I do feel your pain and empathyze with you because I'm going through the same. I also work in med/surg/ped unit, with a maximum of 8pts per nurse sometimes; and I've seen myself hyperventilating d/t stress of the job. There were couple of times I actually experienced CP!! I don't know how long I can go on like this!! I'm in the process of applying for transfer to another unit,Telemetry; hopefully the patient to nurse ratio will be manageable and the stress will be under control. You might want to consider a unit transfer, if all non pharmacological interventions fail. Good luck with your decison.