jnetrn

And...I could kiss you for that response! :hug:It's nice to hear someone who "gets it"!

I would guess that day surgery might be a good place to avoid vomit. The patients get their I.V.'s and presurgery checklist done but I don't think they would vomit much until after surgery. I don't know first hand because I've never worked in that department except briefly during nursing school. I wouldn't choose the E.R. if you hate vomit because the patients throw up all the time there. Everyday there is someone vomiting. I hate vomit, poop, and sputum but I just get through it. As a nurse I don't give myself the option to get grossed out. I figure the faster I clean it up and fix the patient the less I have to deal with it. Who really likes nasty stuff anyway? I was creeped out by amputations too but got over that fear too. Now I work E.R. and have yet to be creeped out. You should pick somewhere with the most vomit and get over your fear.

I have been on the receiving end of the E.R.'s patient admission highway. I remember feeling inconvenienced by the occasional messy patient who arrives to my unit. We would all work as a team to reorganize the patient who was either tangled in a mess of I.V. lines and ecg cables/lines or lying in a mess of bowel incontinence. We would then have to take care of all the immediate pending orders and try to get caught up so that we could get back to our "floor routine." On a bad day, I would have to do it all by myself. I would like to emphasize the word, "occasional" because most of the time the E.R. had the patient clean, stabilized, and organized before arriving to my room. The majority of the time my coworkers were right there with me helping me. Now I'm on the other end of the spectrum and have a full appreciation for what the E.R. goes through on a daily basis. The "push back" from the floors we are trying to move patients to when our E.R. is exploding with STEMI patients, screaming psych patients, dementia patients climbling out of bed, and the never-ending influx of patients coming through our doors. We have to prioritize to keep our patients alive. I feel relieved when the patients move on stabilized to their admission bed or on their flight elsewhere. My confession is that sometimes my patients leave a bit unorganized on busy days. I never leave them in their incontinent mess but I have been yelled at by nurses from sending a patient who may have pooped on the way there. So... its not just you.

I just recently applied to a prison as an R.N. to hopefully get job security, better benefits, and better pay. I have always worked in acute care areas like I.C.U. and E.R. and am reluctant to leave the hospital and stop my learning. Management has been hounding us nurses at my hospital for patient satisfaction, making money, saving money...etc. The turn over has been tremendous after management started giving write ups and eagerly firing people. Sometimes I feel like the last nurse left on my unit! I look around and everyone is new or a traveler. Basically we are not part of a union and things keep getting worse. We are not even getting raises this year. So, I decided to try for this prison job. Does anyone know from experience if working in a prison is a bad idea or a great career choice?

I think that you did the right thing by getting a male nurse to take over. I always trade work with my male coworkers so that they will take care of the foley caths on my young male patients and I will do all the EKGs and caths on the young females for them. I can see how the situation was VERY awkward for you. This will stick in your mind and you will learn from it I'm sure.