my biopsy surgery, a woman wearing perfume got on the elevator with us, and it took everything I had not to throw up...if she would have been on the elevator with us for a few more seconds, I would have. Also, please don't ever wear perfume if you're going to be around oncology patients. Chemo can make you incredibly sensitive to smells, and I also had anticipatory nausea. Even things that wouldn't normally bother me, like barely scented hand lotion, became horrible nausea-inducing smells during and after chemo. The smell of the hand sanitizer that the nurses used made me sick too. I would say it's best to forgo perfume and scented products at work, for the sake of your patients.

Dress like you're going to a job interview. I wore black pants, a pink blouse, and a suit jacket, and I got in! (I heard that if you get an interview, chances are you're already accepted to the program, but I don't know if that's always true. It was for me!)

I start an ABSN program on August 30th. I took Pathophysiology over the summer and met some people in my program, so I'm not nervous about not knowing anyone...but I am TERRIFIED of not having a full-time job. I've been working at least part-time since I was 16. My last day of work is August 29th, 2:30-11pm, and classes start at 8am on the 30th. I'm hoping to keep myself busy enough that I don't have time to freak out and start worrying about how I'm going to survive financially. I have loans, but I'm going to have to make some drastic reductions in my cost of living in order to live off of them. I'm going to stay casual at my current job, work weekends, and hopefully make enough to pay the rent each month. I'm 29 and I've worked in a hospital for five years as a lab tech, plus I had cancer and went through chemo, and continued working the whole time I was having treatment, so when they tell us how intense this program is going to be, I just smile to myself. I can handle it. (On a completely unrelated side note, I'm watching public television right now because I don't have real cable and there's this guy named David Garrett on and he is amazing. Google him. He's a hot violinist. Just thought I'd share.)