hotwaterbottle

Ruby Vee, it's very hard for me to understand how these doctors can just steal stethoscopes, especially from ppl who may make less money than they do. I was brought up to respect other people's personal property, and I still do. For example, if I borrow a book I read it as promptly as possible and return it so that it won't get lost in my home. Other people don't seem to be brought up this way. My husband and I lent a book and a movie DVD to friends and they claim they lost BOTH of them and never returned or replaced them and appear to be unfazed. I could go on about them and others (coworkers of both me and my husband stole stuff in the past) but there's no need. It makes me mad that that cardiologist's office was full of your former coworkers' stethoscopes. What are these doctors thinking? DO they think? I may seem old-fashioned, but this country needs to get back to some basic morals like you don't lie, cheat, steal or commit other crimes. I'm glad you got your scope back and embarrassed the resident as well (I probably would have been too chicken to say anything in front of others).

I think the fact that this was due to an overdose is pertinent. I know when my junior high health class had a "junkie" (that's the word that was used back then) come in and talk to us about the dangers of drug abuse and I guess heroin in particular, it made me vow to never get anywhere near heroin. If you've seen the dangerous and even lethal effects of drugs on patients, you can share that info (without giving any patient details, of course) with siblings, cousins, your own children, etc., to impress upon them that drugs really can kill them. It does make it more real to people, I believe, than something just out of a textbook. And it's not guaranteed to work, but at least maybe you can feel you did something positive after the experience. Also, if you are allowed to contact the family at some point so they realize you really did care about them and their loved one, that would be a nice thing to do for them. I was a little hurt when there were a few people that did not return my calls when after my mother died, I'd wanted to give them each something small that had been my mother's--something for them to remember her by, and for me to thank them for their care (one was a hospital nurse who'd even visited my mother when I'd called her as my mother got closer to death, and the other was a hospice volunteer). I still appreciated all their caring work, of course.

I used to have a neighbor who was a retired nurse. She told me she'd been "on duty for 50 years". I remember it kind of amused me the way she called it "on duty". She was a real character: always had a cigarette hanging out of her mouth, and still drove a car but had several fender-benders while we lived in the same apt building (luckily no one was ever hurt). I used to visit her and one of the other senior ladies in the building. It would have been interesting to have ever worked with her. I really like "old people" and I have noticed there doesn't seem to be the same respect for them that was present in the US when I was growing up. "Old" has become a put-down, and also politicans and others don't seem to talk about the needs of "seniors" or "older Americans" as a priority, the way they used to. This concerns me, especially in terms of future rationing of health care.

My mother had a hospice nurse who used to come to her house once a week when my mother was dying. The nurse was young but had tried hospital work also. She said she would never, ever go back and was very happy doing the hospice work. Also, I've worked on a child psych unit and we did spend a lot of time with our patients. Although it's a very different kind of work. I would recommend staying in the hospital setting for a while to gain knowledge and experience, then transferring to a different setting (like hospice, home care, or child psych) where you don't spend all of your time charting.

Interesting reading all the comments. I worked as a "nursing extern" one summer (1981) at a hospital down south while I was staying with my parents during break before senior year of nursing school. We wore a white dress (mine was above-the-knee; I'd purchased it at a store in Boston that seemed to have a lot of old stock and I hadn't realized that most of the dresses nurses were wearing were longer. I think the dress was from the 70s or maybe even 60s?) I also used to purchase these white pantyhose from that same store (during nursing school and for a few more years) that wore like iron. They too seemed to be older stock, judging by the photo on the package. While I was working as a nursing extern (which was like a nurse's aide with a few added duties, since we were all nsg students) I worked in oncology, postpartum, and nursery. I really loved nursery and babies so by the end I was allowed to choose my area and stay there. There were five rooms for healthy babies (there was a special-care nursery on another floor which I never saw) and I would be in charge of one room holding 12 newborns. There would be 2 nurses, one covering 2 rooms and one covering 3 rooms (always seemed unfair to me). But in each room, it was just the nurse's aide or nursing extern doing all the work. We had to weigh and measure all the babies when they were born, and give them their initial baths, and continue to do daily baths until discharge. We would bring them out to the mothers for feedings unless the mom wasn't up to it. I mostly worked night shift but if I worked 3-11 we'd put the babies in the window to be viewed by visitors. When I worked on the oncology floor, I remembered one man dying at age 30 and his wife was wailing so loudly that they shut all the fire doors on the unit. Sad. I also remember some male patient's brother asking me when I got my break (maybe due to the shorter dress I was wearing) and wanting to date me. There was also one pt who was so handsome that my knees were knocking when I took his blood pressure. Also, I remember in nursing school while doing my med-surg rotation on a neurology unit, I had a pt who was either a paraplegic or a quadraplegic and made some comments to me when I did his bed bath, that made me uncomfortable. For these reasons (plus mainly since I'd liked babies and kids since I was very young), I wanted to work with babies and kids as a nurse. Since I already was very used to taking care of newborns from that previous job, I was able to get into a newborn nursery job after I graduated in the early 80s. It was a long commute, but it was the only job I was offered that squared with my interests. It was actually kind of hard to get into a specialty at that time, but ironically, I also had this new nursing home calling me and wanting me to be their DON as a new grad! That scared the heck out of me; having gone to a 4-yr baccalaureate program, I didn't feel I'd gotten nearly enough clinical experience, so I turned them down, although I felt bad because they seemed desperate. The newborn nursery job was the easiest RN job I ever had, but after only 11 months, the unit turned into a mother-baby or "coupling" unit. I only did that for a couple of months, since I moved out of the area with my boyfriend. I was then able to parlay my experience into working in a NICU, which was kinda my dream but also very scary. We had three parts, intensive, intermediate, and continuing care. There were secretaries in the intensive and intermediate areas, at least on days and eves, to help with orders and stuff. Plus an attached blood-gas lab. The neonatologists were pretty nice, and there were also med students rotating through. We'd heard of "HTLV III" while on my previous job, but didn't really start to deal with the AIDS issue until this job. We would have a lot of mothers who were IVDAs, sometimes knowing their HIV status and sometimes not. So if you got a needlestick from a baby belonging to one of these moms, it was pretty anxiety-producing. I always wore gloves while starting IVs, and when taking care of those babies would even wear them while feeding, since babies often spit up on my hands. And speaking of my hands, I got really bad eczema working there, due to the frequent hand-washing and the types of liquid soap they had. Once I had to take two weeks off from work because of a weeping mess on one hand. I do remember that job was kind of "clique-y", and there were some nurses I was actually afraid of, but there were also a lot of ones who I enjoyed talkng to. And the management was very professional. And unfortunately, nurses were able to smoke in the break room. I usually ate my meals in there as the cafeteria was far away and I usually brought my own meal to save money. But people would be puffing away in the break room, which was a small room and the windows didn't open, and I did not enjoy that when I was pregnant. I forgot to mention, in the newborn nursery job, we would change into these little white scrub dresses and put our clothes in a locker. So the hospital provided our uniforms. In NICU, we bought our own scrubs. The few times I was floated from NICU to labor and delivery, we changed into their scrubs and I remember the doctors up there were much more flirtatious--I remember one put his arm around me, which never happened in the NICU. The neonatologists were more like kindly pediatric types. Of course, there were no computers on the unit. There was no surfactant or ECMO--I heard that came a bit later but I'd quit in 1990 to take care of my kids for several years. Unlike what another commenter had said, we'd let parents hold babies even if they were on a vent, although that made me nervous. Really, I was always nervous about chest tubes or ET tubes being dislodged, so I preferred to work with the less severely ill kids. There were also "cuddlers", who were volunteers who were allowed to come in and just hold babies, which of course we didn't always have time to do. One thing that stands out about that NICU job was that we always had plentiful supplies. You could stock your area next to your baby with needles, angiocaths, diapers, nipples, etc. each shift and we never had to spend time running around the facility looking for supplies as I did in my more recent jobs.

I have to say I had a somewhat similar instructor many years ago. She dressed us down in private usually. Well, semi-private: an alcove where we drew up injectable meds under her supervision. I remember that every student was in tears when I saw them walking out of there. But there were a couple of students she really seemed to like and prefer (the very outgoing ones) and didn't give them any trouble. I remember even the kids (this was on a pediatric unit!) thought she was the b-word. She would stomp down the hall. (Guess ppl like her is why they made up the phrase "battle-axe" as applying to a woman.) She even told me I would never be a nurse and I almost quit school 3 weeks prior to graduation! I seriously felt I couldn't go on! She also used to name-drop and thought she was "all that". In contrast, as a nurse the instructors I've seen with students more recently are a million times kinder and more professional.

Wow, Pavanneh, that sounds awful. I don't have fibromyalgia, but i have something else that most people think doesn't exist, so I know what it's like to have people think you're crazy.

LTCNS, I don't blame you for being defensive, after obnoxious comments by Emergent and The Commuter.

I have worked in inpatient locked psych units with children, adolescents, and adults, so having to deal with this sort of charting was a daily occurence at my jobs. One of my pet peeves was cowowrkers charting "Pt. was whiny", or better yet, "Pt. was whinny". I saw that from more than one person!