Nurse Joy :-)

I can shoot you an e-mail with the details! What is your e-mail address?

I started off in Med-Surg and now work in the MICU. Body fluids probably made me week in the knees for one or two weeks. You get more delicious sputum and stool in the ICU compared to the med-surg floors. It really is nothing after a while!

Sorry, you're right I guess I am geographically incorrect. Texas is in the South! :-) it was easier for my parents to afford my nursing program in the Philippines, since the exchange rate was 1:50 at the time, and they are from that country so I had family to stay with. The concurrency issue in California became a thing in around 2010, but before that most foreign graduates had no problem applying to take the NCLEX in California. It had become a trend for Filipino families to have their children wanting to go to nursing school in the Philippines, so this had posed a problem since then.

Texas - 20 bed MICU, 1-2 techs per shift, sometimes there aren't any techs. All our patients are on monitors and the vitals transfer to our charts automatically. We have our charge nurse, rapid response, and our co-nurses to use as resources/extra hands if we need help.

Hello everyone, i've been an avid reader of AllNurses for a few years, and wanted to share my California RN success story with you all. Born and raised in California, I went to the Philippines for nursing school due to financial constraints (wuhoo no student loans!), and graduated in 2012. Applied to take the NCLEx for California in June 2012, the whole process took 2-3 months, but eventually I was in the same boat as my fellow foreign grads - they told me there was a concurrency issue with my classroom and clinical hours for Med-Surg and OB (which honestly I thought was pure bullsnaps). But oh well! How to fix this? Re-take the classes. I wanted to take the NCLEx right away so I did my research and found out Hawaii was a state where they processed applications quickly. I applied for licensure by examination for Hawaii, got my ATT, passed the NCLEx. I wanted to focus on earning money first back then, because I was young and naive and didn't know you could take out a student loan too pay for tuition. Hey, I'd been in the Philippines where the policy was pay (tuition) now, study after. I worked an office job at a biotech company in the Bay Area for two years when I finally decided I was financially stable enough to try and take the two classes. Went to thr board of registered nurses website snd e-mailed every approved nursing school on their list. Dominican, Evergreen San Jose, Samuel Merritt and Unitek replied to me, if I remember correctly. Every single one of thrm were waitlisted, full of other foreign grads who had decided to work on this problem way before I had. I came across a thread here that mentioned there was a school in Texas that offered the courses. Perfect. I had a friend who lived in TX, and a relative as well. San Antonio, specifically. I started e-mailing schools in San Antonio (again, went through the Texas Board of Nursing for a list of approved nursing schools) to see if they would be able to accomodate me for two courses. By some miracle, I found a school. Without even thinking, I applied for reciprocity to transfer my Hawaii license to Texas, put in my two weeks at work, drove to the midwest, got my TX RN license, applied for a job, started working in the Medicine ICU at a too hospital in the city, took the classes while working full time, finished after two terms in Feb. 2015. Got my California license May 2015. Now just working until I get a solid two years of ICU experience before heading back to the golden state! Lots of sacrifices, but everything was worth it, my friends. Just wanted to give y'all a little bit of hope in the midst of this dilemma :-)