nurseprnRN

The MGH program was one of the first of its kind in the country, and is excellent. Boston is a GREAT college town. Downside: The cost of living is very high here and the Old Farmer's Almanac projects that we'll have a worse winter than last year :).

Thank you, ixchel, for being nice to an old bat. :flwrhrts:

If they draw blood they DEFINITELY need to know ... about precautions for EVERY patient, no exceptions, no exceptional circumstances.

Try Khan Academy on YouTube-- they have some great video tutoring that can help you get it!

I like your plan to take no more than 2 classes at a time and one over the summer. I hear your eagerness to get this the heck DONE. You also need to consider that nursing school admissions are VERY competitive; a little extra time send in rocking out prerequisites will translate into sooner admission to better schools, so totally worth the time. Also, fewer classes at a time means more time to really learn the material, and you WILL be held to a standard of having a good working knowledge of all your prerequisites. The other consideration is the money. The longer you can hold onto your full time, well-paying job, the more money you can sock away to live on when you are too busy with nursing to earn it. We see students here all the time who have incurred huge loans for tuition and living expenses, and then can't find work that pays them enough to live on plus make their loan payments. CNA is useful, and in my opinion probably a lot more so than phlebotomy and certainly more so than EKG at this remove, so save those for way later when you figure out whether you are learning them well enough in school already. Working as a CNA for even a few months, perhaps over the last summer before you enroll in the nursing program, will serve you well in your first semester, when the nursing program related to patient handling and care motor skills is largely CNA-level anyway -- you'll be ahead of your classmates who are still squeamish about and obsessing over bodies and personal boundaries and touching, so you can focus on the actual nursing skills of communication, assessment, and planning care better than they will. Nice to meet you! Welcome to AllNurses! Stay in touch!

Without reading this whole thing again I can't tell if I already answered this, but this attitude is not good for two reasons: 1) You are completely unable to be certain of ANYONE's status regards blood-borne illness of any kind. Period. 2) Therefore, if you are "a little more careful" with only the ones who are diagnosed, and not exercising the same level of practice regarding universal precautions with the others, you 2a) put yourself at increased risk of infection and 2b) by telling your CNAs that, you decrease their commitment to UP and therefore increase their risk of infection

Never, never, never stand around in a group at the end of the hall talking. Never, never, never carry your cell phone while you're on the floor. Leave it home or lock it up in a locker. I mean it. Cut the cord. If you need to look something up, ask your nurse where the manual or the binder or the book is for that in the nurses' station or how to do it on the floor computer; she may even take pity on you and give you the answer. :) Do not ever let anybody find you sitting in the nursing lounge studying or doing homework. You study at home or in the library. In the hospital, you're there to learn a lot about patient care. You ought to have come prepared, and you can make notes for yourself to look up new stuff when you get home. When your patient goes on a field trip to xray or GI lab or PT or anywhere, go along and soak up all you can. If your instructor gives you the chance to spend a day or two in a different place, TAKE IT. Fun places where you can learn a lot you can apply anywhere: cardiopulmonary rehab, diabetes clinic, GI lab, PACU, ortho clinic, inpatient psych or geripsych, shadowing the infection control nurse specialist or the wound/ostomy specialist ... Write a nice thank you note to your preceptor or any nurse that is particularly helpful to you, and say exactly why. Make a copy for the nurse manager so s/he knows who's doing a good job at that. It's also reinforcing so that nurse will be good (or better) for students the next time. Bring snacks for the whole staff (don't forget night shift!) on your last day. Smile a lot!

I dunno. I sense a great attitude and a literate way of describing your outlook on life. I think you'll do fine wherever you go...if you love critical care-types of things, take every chance you get a a student to peek in to the ICU or NICU (less heavy lifting, more like cats than Great Danes), meet the staffs, take your senior practicum in a critical care unit and excel at it. For most new grads we recommend that they take whatever job they can get, because it's hard to find jobs. It is really not too soon to start cultivating relationships, though. Work a day a week as a CNA and volunteer to help in the ICUs. Get known. Soak up everything you can. Looking forward to seeing you go through school! Good luck! (Here's my experience with vet ICU from an old thread about whether it's appropriate to call them "vet nurses." ... bless you guys... Our Naja kitty squatted and gave me a bloody sample on the floor, and having seen this before I took her to our vet and reported she had a UTI. He stuck her for a urine sample and gave her an antibiotic. Next day he called to say the urine C&S came back clean, and we shrugged and went back to life. Alas, Naja almost went on to die, as she had a rare side effect to this very common antibiotic and almost infarcted her bowel. After a stat CAT scan (really) she had emergent surgery that night by a guy that reminded me of a pedi surgeon-- great huge guy with immense hands and a heart of gold. "Oh, I love calicos!" he said. "I'll take good care of her." But he didn't know if she'd live. We went to visit her in the ICU the next afternoon. She had a staple line from her pubis to xiphoid, drains, and a little kitty PICC line in a shaved foreleg for blood draws, IVs and pain meds so she didn't have to get stuck all the time. She was wrapped in a pedi-sized BAIR hugger and in an oxygen cage. Do not ask what all this cost us. And those nurses were great-- I watched them check her SpO2, take vs, give her IV pain med before moving her, turn her from side to side, check her urine specific gravity, and pet her and croon to her all the time. I don't know what they had to learn in school, but whatever it was, they knew exactly what they were doing and looked like they'd be perfectly at home in any PICU I've ever seen. So yes, in the vet context, they're nurses. I bless that surgeon but I also bless the nurses, and told them so, nurse to nurse, how much I appreciated their skills. I was able to talk shop so well with them that they assessed me as being able to manage home care a day sooner than usual for this sort of thing; I took her home with the big collar, a few meds, a schedule to give them, a med sheet to chart them, and dressing supplies. She was in step-down (confined to our bedroom) for three weeks. I took out her staples at 8 days; I saw she wasn't paying any attention at all to her staple line if I let her have the collar off to eat, so after a few trials of observation I let her keep it off. Good patient, adherent to treatment plan. She's fine now, two years later, catching rabbits and cuddling with us whenever she wants, very communicative and a pushy cat. We're glad to have her. )

Part of your faculty's reason for giving you this assignment is to get you to go out there and speak to an RN face to face. A big email blast is not a substitute for shoe leather. AN is not Google. See, in nursing, you have to learn to speak to a lot of people you would not otherwise encounter; you might find yourself out of your comfort zone. This is part of nursing, a huge part. An anonymous respondent online, well, you don't really know who we are, do you? We could be the truck driving guy living next door for all you know. So if all you do about learning new things is "Go to the keyboard and hit send," then you are limiting your chances of actual learning a valuable skill you will need all your working life. Also, your faculty will not be impressed by your citation of an anonymous nurse on the internet. That said: Where will you find a nurse? Think outside the (computer) box. Local hospital: go to the staff development/inservice education office and ask one of them. They value education and will be happy to chat or to hook you up with someone who is. Go to the public health department downtown. They're in the phone book. Ditto. Go to the local school and ask to speak to a school nurse. Or your college health clinic. Ditto. Go to a local clinic / physician/NP office. Ditto. Go to the local jail and ask to speak to the nurse there. Ditto. One of the really cool things about doing this assignment is that you will find that there are MANY MANY different ways to fill 12 hours for an RN. Take me, for example-- I don't work in a hospital at all, and I've been working all day, and I do things like read records, coordinate care, do patient teaching, research costs, help patients with navigating the health care maze, edit other people's writing, and run an editorial board. And I let the neighbor's dog out to pee and bought a birthday card. :) Notice all of these say, "Go to..." and not "Email..." Remember that part about meeting new people face to face and comfort zone. Go!

Sure. My specialty. :)

Go to your school's learning assistance center or whatever they call it and ask to be tested for learning disabilities. You sound like this could be a problem for you; if so, they can recommend compensatory methods for studying, get you accommodations for testing, and so forth that could be helpful. Also, look into seeing an optometrist to make sure your vision is ok...common cause of learning problems is unsuspected vision probs. Failing all that, though.... not everybody is cut out for the knowledge-intensive profession that is nursing, even at the LPN level. A vocational evaluation could be helpful, too... your state has a free service for that. Look online for the state division of wages and hours and see what links get you what you need.

You may or may not end up in NICU, and as the above people have mentioned, you'd be wise to keep your options open even though you're pretty sure you know where you want to be. I loved my public health rotation in school and was particularly taken by the nurse practitioner who was in a free-standing clinic (this was a radical new concept at the time). I was dead certain sure i wanted to do this because the autonomy grabbed me by the shoulders and wouldn't let me go. So my plan was to graduate, work a year or so in peds, and then go do the newfangled PNP program at the next university over. However, my then husband got a job transfer out of state and before I knew it, I was falling in love with critical care, which I did for nearly 2 decades, eventually getting a MN in and working as a clinical specialist and educator. But things change....and now I own my own independent nursing consulting business and wouldn't do anything else for love or money. I have told this story before, but here it is again. Every year our program would admit about 25% more students than we knew we would be keeping, because no matter how well-qualified the applicants, in about three weeks about that many would be in our offices crying because they 1) didn't know they'd have to see naked old people, 2) didn't know school would be so hard, 3) thought it would be more like on TV, 4) thought they could just do mother-baby and didn't have to do med-surg and psych and all that other stuff too in school, 5) didn't know how much responsibility a nurse has, 6) were shocked that they had to see/hear/smell/touch things like .... etc., etc. "I always wanted to be a nurse like my mother/my auntie/my neighbor/my pediatrician's nurse/Cherry Ames," they wail as they come to withdraw. I also always told my students to ask every nurse why s/he did what s/he did, and also why s/he didn't do what s/he didn't do. Lots of people can tell you why they like something, but it's when they tell you why they don't like something that you can make a decision. Also realize that you will be exposed to many different kinds of nursing in your education, and most people end up doing something entirely different than they envisioned when they applied. Examples: "Mother-baby nursing! I love it! What better opportunity to get a new family off to a good start-- a good birthing experience, establish breastfeeding, and all that. And when a new family has a good birth experience, they'll come back to our hospital for care later on in life." "Mother-baby nursing, yeeeeecccchhhh! Tits and fundi and peripads and screaming brats and if I never see another whiny entitled ***** with a six-page birth plan and a mother-in-law it'll be too damn soon." The point of these rambling anecdotes is to encourage you to recognize that best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley. It's terrific to have a goal in mind and to see your path before you. But smart people keep their peripheral vision tuned, too, because you never know what might turn up along the way.

You are kind to say so. I'll be here until, well, I'm not. So in a way, you can be if you choose.

OK, then, you have just outlined your essay. Well done.

Coming back to the original post, we have seen several newer students with an inaccurate understanding of the word "prioritize," as in, whether it means "needs attention more because pt is at greater risk for problems" or "do (tasks) in chronological order." We had a prolonged argument with one recently about this issue, where the student thought "priority order" meant something related to chronological, and we had the darnedest time trying to explain that it meant "order of importance." https://allnurses.com/nursing-student-assistance/rn-diagnosis-chronological-1000104.html This student (OP) read the question as "who's more important to receive a limited resource first?" and for her own reasons thought it should be the middle-aged male. Most working nurses would say, "Which one of these people is going to need more of my time and attention?" and know immediately that it will be the elderly female due to her increased risk for complications.