arte_suave

At the community college I go to we have a ton of displaced workers going for lots of different things, not just nursing. The crash hurt a lot of people. Nursing is not the only profession affected. Have you taken a look at what's happening to law schools? They are getting sued by the very students they taught because of hollow income promises and few job opportunities.

One of my favorite is a Cherokee Indian saying.... When you were born, the world rejoiced and you cried. Live your life so that when you die the world cries and you rejoice.

Considering that the median wage in the United States is $16.75 and I personally have spent the past 10 years with a college degree never making anything over $17, I would, say, yes nurses do make decent money. In the healthcare area I came from, dental, most office managers don't even make what a starting nurse makes despite years of experience in both front and back and an assistant is making big bucks if she pushes the $15.00 mark while dealing with the same kind of disrespect and under-appreciation (if not more) that I hear all these nurses gripe about over on the the boards. Oh and forget about healthcare although we may get free to discounted dental if you want to have the dentist you work for work on you. I think for a lot of nurses who have been in nursing, they have only seen what has happened to nursing in the past few years but the whole country has gone to pot! They have no idea how the whole economy is busted and despite all the hell they go through, they are one of the better paying professions for people who lack the money and access to acquire better paying jobs but have gumption and fortitude anyway.

I liked the original post it's just a shame it's message of positivity got squandered with the rest of the posts. I compete in a sport known as Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and I also teach it. It is not a sport for everyone BUT anyone can do it. Most drop out of training before they even receive their first belt because it takes about 12 years, on average, to be awarded a black belt. It's difficult on the body and the mind and its nickname is human chess. There is blood, sweat, and lots of human contact yet we exclude no one who wants to come into our dangerous world of choke holds and joint locks because we know that the ones who are meant for it will stay and survive. It is the same with nursing. How bad do you want to be nurse? If you want it bad enough, you will overcome any obstacle to obtain it. Bottom line. Same with being a doctor, an astronaut, or anything else your heart sets out to be. If you want, take it. As Buddha said, we are makers of our own destiny. There are real reasons some rise from the slums to success but that doesn't change the fact that anyone can do it. As for the ones who don't, they also have real reasons they don't succeed and labels like "not being smart enough" are just excuses. It is true that not living up to your potential weighs on your shoulders for a lifetime so reasons for why you didn't do this or that make that fact easier to hide. Success is success and there are certain traits required, no matter what the profession, to excel and anyone can do it if they apply them and I think that is what the OP is getting at. In no way did I take the original post as it saying "Stupid people can do nursing if they have x,y, and z in their hearts". For everyone who needs that affirmation: yes nursing is hard and requires various levels of social and mental intelligence. It takes more than a dream but anyone who wants real success should already know that.

I went to nursing school because I got burnt out in dental which I see the OP mentions being a "hygienist as being a comparable profession without the risks". Not for me! After seven years of dental assisting with a bit of office managing thrown in at the end, I was literally fried and overcooked with the dental profession and private practice as a whole. For one thing, no one likes the dental office and everyone makes sure you know. There was even a point where one of my co-workers tried to commit suicide during office hours by running into traffic (while the doctor chased after her!) due to the overwhelming level of stress patients and the office were giving her. It's hard to love your job when you are the number 2 phobia behind public speaking. Then you have your wacky doctors that run the whole show because it is their practice but have no idea how to run a business. They went to dental school which last I checked has no courses in business management! Plus, they really do have hang ups about not being considered a "real" doctor and only being a dentist. Throw in trophy wives who expect a certain doctor's lifestyle and guess what you'll never get while you work at that office? A raise. Plus, there are patients who are too ignorant to figure out what their insurance covers but are willing to physically maim you because you want the 2 grand for the root canal and crown that they agreed to with the doctor without knowing what their insurance covers! Oh and don't forget the drug seekers too who think can pull a fast one you because it's a dental office. Throw in the fact that you never can call out unless it's "coming out both ends" because the doctor is so cheap he'll only hire a skeleton crew. Finally, you go home after working a 12 hour shift just to be awoken in the middle of the night because Mrs. So-And-So's tooth blew up and now she is undying agony that we need to do an ER procedure at the office RIGHT NOW even though you are going to see that same office for another 12 hours very shortly again (oh & you will have to remind, beg, and plead with the doctor to pay you for your midnight time which will still be the same subpar rate you always make)! So each to their own! I'll take nursing any day over working in the red-headed stepchild of healthcare that is otherwise known as "dentistry". It's all about what you can put up with.

All facilities are different too. I work in a hospital that has hand sanitizers everywhere and lots of sinks to wash hands. It's easy to wash my hands just because there is always something to remind you like a pump or a sink that says "Use me!" Now the hospital I'm doing my clinical at is a whole different story. It is an older hospital that literally makes washing your hands an absolute task. There are no pumps on the outside hallway walls, sinks only in the patient's bathroom, and in each room they seem put the alcohol pump in a new place it seems like. When I'm at clinical, I'm literally going out of my way to make sure my hands are clean whereas at work its not even a second thought because access is all around me. Overall, I have noticed a better compliance at the hospital I work for and I think its because management has gone out of their way to provide ergonomic access for hand washing. So I understand how the poster may be frustrated with the infection control nurse riding on them, especially if it is a facility that wants you to wash your hands but does nothing to help you do it. OP knew the patients were sleeping so the chance of them falling or some other hazard occurring was slim and probably interacted with the patients shortly before they slept because a student nurse has that kind of time to spend. It was a literal check but the unfortunate thing for the OP is that they are a student who got snagged at the wrong time in the wrong place. Let's just be honest. On a side note, for the all the emphasis on hospital personnel maintaining hand hygiene there is one staggering group I have noticed that is lagging seriously behind in that department which are the doctors. It only takes one vector!

You have already done one of the hardest parts of success, which is getting started. If want to be that professional nurse, you have to take that little decision you made and keep executing it to take it as far as your imagination holds. Believe me it's not talent or innate ability that makes you succeed, it simply comes down to how hungry are you? How hungry are you to improve? How big is your appetite for success? What are you willing to do to reach your dream of being a nurse? Because the really good professional RNs, they didn't care about the naysayers, or the fun they were forgoing, they didn't take days off, and they were 100% set in their ways in perfecting their craft because it was all for a much larger purpose than any semblance of happiness that immediate gratification provides. Remember during the depressive parts that reaching your goal is the real bliss! To make it into being a professional nurse, I have learned you have to be willing to knock on the doors of complete exhaustion every single day. Now here's my opinion of exhaustion: That it you are so tired, frustrated, and pained that you can't even think straight. It is in reaching that point that you know, deep down, that you did everything you could do to be successful. That there wasn't one more thing you could have done to make anything better. Sometimes you will feel terrible and depressed in nursing school but the more important question I always ask when I feel that way is, "Am I moving further or closer to my goals?" Am I at the door of exhaustion or am I merely uncomfortable? Because being uncomfortable is not exhaustion. Being uncomfortable is your mind quitting on your spirit. Being uncomfortable is just saying no to trying again after failure. Remember it will always be easier to watch ER, Nurse Jackie, Grey's Anatomy than it is to be that actual person becoming a nurse. It's easier to hang with your friends, husband, kids, etc. than to spend all day in the library. It's easier to sleep in than to wake up at 4am for clinical. It's easier to go to a party or a family function than it is to sit with your study group working away. It's easier to work a full time job that you don't really like than to pursue your dreams. But it is also a lot easier to look back on life and know you gave it your all than it is to live with regrets. Not living up to your potential will weigh on your shoulders for a lifetime. No one ever said being successful as nurse is easy but more have told me that it was worth it than not. Just remember you are you own maker in this world. I just tell myself that there is no such thing as failure. I just tell it no, not this time, not with me. I'm going to try again and again. I have no issue looking at these nursing school hurdles like depression, failure, and uncertainty in the face and telling them that I'm willing to go through it all and any other issue that gets thrown at me to reach my goal because I know without struggle there will never be any progress. It just comes down to how bad you want it. How bad do you want to be a nurse?

I agree with many of the posters that the obese should not be discriminated against in employment. Many can perform their tasks just fine and, depending on the nurse, they can most likely perform above and beyond the normal call of duty as well. My personal story is that I was obese from childhood on and I lost it the old fashioned way (diet and exercise) when I was 21 after reading a statistic that the chances of obese children not being obese in adulthood was slim to none. It was my epiphany and since then I have maintained a healthy weight. It did reduce a lot of the health problems I was beginning to encounter even at that early age so I believe in promoting healthy weight reduction but as someone who has fought the battle of weight loss, I can't emphasize enough that the enemy is not just the obese person. The 20th century was built to make us fat! For fifty+ years, corporations with vested interests in profits not citizens have had a hand in creating the a world where we have to drive everywhere, pedestrians are disdained (what happened to sidewalks?), the food is barely real anymore (what's next? Soylent Green?!), and actual physical activities and labor have been reduced with the induction of electronic devices that either entertain or do the work for us. Hospitals and healthcare in general should not be chastising or discriminating these poor nurses or the obese at all but instead working to reduce risk factors like we would do for any other disease. I think we all can agree that we need a healthier, thinner world but I can tell you stocking a hospital full of thin nurses is not the right intervention.

Well, I have no actual proof like a website to send you to just merely anecdotal information that came from my teachers and the experience we had in our program. For example, I just finished a OB/Peds rotation where I did a home test and one of the questions asked how to clean the newborn's cord. Current standard recommendations for cord care on a newborn is to use sterile water with a neutral pH cleanser but on the ATI test the correct answer was using alcohol which is an older recommended method. That was just an example of some of the questions that have created some conflict in our program because then students complained when they were penalized on similar questions during our exams whose correct answers followed current practice standards and not what ATI prescribed. So after many team meetings, my nursing program's faculty decided they would prefer to go a testing program that stayed more up-to-date and that was reason we were given for switching.

Our school is actually leaving ATI due to inconsistencies with current evidence based practice. From what my teachers said, ATI is about five years behind on current practice standards which is why our program has decided to switch to Evolve next fall. It is kinda of fortunate for my school's students because we take the HESI exit anyway. We also only award points for ATI depending on your level. Personally, if it means anything, I'm not particularly fond of ATI. I think the questions' rationales are too simplistic. I don't like how a test score as low as 63% can be a national average worth a level 2 making remediation often quite useless since you need to review over 40% of the material you didn't get right on top of your class studies. Finally, the site is not user friendly and I have found they do maintenance at inconvenient times. Regardless, your class policy is what it is. You can try the appeal but my school has told us that our handbook and passing requirements are basically like our first nursing contract and we must treat it as such and be familiar with all aspects.

I wish I would have bought the Davis' Success Series of books much earlier than I did. They were an enormous help when it came to understanding and mastering test questions.

Why do you feel you deserve to have an average in the 90s when you just said you are not putting enough time in your nursing classes? Your grade is a reflection of your effort. You just said it in your post. The only person that is setting you up for defeat is yourself. Make the time if you want it bad enough. Period. That is what everyone else is doing who has their 90 average. You want that average too, then go and get it! Yeah so you have some tests that aren't so great, move on from those hits, get back on your feet and show you and everyone else what is inside that noggin of yours!

Well, first off he definitely paired you up with the outspoken person because you even agreed you are somewhat shy. He wanted you to learn and probably thought you would feel more comfortable with someone who is not afraid to take the reins of communication should you falter due to feeling shy, anxious, or unsure when dealing with a patient. Shyness doesn't work in nursing because communication is needed in our profession to extract needed information about the health and wellness of our patients. Secondly, you mentioned twice in your letter about other people being smarter/better than you and wrote a whole paragraph about your clinical peers being far superior because of this or that. Then you even admitted to feeling intimidated. I mean I could tell just from the way you wrote your post that you feel insecure about your skills and knowledge, so what makes you think your clinical instructor can't smell that a mile away? It is not that your clinical instructor does not trust you, it is that you clearly do not trust yourself and he can see this. His job is to make mold you into a nurse but he is not going to put you in certain situations until you feel confident in your skills because it makes no difference if he believes in you if you don't believe in yourself first. My advice is this, you made it in, you can make it out. Stop focusing on how skilled the others are and put work into yourself. If you don't feel confident then fake it till you make it. You have to understand that even though we are nursing students, for the most part, patients respect and expect us to take care of them and keep them safe. They don't see the scared, nervous nursing student unless we show them. They see a healthcare professional in training who has the knowledge and expertise to be trusted by the hospital to care for them. Trust me, everyone in your clinical is a little scared and nervous, they just hide it better. Be confident in yourself and stop worrying about if other people are confident in you and the rest will come.

Great thread! Don't know how I would survive school without some well-written reminders here and there! "It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt "Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn't learn a lot, at least we learned a little, and if we didn't learn a little, at least we didn't get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn't die, so let us be thankful." - Buddha "Sow a Thought, you reap an Act, sow an Act, and you reap a Habit, sow a Habit, and you reap a Character, sow a Character, and you reap a Destiny!" - Charles Reade "When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life so that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice" - Cherokee Indian saying