tech1000

I never draw a med with the needle I give it with. Piercing the top can slightly dull the needle. I pull all the med in with a smart tip, then put on my needle, then "prime" the needle.

Figs are definitely not needed for ER nursing. ER nursing doesn't require more expensive scrubs than any other type of nursing. I wear a t-shirt and regular old scrub pants. No extra pockets or anything. I have a stethoscope and that's about it. If I need a pen light, I use the otoscope in the room. I keep trauma sheers in my bag at the desk and grab them if I need them- same with my stethoscope. I only walk around with a pen and my phone. Less things for people to grab on me.

If the child is fine, I feel like 24 hours is a lot. The germs spread long before the kid got a fever, so does it really matter? And some parents could face losing their jobs if they call out every time their kid gets sick. If their kid is feeling well enough to go to school, fine.

You aren't a failure! So many people change majors in college! If all 18 year olds knew what they wanted to do for the rest of their life, well, colleges wouldn't make nearly as much money from all of us :) There really is absolutely nothing wrong with realizing that nursing may not be for you. If you really suffer from anxiety that bad though, you definitely need to seek out some help. One of my friends had severe anxiety and had great progress with a behavioral therapist. She's like a whole new person! Although, nursing is very stressful and even I feel anxious at times (giving a new med for the first time, when patients have a bad reaction to a med, whatever) and I'm a low anxiety type of a girl. So, while your anxiety may improve with some therapy, it still may not be the best choice for you. If nursing school is causing you this much grief, I'd say it's time to explore some other options.

My school had a 97% NCLEX pass rate. I felt good about that :) I knew a lot of other grads from private colleges who paid big money for their degrees and failed the NCLEX multiple times, and multiple people came from the same program.

Travel nursing locally isn't all it's made out to be. First of all, not all cities are big on local contracts. (Portland was, my hometown is not.) A lot of places looking for travel nurses also actually require you to be outside of 50 miles from the hospital, so when I was home between assignments, I couldn't take an "assignment" close to home. I traveled and loved it, but then I got pregnant (by my husband!) so I'm home now for good. California I've heard can be super rough, despite the ratio laws. I stayed in rooms I rent off Craiglist and sent the rest of my stipend paying my mortgage at home (since my husband was still at home). It was somewhat lucrative, but nothing I'd say I could retire early off of. Also, if you quit traveling, you have to remember that your taxable income was low, so getting loans for houses may be harder. I'd also recommend AT LEAST 2 years of nursing experience. I got to one job and had 6 hours of orientation total before I was on my own in a whole new hospital, and I wasn't even familiar with the charting. LOVED the assignment and I did just fine, but there's no way I could have survived had I been a newer nurse.

We had people cheat in nursing school and they got kicked out of the program for good. No chance of reacceptance.

Don't fret. Those are observation days usually. No other nurse wants to be responsible for your actions :)

I never get it when nurses come out of school with major debt. Nursing isn't that lucrative to start with, but if you really want to do it, then do it. But find a way around it. My hospital paid employees $3000 annually for school but they have to stay a year after it's paid. I did that. It at least paid for one semester of my BSN every year! I'd also try to pay some of your loans down first...

You could discuss phenergan since it is caustic but still routinely given IVP. We also give it IM on patients who are quite large and I always wonder if it ends up more subq than IM in those patients. Also, you could discuss something like beta blockers since bradycardia can be common. Epi, since 1:1000 and 1:10000 can be easily confused in a code situation and can also be given in the wrong concentration. Calcium gluconate is usually ordered IVP for hyperkalemia but can also cause adverse reactions and no policy has ever been in place in at any hospital I've been in regarding administration....

Well, use that EMT experience to get a job as an ER tech in a hospital. If you can't immediately with the experience you have, you usually qualify to get tech jobs after a semester of nursing experience. Once you're in an ER as a tech, it's pretty easy to get hired on when you finish school if you have a good record at the hospital. I had military experience, was in nursing school, and working as a tech on a med-surg floor, which was how I got in as an ED tech. Then I got hired right out of school for days in the ER residency. Almost every tech who graduates comes to work in the ED as a nurse.

No, it will not get better. I've been in the ER for 5 years now and it hasn't changed at all. While I am burnt out, I don't think I have quite that negative of an outlook. It is unreasonable to expect that you can be a nurse, but not to have to tolerate things in your professional life as you would your personal life. You work with the general public. I would expect that you are respected by your employer and wouldn't tolerate that from your employer, but the fact of the matter is that in ANY job working with the public, you WILL be treated in a matter that is at times extremely unacceptable. It will probably be worse in the ER because some patients are actually sick, some families are actually worried, and some people are actually drug addicts who are just angry about their drugs. If you are this jaded, find a different area of nursing.

If it's an adult patient, we have a monitor tech who is watching all ED monitors and also takes the EMS calls. On our children's side, any nurse or paramedic takes it. Techs aren't allowed to take the calls unless they're also a monitor tech.

Just out of curiosity, why did you go to nursing school if you weren't interested in bedside care? What is it that you saw yourself doing with with a degree in nursing if you weren't willing to actually work as a nurse? This question isn't meant to be rude at all, I'm just curious what took you down that route if it doesn't seem like you want to actually do it.

Our ED docs order meds ALL THE TIME (as in, every single time they order an infusion, aside from potassium for some reason, which automatically enters that it's 10mEq/hr) with no infusion rate. Not a single order says how long to infuse the meds over. But, you can easily look up how long meds infuse over or call pharmacy if you aren't sure what rate to infuse at. That said, I hang certain meds instead of pushing. Not too often, but I do.