Warpster

Some jobs are just not a good fit. A transfer to another unit within that hospital might fix the whole situation or the whole place might be toxic enough to you that you'll have to leave and resign yourself to a longer commute. I saw that happen wit...

I managed to hang in there for two years in a VA hospital but only because my rheumatologist wrote a note to my charge nurse that rotating shifts were making me much sicker and that I needed a permanent assignment. So I got put on permanent nights in...

As my name suggests, I'm a weaver. I also spin, dye, knit, crochet, sew and do just about anything with a handful of fluff that can be done. And now that I'm not exhausted from working 12 hour night shifts, I'm getting better at it.

Nursemares are something nobody talks about at nursing school but I think we all have them: the one when it's almost the end of your shift and you've been dealing with this and that and realize you haven't passed a single med and where the hell is th...

The bottom line on patient spirituality is that as nurses we need to park our own concepts and preconceptions at the door when we come to work. It doesn't matter what we think of a patient's spirituality, if he thinks drumming, chanting, praying, fe...

Some of the best advice I ever got from an instructor in nursing school was always to have something outside of nursing that captured your interest enough to occupy your time when you were no longer able to work such an intensely physical job. I took...

Lily Ledbetter ring a bell? It's still going on, too.

My parents tried to pull this garbage on me but I explained to them that the job was the same in both cases and it was much smarter to go through a 2 year program and come out debt free than to soldier on for 4 years at a name school and come out fif...

Well, I'm retired so a lot of this is irrelevant now. In any case, employers have been surfing all sorts of social sites for years. I wish I could say this is something new, but it's not. A few rules to keep in mind are never to mention your plac...

Thank you for the wonderful summary of reasons I decided on an ADN rather than going into hock for a 4 year degree. As it was, I was able to graduate debt free, working while I was in school to generate enough cash for courses and books. Were I youn...

They've said that in theory for decades, but I don't see LPNs, LVNs, and ADN prepared RNs going anywhere in practice.

In theory, competing diagnoses that focused on practice rather than disease were to help us compete head to head with other professionals. It just didn't work out that way, in part because of the cumbersome language you cited in your post. "Impaired...

#2 is universal, it happens no matter what the subject is. Some jerk will always have to point out he's got a shirttail relative who doesn't fall within any statistical norm, no matter what norm that is. #3 is a debatable. Being a sicko myself, I...

You can tell what sort of nerve you hit by the number of kudos at the bottom of your post! The truth is that turning health care over to MBAs was almost as big a catastrophe as turning it into a profit generating enterprise: the former has completel...

People in serious pain who are not in control of their own medication via pump often display classic drug seeking behavior. I had a tomcat after surgery who also did, meowing at me and meowing at the fridge where the Stadol was kept starting about an...

I've watched too many fine nurses struggle with trying to quit and fail to think nursing programs should limit their student pool that way. While it would be nice if we were all prim and perfect people and an inspiration to our patients, it just do...

Yeah, one, a study in raging personality conflict. It was during pediatrics, a discipline I already knew I would not count as the high part of my nursing education. I knew enough to let her huff and blow and try to push buttons without reacting or ...

I remember MGH from a long time ago. They go through periods of this rubbish, thinking nurses can live on air and warm fuzzies. Or that if we're not all married and childless and married to investment bankers who can afford to support us, we should...

It depended entirely on the time and the person. Wingers who wanted to show off the ranting skills they got from AM radio just thought I was an airhead who was probably interested in fashion or pop singers or something because that was just nothing ...

I think most people can differentiate between art and advertising photos and "Girls Gone Wild" rubbish and would only question someone about the latter since it usually involves alcohol and/or drugs. While you might eventually run into a stone prude ...

One hospital I worked at abandoned the dress code completely. What we all found out is that wearing lab coats with street clothes got us the most respect from docs and patients, alike with one exception: confused. elderly patients responded best to ...

Face it, hospital humor is vile. Just the various uses of KY alone would put a civilian off his feed for months. Finding a coworker on nights who has nodded off meant taping him or her into the chair and wheeling the whole business into the elevat...

I clung to night shifts for most of my nursing career. At first a little nervous about working nights with lupus, I found that if I kept a modified night schedule on my nights off--up until 3 AM and sleeping until late morning--I did quite well with...

Happened on my first job, about 3 months in, no preceptor, sink or swim. A doc was using an outdated lab instead of the day's lab and ordered a very high K replacement on a patient with significant cardiac and renal disease. Since he dug his heels ...

Munchhausen's and Munchhausen's by proxy are both weird subsets of conversion disorders, when a patient deals with overwhelming stress by converting it into physical symptoms. The difference between Munchhausen's and the garden variety conversion di...