Bat Lady

I went through an ADN program which included a lot of single moms and not a few who were married with kids. We all had our problems with sitters, illnesses, and everything that goes along with having kids. However, the program was such that we'd all ...

^^^THIS^^^^ was a biggie in the area where I worked at one time. It was a smallish city with 2 hospitals. I worked in the smaller (private) now where I floated between ICU and ER. We fixed this problem. sort of, by posting a pic of the doc on duty on...

I have, several times. When I was in home health I always had my bag and supplies in the car. I remember stopping at one scene after it happened...one of our aides flagged me down. The police weren't there yet. A car had gone off the road and down a ...

Wow. I have been on so many sides of this in my career. I've had two nursing home patients in different hospitals who were intubated against their wishes, one because the EMS in that community *routinely* intubated all the "found down" patients they ...

EXACTLY. Most of the hospitals I worked in (and that's been more than several, since I did travel nursing) had a standing order sheet that the doctors used, or the doctors themselves had standing order sheets. You went by those. It was generally a st...

This might be one reason for a phenomenon I saw quite a bit in the 90s....the movement back and forth from ICU to home health. Many ICU nurses (not all, by any means, for reasons which I will mention a bit later) in my area took a year or two off fro...

My daughter went to a Catholic high school. When she started we bought 2 skirts, one in each style. They were also allowed to wear khaki or navy pants. They wore button-down shirts in blue, white, or yellow; we bought most of those thrift stores. The...

All of these comments, and more, are exactly why I left neonatal. I had to attend any birth that was considered "risky" or any C-section, and I heard a lot of these type comments from the docs. I also was back and forth from L&D with the nurses f...

One of my college professors was William A. Williams, and a popular TV announcer where I lived for many years was Bill (one assumes also William) Williams. When I worked neonatal, we had a baby girl come through named Chivas Aspen. Someone joked that...

I worked in a small town hospital in Tennessee. They had the sheriff's department and local police pick up nurses who lived in the city and county. If you lived in another county, as I did, and couldn't get in, which I couldn't once, then so be it. T...

I traveled off and on for 3 years and loved it. Even though I traveled mostly in compact states and took company-paid housing, the pay was good and I really enjoyed it. You *can* talk to companies about taking an assignment within your home area, eit...

And did you miss the part where she said she lives 5 minutes from the hospital and could WALK to work if necessary? I don't know if you read the papers but there are plenty of us who walked farther than that to work in this snow......and in lots of o...

East Tennessee/SW Virginia not too bad, BUT stay away from Wellmont in Kingsport TN and Johnson City Medical Center, TN. They treat their staff people really badly and tend to play them against a large number of travelers. Bristol Memorial, on the ot...

When I worked in the nursery we had a girl baby who was given the name "Chivas Aspen". It provoked many snickers as to how/where she might have been conceived. We also had sisters born about 8 months apart who were called "Castle" and "Camry". So the...

"Melina" (pronounced the same) is a Greek name that means "honey". If you are old enough you might remember the actress Melina Mercouri. (And incidentally, "Melissa" means "honeybee".)

I had a situation similar to yours and found it came from a co-worker who had come to the unit along with the manager and had taken a dislike to me on my first day because I was friendly with someone she hated from her last job. I tried to be nice to...

If you possibly can, stick it out at your job for one year. That one year always looks good on the resume. Start looking for a less stressful job because that will help you while you're earning that BSN. And another thing......I'm sure you're getting...

I was 42 when I got out of nursing school and I felt like I was just hitting my stride when I turned 50. When my late ex and I separated I was 62 and that's when I became a travel nurse. I noticed that almost all the travelers I worked with were eith...

Not to mention norovirus epidemics! Double UGH!!!!!

When you come in, have a code in the first 30 minutes and spend the night trying to keep that patient (who was brought in essentially dead) alive, and then have a code on a DIFFERENT patient at the end of the shift! As my brother the doctor always sa...

Those who are studying for a degree in Healthcare Administration should be REQUIRED, as part of their degree, to spend a year doing clinicals under the guidance of CNAs and nurses. Only then will they fully understand what it is that we do. They woul...

Oh bull pucky! This has been going on for way longer than Obama has been president. When they started hiring these young know-it-alls with degrees in "health care administration" straight out of school is when it all started, and that was in the late...

I had a home health patient who used a walker and had an alert, but he had taken off the alert to take a shower. He had all the stuff in the shower (treads, grab bars, etc.) but as he was getting out, he managed to fall crosswise (don't ask me how!) ...

I preferred night shift, but only after my kids were grown. Before that it was pretty difficult. When I worked PRN, it was mostly okay because I could sleep while they were in school, but summers were hard. I couldn't do scheduled night shift then, h...

^^^^^^^THIS^^^^^^^^^^^^