RetRN77

Amen to that! I have heard many times in various places about decisions not to treat UTI's in patients deemed terminal, and I have always been aghast. As you said, they are incredibly painful, and not just necessarily when one tries to urinate. I do not understand why anyone would consider not treating a UTI. It's not like it's going to prolong someone's life. It's a comfort measure, as far as I see it, and not treating it hastens demise. In addition, I feel the same about withdrawing feedings. I wonder where we have come that these things are even considered reasonable tactics. And tactics they are. They are certainly not benevolent care.

Wow. Incredible. Kudos to you for what you are planning and for your concern. To me, it's unconscionable to let people suffer with UTI's and to not feed them. Most especially since it's obvious this poor lady is not even in any sort of coma. (In which case, I'm still a die hard when it comes to withdrawing treatment.) Those kids showing up and saying she would never want to be half paralyzed and on a feeding tube? Well, she's been that way for over a year, sits up in a chair (with help) reads the paper, listens to music, etc. Doesn't sound in the least like someone who feels her life is not worthwhile. I agree with the person who said these kids just want to get on with their lives with her money. I'm praying she will be able to respond to you in letting her wants be known in a way that no one can refute. Waiting to hear the upshot!

That's pretty funny! Although I am surprised it didn't occur to anyone to stick some old fashioned heavy duty cloth bandage tape on the box and write the name on the tape. We used to label all sorts of things that way.

I don't think I'd feel insulted, but it wouldn't make me feel appreciated, either. I like the sweatpant with logo actual gift idea. I would have appreciated that. Nurses week never happened until after I was no longer working at a hospital. In fact, I don't remember ever getting anything at all for nurses week, and I don't recall when it began. But way back when, our hospital used to hand out gift catalogs at Christmas and you could choose your own gift. The gifts available weren't little trinkets. Choosing your own gift felt rather cheesy and we didn't feel especially appreciated, mostly because the supervisors were tyrants day in and day out. Then again, you weren't getting a white elephant, either. I got my first toaster oven that way. I was a relative newlywed and it was very useful, so I was grateful anyway.

I did, although at the time, I was a student, and had already done my L&D/PP rotation. I didn't know any of the nurses in the L&D unit, because I went to the hospital and delivered during the night shift, so I didn't know any of them. I was only in L&D about five hours. However, I did know some of the nurses on PP, some of them mostly because they were friends of my mom, who had only recently stopped working the PP unit. It was interesting at times, but it definitely had its pluses. I received plenty of visits from my fellow students while on PP, because they lived on site, and that was fun. I do not remember any of the PP checks in particular. :) So if I was embarrassed, it didn't last long!

This happened in my family as well. My mom and her siblings shared the care of her mother late in life. At that point, she told me she never wanted to "force" this on us and she wanted to go to a nursing home when the time came. Many times, especially toward the end, I wanted to bring her here but she always refused. I think it would have been hard on her here, also, since our youngest with special needs was just too active for her to deal with. It was a much noisier and active environment than she was used to dealing with. She would tire easily when we were around too long. I think if she ever reconsidered her decision, she probably considered also that the environment wasn't exactly restful. I felt badly that I didn't get to spend time having her here and caring for her as she lived several hundred miles away from me, but that's the way she wanted it.

Oops - thought I quoted the person who posted the original. This was meant for the nurse who drained her hematoma and needed months of wound care afterward.

Forgive me if I've posted this before. Our very first day of clinicals, another student came to me in distress, telling me she couldn't get the rectal thermometer to stay in place. "It keeps falling out!" I couldn't imagine how that could happen. She begged me to come check it out. As I approached the bed, the elderly lady said, "It's in my lady parts! I used to be a nurse! You put it in my lady parts!!"

Oh, my, I feel so badly for you! Who would have thought it would take that long to heal?

Hopefully, your doctors have an efficient practice, know exactly how they want you to deal with phone calls, and will train you to do what they want. The physician I worked for had very specific things he wanted us to tell patients. He always considered his receptionist to be irreplaceable because he had spent years training her to handle calls exactly as he wanted to. He figured the nurses came with the skills he needed and wouldn't need much training. But he found when his long-time secretary retired that nurses were no slouch, either, on the phone. You might not be required to answer the phone. We usually only answered it when the secretary was on break or for some other reason absent from her desk. There were specific cases in which calls were routed to us for medical advice, but, again, the physician taught us what he wanted us to say, and if there was any question, we would put the patient on hold and ask him. It really was not too difficult. You'll find most things that go on in a physician's office are very similar and routine from day to day. I think you will enjoy your new job! You are fortunate to have gotten such a job at this point in your career. Office jobs are hard to come by and usually go to nurses that know the physician from the hospital or other professional contact.

Oh, hilarious!!! Thanks for the laugh - I really needed it!

Good grief! Except for the faking, crying, denial and swearing, I thought you might have been talking about me! I became ill while scrubbed in during clinicals and had to ask the circulating nurse who was supervising me to take over for me. She gave me an outraged look, like "you are kidding me!" but I wasn't. It was probably at least the fourth or fifth time I was scrubbed in, and I'm not the queasy type, so I don't know what was up. I did make it to a chair and did not actually faint, but I did wish I was dead. I think I did finish out the surgery, or at least I stayed in the room until the end. The doctor on the case was one of the nicest surgeons at the hospital and known for being kind to students and for welcoming them to the OR after surgery. Well, he was apparently just plain exasperated with me and ignored me. I was so humiliated.

Totally off topic, VintagePN, but your avatar looks like one of my old supervisors! :)

In the 70's, at the Army hospital I worked at then, we had a princess of a Middle Eastern country as a patient for a few days. She was very polite to us, and was really no trouble as a patient. There was not a huge fuss over her, because we were supposed to keep her presence as much of a secret as possible, but some patients did inquire because of certain things they noticed. I can't right now remember what those things were, as I don't believe there were guards outside her door, but if I recall correctly, there was a "presence" on the unit. She had a private room, of course, and I'm pretty positive her meals were more special than usual, but there really was not much difference in her treatment than for others. Close to the same time, we had one who thought she should be treated like a princess. She was a foreign-born wife of a lower ranking officer, and you would have sworn she thought she was married to a five star general. It never seemed to occur to her that most of us, if not officers ourselves, were also married to officers. She took exception to the menu every day, complained about having hamburgers for lunch, wanted spaghetti for breakfast, and basically thought we were her servants. I'd take the real princess any day.

I'm a little puzzled, because I wonder why the dividing line between being reasonable and becoming "hostile" is when the incoming nurse goes beyond checking the IV site and goes on to further assessment? I understand that it makes the process longer for you and you think it's rude, but it's not necessarily hostile nor passive aggressive. I can identify with you, however. At one of the hospitals I worked for, we had a night shift nurse who was genuinely hostile and difficult to get along with. She could also be very funny, once she stopped trying to intimidate us. She had a couple of moods - cranky and superbly cranky. The patients would say she had no compassion for them. If they complained about the pain of labor, she would tell them they should have thought of that before they became pregnant! At that point, I knew for certain it was not about me, so I gave her as wide a berth as possible when she was extremely cranky, and genuinely appreciated her humor when she was having a "good" day. She really had no business being a nurse, because her idea of a good shift was one in which no patient succeeded in getting any more out of her than the bare minimum she intended. Putting things into perspective, I felt fortunate to only be the outgoing nurse and not the patient.

Our floors would generally refuse to take patients during report time. If the ED would call near report time saying they were coming with a patient, we would ask them to either bring the patient 15 minutes before report, or wait till the end of report time. It was very much frowned upon for them to try to shuffle patients around at report time, unless, of course, there was pressing need to do so because of the patient's condition or need. The supervisors supported us in this. It seems like there needs to be some communication with the higher-ups to stop this sort of practice as a routine thing. It's not fair to the patients when you can't communicate to the next shift what is up with them because you are distracted by several new patients. Sometimes there would be an exception to the practice of discouraging report-time patients if those bringing them stated there was no urgent need to attend to them, and if they would agree to use their own staff to get the patient into bed and settled in. (Not including arrival vitals, which would of course still be our responsibility.) Oftentimes, they were less busy than those on the floor, so they would readily agree, just so they would be able to discharge the patient from their area. Of course, at that time, we were not dealing with any Medicare rules such as 45 minute time limits, either.

That must be pretty far "back in the day!" When I took it, it was 2 6-8 hour days, and that was 40+ years ago.

Cleaning up after people's daily needs is just part of the job, but it IS part of the job. In some areas and some jobs, there may be others primarily assigned to help the patient with hygiene needs, or there may not. You will definitely have more of this in school than after, but there is no way you can be promised not to have to deal with it on a daily basis. Read threads on this site for a good idea of what nurses deal with on a daily basis. I think it helps to put into perspective that when you deal with bodily functions, you ofen are helping the patient more directly than with any other thing you may do during a day. It also helps to realize there are many other things more challenging and more interesting that you will deal with on a daily basis, and that bodily functions and hygiene are just part of them. When I was a fresh new student, I wasn't particularly fond of having to make sheets so tight that a quarter could bounce off them (ex-WAC instructor, LOL) until a patient said, while she was schooling me to put my foot up on the bed to brace myself and YANK, "OOOOH! That feels SO much better!" His tone of relief was a real education for me.

I have to say that frosts me. There is just no reason for that. I trained at teaching hospitals and I worked at teaching hospitals almost exclusively. I saw a couple of rather borderline "specimen" visits, but nothing like described by the first two posters. Usually they were at least perfunctorily polite, stating their purpose and attempting to be somewhat civil, and most times they were more than civil. I don't remember them just swooping in and out as if they were visiting a zoo exhibit. Generally, they were conversing about how to treat the patient, not just there incidentally because there was something someone found would make a teaching exercise. Unfortunately, when my son was hospitalized in a coma post TBI, we were the recipients of just such an unannounced "visit." They were somewhat polite, but they had this curious avidity about themselves that gave me the chills. Suddenly, the senior resident mentioned my son might have Prader-Willi Syndrome and everyone hummed excitedly, giving various other possible diagnoses. I couldn't believe my ears. My son was in a coma, having unrelenting seizures, no one knew if he would recover or not, and these inconsiderate juveniles were visibly getting all excited over the possibility of having discovered a patient with a possibly rare, but completely unrelated syndrome. In addition, they didn't even have the finesse nor consideration to have a clue about the effect of their speaking about him as if there was no one personally affected present. Sorry, no pass. Such conversations should be held outside the hearing of patient and family, and a modicum of politeness should prevail when they are in the room with the patient. There is no excuse to treat a patient as if s/he were just a specimen pinned to a display.

You're very welcome! I'm sorry that your family has not been very supportive of you. That definitely makes things a good bit more difficult. You will be in my prayers. :)

I'm sorry if I made it sound as though a grandparent was the only option - I didn't intend that. But anyone close to you, IMHO, would be a good thing. I know how it is to not have many options, and the times we could call on grandma were probably not the majority. My cousin's wife watched our son part time during some of the periods, sometimes I called on friends (and paid them) and those were the situations which worked out best for us and gave me the most peace of mind. I have to say I had experiences which were bad enough that when we adopted our second child and I was in a position not to have to work, it was a huge relief not to have to constantly worry about whether a caregiver was treating him well or not. All the best to you, and I hope it works out well for you and your son.

I have a lot of regrets about time my child spent with others while I worked, and I was only working 8 hour shifts. We had several bad experiences. We did a lot of moving around during his early years because my husband was in the service from the time our son was 18 months old until he was about 4. During the best of times, before my hubby was in the service, and once we were back in our home town, my mom would pick up our son from whomever was watching him when she finished work and he would stay with his grandparents until whichever one of us got off work first would pick him up. We both worked odd shifts. My son had special times with his grandma and grandpa while they watched him for us, and that is one thing I do not regret. If you have a relative or a close friend that he knows, I would really look into having them pick your child up at daycare and watch him for a partial day. Any time spent with someone close to him as opposed to being at a facility for 12 hour days is an improvement, IMHO. My son has never said anything about feeling "shuffled around." He was always glad to see his grandparents. I don't care what anyone says about daycare; it's not a great environment for children, it's just a last ditch failsafe.

Really stupid. My mom was in assisted living and often did not feel up to getting up for breakfast. In fact, one of the reasons we decided on assisted living instead of the senior apartments where she had a few, but not all, the types of service in assisted living was because she so often didn't feel like getting up for breakfast. The senior apartments would bring them meals, but charge extra for doing it. In the assisted living, it wasn't an extra charge. She would probably have been throwing everything in sight if they'd called 911 because she didn't feel up to getting up. If she didn't, I would have. However, an evaluation for depression or physical illness might not be out of line, either. In the beginning, the reason my mom wasn't feeling well enough to get out of bed at all was because they kept cutting off the prednisone she was dependent upon, and she was too confused to realize it. It took a while to figure out what they were doing, and they nearly killed her twice.

Definitely. I was referring to the bottom sheet.

We had an instructor who told us the bed should be tight enough to bounce a quarter. Yep - ex military, too. I thought she was a wee bit obsessed until she checked the bed I had made (occupied) and told me I had done a poor job. She proceeded to pull the sheet while putting one of her feet on the bed frame! I thought she might go flying herself, or that the patient would. The next thing I heard was the patient saying, "Oh, that feels so wonderful!" Never forgot that, and worked hard thereafter trying to make the tightest beds I could.