theplugger

:rolleyes:Slightly off topic, but now I AM feeling older than dirt...the metal detector??? I worked in a big city VA, Denver, and walked right through the main door and up to my floor, any time day or night (I worked graveyards), no metal detector (and no cell phone either)!. My pockets were stuffed already, have no idea what pocket I'd have available to carry my cell phone in. And what about getting it wet, or dirty or germy? Do you keep them in a zip lock or disposable cover? This is all new to me, just really curious. From reading everyone's posts I can see both sides of the issue and many in between, where there might be cause for exceptions to the rules. There has been a tremendous technological revolution and I, for one, am ever so grateful to be happily retired.

Ditto to Tweety. I'm a retired RN, getting old as dirt, so in our day there wasn't any such thing as having a personal cell phone at work (or even at all, for that matter), and I did manage to successfully work night shift and raise kids as a single mom. There's enough distraction on the job without having one other one like a cell phone and calls on it for even more distraction. Also, wasn't it a rule until recently "no cell phones in hospitals"? So is this something fairly recent that they're now OK to use in a hospital? Just curious.

Cleaning up emesis, especially projectile and espcially GI bleed projectile....I'll gladly add those to your list. And with all those things listed it's imperative that one not make faces and make the patients feel worse than they already do for making the mess.

One quote that quickly comes to mind (and often comes to mind) was from one of our instructors: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

As a retired RN, this joke really hit my funny bone. Wait a minute! It IS a joke, isn't it?? Did you hear about the nurse who died and went straight to hell? It took her two weeks to realize she wasn't at work! You know you're a nurse if... You would like to meet the inventor of the call light some night in a dark alley. Your sense of humor gets more warped each year. Almost everything can seem humorous...eventually. You know the smell of different diarrhea to identify it. You wash your hands BEFORE you use the bathroom.. You check the caller ID on your day off to see if anyone from the hospital is trying to call and ask you to work. Discussing bodily fluids over a gourmet meal seems perfectly normal to you. You think that caffeine should be available in IV form. You get an almost irresistible urge to stand and wolf your food even in the nicest restaurants. You believe that unspeakable evils will befall you if you say,"It's unusually quiet around here today" You have ever had a patient look you straight in the eye and say "I have no idea how that got stuck in there". You notice that you are using more 4 letter words than you even knew before you started nursing. Every time someone asks you for a pen you can find at least 4 of them on you . You live by the motto "to be right is only half the battle, to convince the doctor is more difficult.." You've told a confused patient that your name was that of your coworker and to holler if they need help. Your bladder can expand to the size of a winnebago's water tank. You find yourself checking out other customer's veins in grocery waiting lines. You avoid unhealthy looking shoppers in the mall for fear that they will drop near you and you'll have to do CPR on your day off. Your finger has gone places you never thought possible. You have seen more memberes than any prostitute. If you are not a nurse and have been sent this by a friend who is, it's just to help you understand our mind set and questionable mental status/sanity. Most of the time we function in spite of this sick sense of humor, fairly normally and very responsibly. Scary, huh??????

Hopefully someone here will be able to tell you more about current ECT procedure since I haven't been in Psych nursing for umpteen years, but I do know they don't use it nearly so often since the advent of chemical treatments, i.e., tranquilizers and such, and I also know that they now administer the treatments under general anesthesia. In fact, I did a search and came up with this page that seemed pretty current and complete.

This thread has really taken me back to both the amusing and the amazing! What I remember about paraldehyde was not the IV method, but we used to have to mix it in some juice in a glass...right, NOT PLASTIC...and have those alcoholics drink it! :wink2: I haven't seen mention of those old glass thermometers that had to be shaken down by hand or, if you were lucky, put into a centrifuge machine (before soaking in alcohol) which, as sometimes might occur, if they weren't seated just right every one of those old mercury thermometers would go flying as soon as that centrifuge was turned on. Also made a racket similar to those metal bedpans. Now that we're down memory lane, every now and then I think of those poor psych patients, who had to undergo ECT "cold turkey", with no benefit of tranquilization of any kind. We had to drag them bodily to the stretcher, place a padded tongue blade between their teeth, then had to practically sit on them to hold them down (often took more than one person for this part) to keep them from thrashing around and getting hurt when the 'juice' was turned on. Thankfully, things have changed considerably! They used ECT much more freely then than now.