ezweydorff

I have worked in Pediatric Home health now for 15 months. It was my first nursing job as an LPN while I went back to school for my RN. I love my job and the company that I work for. I have had 4 clients now and all have been consistent cases. Three of them were full time hours so I had the same client all week and one other client was picked up one day a week with one of the other case hours. For the most part, the clients that I have had have been 'babysitting' jobs. They all received some sort of medication regimen that I had to implement and all include education needs but none of the cases have been critical. In home healthcare, you do have more choice as far as clients that you will take care of. I have refused more difficult clients that have ventilators and that are more severe, simply because I have not been trained on their conditions. You also have more flexibility with scheduling and can arrange your schedule with the office and often with the parents. Home healthcare has offered me stability, flexibility with scheduling while in school and a variety of patients. The biggest perk to me has been having all of the holidays off since the clients parents are often home on holidays to care for the client themselves. Most of the parents are better educated that most nurses that I know when it comes to their child's condition, after all, no one has known the patient longer than the parent. Fair warning for those who begin working in Home Healthcare- you will without a doubt become attached to at least one of your clients. These children have an amazing amount of love to give and they begin to feel like part of your own family.

For those that have gone the WGU route, what does the 90 hour clinical experience entail? Did you have to arrange your own mentor? Did you have any problems finding a mentor? Did that mentor have to be a graduation of WGU?

You've got a degree that took 4 years to get (or close to it) give yourself at least half of that time to decide whether you like it or not. Definitely try other aspects of nursing. Many insurance companies offer nursing positions taking phone calls and reviewing charts. Also consider home healthcare. This is my profession and area of choice. Home Healthcare allows you deal with a limited number of patients (in my case I have 1 patient for 40 hours a week). Home Healthcare also allows for more autonomy, which is fabulous because there is no one breathing down your neck barking orders.

"The longer you wait to take the NCLEX the harder it is." I can not count the number of times that I have heard that statement within the last 6 months. It was as if people were trying to stress me out. But still, I procrastinated. I waited to send in my application, then waited to send in my fingerprints, then (not surprising) I got my fingerprints rejected so what did I do? I waited to re-submit them. Once they were approved, I scheduled my exam one month out. I waited to study, then the holidays came and I waited some more. One week before my exam I panicked and rescheduled my test. My authorization to take my exam was set to expire on 01/16/2016. I knew this was it, this was the last time that I could possibly procrastinate, so I scheduled my exam for 01/05/2016. A little background to why I had waited, I failed Advanced Medical-Surgical Nursing, much like half of my class had done. When I re-took the class it will still a struggle, I barely got through it. And what's worse, the class that was supposed to be the easiest the "transition to registered nursing" was also a struggle for me. It could have been my lack of studying (can you tell I'm not good at that?) or it could have been the material. With the struggle that I had through these classes, I had little faith in myself and thought that I would never pass the NCLEX examination. So finally, the date came around, EXAM DAY! I arrived promptly at 12:30 for my exam, which I had written down was scheduled to begin at 1 pm. But you see, that was my original time for the original test date. On this new exam date my exam was scheduled for 12:00. Thankfully, the staff at the Pearson Vue office were amazing and let me take my exam still. And I sat in that little room, right next to the interstate, with 20 other people taking exams. And I sat there, for 4 hours. For 4 hours with one 10 minute break taken, I took that exam. With a full 265 questions (possibly more, I wasn't counting after 261), I took that exam and thought I failed. I was mentally prepared for this failure. I was calculating just how much time and how much money I would need to re-take this exam and what I needed to do to study. Within two hours, I tried to go online and re-register and it was allowing me to do so. I tried to pay for my exam results but they weren't available for 48 hours. The following day, I tried again to re-register and it was still allowing me. The NCLEX quick tips and tricks for finding out if you had passed were not working for me. According to the site I had failed. By 9:30 pm the day after my exam I had received an email from my state board of nursing. The title simply said "Your Kentucky nursing license was issued". My chin absolutely fell to the floor and my eyes filled with tears. I had actually passed this 4 hour 265 question long exam. Let this be a lesson to others pending their exam. Take time to study, don't let the nay-sayers get you down when they tell you the longer the wait the harder it is. And when it comes to the NCLEX 'trick' to finding out if you passed, don't doubt yourself just because it lets you re-register. If nothing else, wait at least 48 hours and pay the $8 to find out official results.